How To Make Creative Your Biggest Lever To Help You Go to Millions With Ari Murray and Daniel Murray

Evan Lee What's up everybody? Hey, hey. How are you? Welcome to the party first and foremost. How are you both feeling?

Ari Murray Feeling fab. The chat's popping off, so everyone's awake. Good morning everybody and good to see you Evan.

Evan Lee It's great to see you. It's great to see you. Awesome. Well everybody, you're in for an absolute treat. Uh, when it comes to Ari, I think we've had the pleasure of knowing each other for like a couple of months now and honestly so time's, time's flying by. Uh, everybody she's one of the nicest people I've ever met in the world, but she's also an absolute rock star. By day, she's the Chief Growth Officer at Sharma Brands, working real closely with Nik Sharma, a DTC consultancy that launches the biggest uh brands in the world. And by night, she pens her love letter to e-com, Go-to-Millions. I'm sure there's some of her 40,000 community members here with us today. So welcome Ari to the party everybody.

Ari Murray Thank you. I love the intro.

Evan Lee Most, most definitely. And on the other hand, uh we have Daniel in the house. So Daniel and I haven't actually had a chance to like formally meet, but you're definitely someone I've, I've respected from afar. So Daniel's a former D1 athlete and has a wide range of experience that has helped shape his view on creative performance. And Daniel's the founder of Marketing Millennials and is also the Head of Media Strategy at Workweek. Um, the last thing I wanted to call out everybody is that uh, hey, this is a power couple y'all. This husband and wife duo, like they have so much knowledge that I was afraid the screen was gonna break a little bit. So everybody if we can throw some love in the chat and uh, and welcome to the party. Let's do that please.

Ari Murray We love that you said that because sometimes like Murray's a common last name, so people don't know that we're married, but we are married. We met at work back in the day, so it's, you know, it went like that.

Evan Lee I love it. I love it. So without further ado, I'm gonna hand it off to you two and then uh the everyone in our chat's gonna participate, throw question and answers, and we're excited to learn from you. We're excited to learn from you.

Ari Murray Awesome. See you soon.

Ari Murray Alright, so before we begin, Daniel is going to be kind of interviewing me or Daniel you take it away. Daniel's gonna host.

Daniel Murray Yeah, we're gonna frame this like it's a live podcast. Um, and I'm gonna interview my smart wife because she knows definitely more than me about this topic, but I excited to give my view as well.

Ari Murray And we are in the same house, just in like completely different sides of the apartment. So just wanted everyone to know this looks more official than it is.

Daniel Murray Well, I want to get started Ari. I, I know the session title is Creative is the Biggest Lever for Growth. So why is creative the biggest lever for growth?

Ari Murray I think because no matter what there's always a brand that will spend more than you and that brand will always find its way to being like your direct competitor. So there's always someone you're gonna be chasing and you can't just rely on your product or whatever it is that you're selling. And it doesn't matter if it's better, you can still get crushed by someone who has more money than you and that's just the way it works. They'll bid more, they'll spend more, they'll lose more, they'll pop up in more places. And so the only hope you have is to do something so interesting that you can cut through the noise in that way and like box out and carve your own lane. And I think no matter your stage, no matter where you are, creative can mean a lot of different things, but to me I think it all is like creativity is the base of it all. So I think a lot about ad creative in my day. I think a lot about website design. I think a lot about campaigns. But I mostly think about like what are we gonna do that's actually interesting and how is it gonna lead us where we want and what I want at least for my brands is like just to make a ton of money. And so I think for me like creative is the base, but you have to be creative in order to have good creative. But I don't know Daniel, what do you think?

Daniel Murray I think with the changing landscape with iOS 14.5 and it's getting harder and harder to target, creative becomes your targeting way to target. As well as creative is the way to separate through the noise. I think before five years ago, you can separate through the noise by doing great targeting on Meta or other platforms, but now you have to separate through having the best creative. Um, and also with now AI and all this stuff, creativity is what's one thing that humans can do that can separate everybody. Um, so I do think it's an one of the most powerful skills you can have as a marketer today.

Ari Murray Agreed.

Daniel Murray I want to also go into what are some big lessons you've learned about creative or creativity throughout your career Ari?

Ari Murray I think the biggest lesson is that if creativity isn't nurtured in your team culture, then it's crushed. And by that I mean like I've worked places before where I used to be an e-commerce manager for many years and I worked at really cool brands and some of them were really well known. And I always thought of myself as a good writer. And so whenever we had like PDP copy or ad copy, it was uh, you know, like in my role before I got the job, it was to write that copy. And then I worked somewhere and they edited like to hell everything I wrote. And they basically like in many different ways, in many different words, like made me feel like I was a bad writer and my copy never saw the light of day. And then if you work somewhere where you think you are and you're told that like, oh this isn't how we do it or that's against the branding or even if you follow the guidelines but they just decide they don't like it, then all it does is it like sometimes doesn't let either the best idea win or mostly it just crushes the person who's working on that thing and then they stop coming with new ideas. They stop trying to do something interesting. And then I quit because I don't want to be treated like that. And then I went somewhere else and they thought I was the best writer. And then I went somewhere else and they liked me too and they made me feel like I was smart. And then over time you start to realize that okay, maybe I am like a great marketer who can think well and be creative, but only if you're given the bandwidth and like the reassurance that your ideas can be good. And now I write a newsletter that's read by over 40,000 people and I, I think that it's great. And I never would have thought when I was 25 that I was decent at anything when I worked somewhere that crushed me. And so I think that that's the biggest risk is it's not just about writing or creative, it's like every marketing idea, the best idea should win. Like when I'm in a room, now I lead a team and I am like grateful to do that. And whoever has the best idea is the idea we pitch to our client and that's the idea that we represent and we push with like all of our heart. And it doesn't matter who the idea came from because if you tell people that they aren't creative, then they have no choice but to not be creative. So that's my rant, but it's like pretty crushing to work somewhere where like you can't have fun and be creative and that's the risk. I think a lot of internal companies that like as an agency person now, that's what I see. I see teams where some people you can tell are being crushed and I see other teams where people are like happy. And the happy teams are the ones where we're printing money and we're spending money and everything's moving. And then the sad teams I just like want to like hire them away and make them happier because it's like I've been there. Sorry for the rant.

Daniel Murray No, Ari I love, I love when you go on your rants. Um, I, I'll go into a little bit of why I think the lessons I learned from creativity quickly. Um, I think the best way to be creative is through being the best consumer. Um, I think really what a creative idea is is taking two two different ideas and connecting them together. So what I like to do to be more creative is have a consume a lot in marketing, but also a lot outside of marketing so I can bring those two ideas together and make something new for my space. I think the mistake a lot of people do is they consume their competitors, they consume people close to them, but really you should understand your competitors, you should understand marketing, but the best ideas are gonna come from the world around you. So be the best consumer, consume as much as you can to come up with more creative ideas out there.

Ari Murray 100%. I think Daniel too has done this at like such a macro way. So The Marketing Millennials, which is Daniel's brand, um it started as a curation and it started as like how do I bring the best marketers together? How do I share their best work and give them credit for that work and tell their stories? And I think in order for you to have found those marketers, you had to consume so much. And now your brand is like basically like accessible to all marketers because they could one day like be a part of The Marketing Millennials because the best creative and whatever they do is what you'll feature. So I think that you do this well.

Daniel Murray I wanna, you, you at Sharma Brands and in your career have made some great creative um ad creatives out there. I want to know what are some elements you need to make a great ad creative?

Ari Murray Well, you really need room. And so the first thing we do when we get like a new brand that we're making ads for is we dive into every ad they've ever run. So we use Motion. I really do use Motion on every account. That's how I met Evan. We talk all day long and my whole team relies on Motion. That's my pitch and no one asked me to do that, just the truth. Like I would die without Motion. But anywho, I, the first thing we do, we get Meta access, we get Motion access, we hook up, and then we look through every ad the brand's run, not just in this last month, but in this period last year. We look for winners, we look for outliers, and then we look for what's missing. And usually what's missing is like they've trained their account to be a video account or they've trained Meta that they like only run statics. And so whatever's missing, that's the first thing we want to try to go make. And so I think that every ad account needs to have a media mix. So it needs to have gifs, it needs to have short captions, long captions, it needs to have long-form video, like by long-form I mean like 15 seconds, and then lots and lots of statics. And so whatever we're gonna go make is going to fill in those holes and then reinvent the wheel on any creative styles that seem like they're working. But we do have like our favorites. I love a static carousel. Those work incredibly well. It's a great way to get a lot of information out. But we don't make like one static carousel. We'll make 20. And when we make 20, a lot of them are very similar, but we're mixing the order, we're mixing the colorways, we're trying to break brand guidelines sometimes, which is a little scary. But we really want to try new things, double down on what's working, and then usually break the rules a little bit um so long as it's not like completely off brand. But it's really just dependent on what the account is telling us to.

Daniel Murray I want to go into that topic about brand guidelines. I think people overemphasize on their brand guidelines and which deters performance. And I think when you're running ads, the number one goal is to sell the click, sell, get conversions. So how do you, what is some advice to people out there of how to balance brand guidelines versus having creative that you can test that actually converts?

Ari Murray It's like the battle of our time. But I am responsible, like my title is Chief Growth Officer, like I'm responsible for the growth of my clients. And so I need them to hit their goals. And that often means we will turn in a brief, it gets approved, we'll turn in then the ad, and then it will have like millions of edits against it. And some edits I completely agree with. Like if we, you know, could have said this in like a more accurate way or if this claim is wrong or we could actually use this stat 1000%. But sometimes when you turn in something that's different, it might not break any of the written rules, but it's just like, mm, we don't, we don't do that or we don't like that. And that's sort of the fight we'll have um and like go to the grave on because if, if we brief a concept, if we're like we want to do UGC and have my creative director film and she's gonna do it in one take and she's gonna show the process. And if then we have to rescript it and do all these changes and they don't want to use an end card because they don't think that it like feels too salesy or whatever the edits come in that they are, those are eventually if you take too many, they're going to ruin the concept. And then mostly they're going to make the ad take too long to make and then we've missed this moment in time. We spent then three weeks editing this single asset when we should be making seven versions in this time. So I think for me brand guidelines exist um to know what is done and what should be done and like Oxford comma, yes, no, like that's fine. But what do we do to push the boundaries? And that's usually like something new. Um and the clients we work with, they get it, they get it and they know that we're going to try something new. And the best thing is is if whatever we try, if it works, we'll go make more of it. If it doesn't work, we'll go make more of something else. And if they're making something that works, we're happy to make more of what they want to or make a version that has their edits. So it just has to go out and deploy at some point too.

Daniel Murray It's also great that we're in a world where that we can test with a small budget different creative. And I also think people get stuck that internally of being perfect or showing their brand in a perfect way. But ultimately you have to let the market decide if a creative is good or not. You gotta let the world decide. You internally you can't just decide that yourself. You gotta, the best line in marketing is just test it. Um whenever someone says I don't want to do this, just be like hey let's run a small test to a small audience and just test it and see if it works. I think and test it against the the idea that they had and see which one wins. I I don't think anybody knows. I think at the end of the day the market decides. You can try as many formats that have worked in the past, but that audience might not like it or at that time period it might not like it. So sometimes it's just let the market decide what is the best creative um and let that be the winner. Um I want to also ask you Ari, how can brands that are starting at zero or close to it set a foundation that allows for and encourages creativity?

Ari Murray I think it comes back to like the best marketing comes from marketing teams that have fun. And so there should be time in everyone's day, anyone that's touching anything that's going to lead to growth, they need time to go consume. They need time to talk to each other and to brainstorm. They need time to make two versions of something. And I think that if you lay the foundation that we don't just spend, you know, all of our time like we don't receive in content or receive in a brief and then go execute exactly what it says. Every time you do something it should be like okay this is how I've done it before, what else could I do and like how can I think through this and like stop for a second. I think if you start with like everyone's with their like a chicken with their head cut off, it's hard to then eventually find time to bake into your processes like that moment of what would be like a good idea here versus let's just go do this or I don't want to turn in something new because it's different and I'm scared what will people think of me. I think if you bake in time um in every process to like stop, like we just got a a brand that came to us and they had their BFCM offers like completely baked and they asked for like a certain funnel they wanted like this ad to this landing page. They knew what they wanted. And then we brought it to our design team and to our creative team and we were all sitting with it and we're like wait this is confusing. There are actually two offers here and we cannot do this in one asset. We cannot do this on one landing page. And so we then in the client meeting where they expect this final like you know wireframe and ad brainstorm whatever, we came with like a completely different funnel and then we had a conversation about it. And now they're going to do the funnel we suggest and it's going to be broken up because if you make the case for any of your ideas, there's a chance you can win. And if not we'll go do it. But if you don't like leave the time to be like okay if I was served this would I understand? You have to leave that step. So just like give people space to be smart and creative.

Daniel Murray Yeah and I think you also have to have a culture of letting the best idea win and the best idea can come from anywhere. I think that's why having a testing culture is so important because um an idea can come from any department anywhere. Um I don't say listen to every department on changing creative, but like if they say hey our audience likes X, Y, and Z, like maybe let's try or this line really works with our audience, it doesn't hurt to try it. I think on the flip side it shouldn't be in the the creative process where you have a committee trying to make a decision. I think make the idea and put it out in the market and test it and then you can make tweaks. Um I want to also go into what are some of your go-to ad formats currently that are working for you?

Ari Murray Static carousels. We love UGC. We love UGC whitelisted from the person, but then also the same content with a new caption from the brand account. I really love a animation. And by animation I don't mean like just like random flying objects. I mean like the offer is the animation or if there's a free gift that's the thing that's shaking in the static. Um but ultimately my favorite format is the format that has the best results against it. And so I'm not precious about it. I just want many formats to exist in a single account and many versions. And I think what people often forget too is that if you make 30 different ads, they all feel really different and then your ad copy is the same line that's like on brand or given to you by the brand, that's a mistake. And so we're also testing copy in the same way. We're testing the handle that's serving it. Um and then I think my favorite format too is when the exact ad unit matches to the landing page that's behind it. And it's like specifically curated for this fleet of ads that have the same colorways, the same offer, and like the same exact uh sort of like cohesion.

Daniel Murray I think also you made a great point of that creative is not just imagery, it's not just it's not just it's also the copy, the offer, what's in involved in the whole process. I think people mistake that it's just getting a video or getting UGC, but I think creative is the copywriting, it is the the ad for the the format, it is the video or the static or the gif or how whatever you say. It's it's all of it and you have to focus on all of it to be successful.

Ari Murray Someone just asked what we think of ugly ads. I love them. I think that everything can just sometimes be overproduced and I think that the best content is a mix. So I love high performance like brand photoshoot assets that we can treat and make animations with. I love UGC that's from one take. I love like you know non-perfect like I don't need everything to be like eight pixels apart. Like I want it all going up. But I don't think all of your creative should be ugly. I think that all of your creative should be tested. You can't just like default that people online say ugly ads work. No, why don't you just try all types and use the assets that you have and then let them all go live. Sorry, I had to answer that.

Daniel Murray Yeah, what is what is an like a definition of an ugly ad? I think because I think people so the audience understands.

Ari Murray An ugly ad is like something you wouldn't expect. Let's say the brand is Sephora and you would expect Sephora to have really like perfect retouched photos and to use models and to have like you know really high intensity like gradients or really high intensity assets that are put within the ad to make them feel like very expensive. Versus if like you had a photo of me who is like imperfect with the mascara and being like 30% off Sephora like run. And that would be the ugly version. And I think there's a lot of ways to make an ugly ad, but basically something that feels like the brand didn't perfect it to to the end of all time. Um that would just be like an ugly ad that would work would be UGC that's from like a real person who likes the brand, like a real customer versus from a model or from a celebrity that you paid thousands and millions of dollars to. It's just the low-fi more organic feeling content.

Daniel Murray I want to go into how do you measure the effectiveness of ad creative?

Ari Murray I measure it based off of the KPIs that we have for the account. And so for me I'm always looking at ROAS, CAC, MER. I'm looking at CTR and I really paying attention now that we're in Q4 to CPMs just because I know that we um need to like bring those down in order to have a shot at the rest of our numbers. So I think obviously we want for different content we need to measure thumb stop and we need to see like retention and hold rate and all these things. But ultimately sometimes the most interesting content doesn't actually feed the account. And so it's not just about looking at um CPMs and just about looking at hold rate and thumb stop. It's about like okay this asset has like maybe two metrics that are off, but my highest metric is always going to be like CAC and MER because I care about the real money that content drove. So that's for me how I measure, but it depends on where we are in the year, how like quickly we expect the customer to move through. But I we look at it all and we do use Motion.

Daniel Murray When you get results back from let's say what the ROAS is or whatever metric you you're looking at to for success, um how do you decide what to put more budget to, what to put less budget to? Um what what more creative should we make versus what less creative we should make?

Ari Murray I think we sometimes know we'll try like a big swing right. Like maybe we'll try um it'll be a celebrity brand and we'll try to not lead with the celebrity. And then we'll see that okay no matter what we do if the celebrity is in the first four seconds, we have a much better shot at all of our other numbers. And so then we we spend more of our time and more of our energy spending against the ads where that celebrity exists in the front and then making more ads like urgently where that celebrity is in the front and making more ads that have the celebrity's name or whatever it might be. Or we'll see the opposite. I have a brand where the celebrity is like gotten into a little bit of trouble uh recently. Nothing bad, but just like you know the internet. And so now we we've learned and what we've seen is that we should not lead with the celebrity because our ad comments are crazy and they're hard to manage and they become graffiti and we we can't get the results we need. So I think for me it's just about seeing not just like what a single asset can do, but if we see trends in the data. Um and my team is on the the call right now too and so Jake on my team, he spends a lot of his time looking for these trends and like that celebrity first three second trend, we've made that change to our creative and it's literally driven like millions of dollars in extra incremental this month just by like noticing that trend. And so I think you can look at things on a single asset basis or you can look and say okay all my creative is summery, it's now like end of September, this is fatiguing and like that's my hunch. And then you transition the same template into fall and you see what happens. And it's just like about like looking at it individually and then like macro as well.

Daniel Murray What brands do you think are doing it well? Um and what brands do you look at for inspiration?

Ari Murray So the clothing brand Staud, I think that their ads are very creative because they found a way to gif almost every single product. And they're producing like big collection style um gifs that feel like you can really see everything, but there's actually like a lot of content packed in. And they're using the same templates every time. Like no matter what month I'm in, I'm seeing a Staud ad that has some sort of like animated collection that's coming in all at once and it's just exactly to the season. And they do a great job of matching their ad copy. Staud, so S-T-A-U-D, I will drop it in the chat. Um love that brand. And then I would say if I could pick another brand that really kills it, I would I would say HexClad does this really well because they know what works, they do what works, but then they're not precious about all of those other things I say that other brands are precious about. They will literally do what works. They will let you try new formats and they sell a great product so they do make it easy. What about you Daniel, what brands do you like?

Daniel Murray Yeah, I mean there's I'm trying to think of ones that I I like right right now because it changes a lot. I think brands go through ebbs and flows of putting out great creative and bad creative. I really like Wilson right now um because I'm really into tennis and I think their ads kill it um especially for that. I also been targeted by I've seen some cool targeting lately of brands that aren't like for example Nutrafol that doesn't aren't in the tennis space but they're targeting with tennis creative which is pretty cool to see that I like tennis and then they targeting me with Nutrafol which is um two things that are come together and an actually interesting way and the way they wrote their copy about in the creative is was really great. So I think those two brands I I really like right at this moment.

Ari Murray A few people asked for a few other examples. So for like beauty brands that I think absolutely kill it, I think that Amika, so A-M-I-K-A, it's a hair care brand. I think their ads play with color in a really perfect way and their site plays with color in the same way. For skincare, I think U Beauty, I'll drop all these, but Amika, I don't work with any of these, I just like them. Um U Beauty, um they U Beauty times their ads really well. Like they are early to every promotion, they're early to every season. And their ad creative like is it going to win awards for like most beautiful or most complex or most expensive? Probably not. But it gets me because I will literally be like oh you know what, maybe I should buy my holiday gift sets now because they put the offer there, they say this is the best deal, and they brought it to market like first day of October. And they're just early and I think that brands that are early are great to watch because you can also if you're a skincare brand, watch their timing for next year. Maybe you can't correct it for this year, but if you see other brands already moving and you note that now like okay 2023 October, I want to move everything up by two weeks, then you should like remember that and if you can't action it for now, you for sure can action it for next year.

Daniel Murray Awesome Ari, do you want to get some questions going?

Ari Murray Yeah, I think Evan if you want to come back up, um we can hang out with you and then we'd love questions from anyone that's listening. We um could talk about this for 24 hours.

Evan Lee Oh, thank you both so much. Absolutely crushing it with the knowledge. This is incredible. We we have a bunch of questions that have been rolling in and there's also been like a ton of upvoting happening. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pull them onto our screen and then I'll kind of throw them at both of you just depending on uh where we jump in. And if one of you also wants to answer, feel free to make it happen. So there's a couple questions that are centering around like brands with smaller budgets. So Matthew has a question, can you speak to brands with smaller budgets where you have to be very selective with what you are testing? And this compounds um uh into an Amanda question similarly. What are some of the successful strategies you have seen deployed to test with a small budget? Ari, maybe I'll throw that one at you first.

Ari Murray Yeah, I'd love it. So I love this question. I think that I always think about if I ever started a brand like I would be a small brand. And any brand that starts at zero, like what can you do? When everyone finds examples that are like HexClad or huge or I don't I don't think that that's always applicable to anyone that's listening. And I think that no matter what you're doing, you can behave like a smaller brand. So what I would do is let's say I'm a new brand, I've got $10,000 a month to spend on creative and including running that creative. I would spend a lot of my time, which I would have as like a resource that I don't have to pay for, I'd spend a lot of my time looking for funnels that exist for brands that are like a step ahead of me in a different space. So if I was a skincare brand, I would maybe look to hair care. I don't want to do exactly what the person in front of me is doing, but I wouldn't want to like randomly just decide okay I'm gonna make seven ads this month, that's all I can afford, that's all I have to spend to really go test. I'm not trying to do like exactly what someone's doing. So you want to make sure you're standing out. So that's on like the ad creative baseline. But you can never as a small brand put any money towards something that you also could be doing for free. So you cannot like run TikTok ads if you're not if you're not as a brand like posting three times a day on the platform and like testing content. If it's free to post on a channel and you're trying to spend on that channel and you have like a paid strategy but no organic strategy, that's crazy. Like if you if it's free to post, you have to post often and you have to nurture every single comment and you have to look for winners in your creative when you post for free and then let that dictate what you go make. But my like big tip here is post like with deep intention organically, post often, get feedback, engage with every single person that dares to comment or like or follow your brand when it's new and make them feel special. Gift your product all the time and hope for extra eyeballs. And then when you're gonna spend, like look outside of your exact niche, but don't go like too far out.

Evan Lee That's so good. There's one like naturally curious conversation that comes to mind for me if you're cool with it. So the one that I'm thinking about now is there's almost two buckets you had dove into, right? It's like if you have a small budget to run ads, like here's what you can do as you described, like look to different industries, like that kind of stuff. But what I'm now curious about is like all of the other things you could be doing. So let's assume they are small brands, you've given a couple examples. Is there's like a prioritized list that you'd say, hey before paid, like this is where you can place that focus as you're trickling through?

Ari Murray Yeah, I think before you go spend on ad creative, like what's your offer? Like is what you're about to sell, like does it make sense? Is anything you're doing convoluted? If you go explain it to your dad, do they understand like why this is a good deal? I think sometimes too, like I think of my dad. My dad like literally is as savvy as like he could be if like he didn't care about the internet at all, but he still has to buy things. So like if I think about an offer, does it have too many rules? Is is there no threshold for free shipping? Are there any like sort of barriers to entry? Before you make anything, like it has to be a good funnel and you have to break that funnel and like think through if there's anything like not working on the site, not working in the offer, is anything not easy to understand? And then you go like make creative that clearly explains what you're selling. Um but you have to like first make sure you're making like a funnel that is not too complicated.

Evan Lee I love it. And then the last part of that just so people can walk away with an actionable step there. What I'm thinking about is um would your advice be the same when building the funnel as it was to like the same with um like lower budgets to run with your creative? So meaning look to adjacent industries potentially to see like what they're doing or what would the approach be?

Ari Murray I think so. I think we should also like put ourselves in the customer shoes. So I'm a big like online shopper and I pretend it's market research for my job. And so when I'm buying stuff online all the time, I'm looking at like the things that stop me in my tracks and the things that are agitating to me or the things that I like. And often the brands I'm buying aren't the huge expensive sites that have every bell and whistle and that have been like set up by really expensive agencies. They're the brands that like have organic content and that have proof and that are clear. Um and so I think before you even look to other industries, you should like shop your own brand and go through everything yourself and that would be the place to start no matter the size.

Evan Lee Very good point. Very good point. Okay, another question that we're seeing upvoted quite a bit is relating to AI. So Daniel, I'm gonna throw this one to you because I know you had mentioned it earlier. So how do you see creative teams adapting to the, if we call it a threat, of AI?

Daniel Murray Yeah, that's a great question. I think I think people should see it as a a tool um to make them better at their job, not a threat. I think we creativity comes from humans. I think humans have an innate ability to feel pain points that are out there. And I think you as a human could do that. I think having a tool to make you superhuman that can make you 30, 40% more productive in your job. I think the mistake is when people are anti-AI because they think it's going to replace them. I think you should just learn it as much as you can and see how it can improve. But I do think I also play devil's advocate to it too. I do think that that's where we as humans need to in in the creative industry too need to up our strategic game, up our creative game, up our other games because simple tasks like making creative fast and sending ads out to targeted audience is going to become automated one one at one point. But having we still have guarded walls with Meta and Google and stuff like that. So we still always going to need people to look through a bunch of accounts until the internet if it becomes more open. So I would say to the point is use it as a a tool to be better at your job and up level your strategic creative game.

Evan Lee I love it. I love it. And then Ari, this is something so applicable to your world too, right? Like wondering if you have any thoughts to add to this one.

Ari Murray I think AI for us is like so powerful in the data side that there's no threat to creative when you think about what all like the more AI becomes a part of this side of the world like for our business, then the better data, the quicker we'll be able to understand like those hooks that we have to manually like put these pieces together. I think the more data and the more we all use it, then the stronger it can be. So I'm all for it. I think too it like when we think about variations, maybe you need the original idea, like maybe your team is just so smart and they know this product and they behave so well. Maybe they come up with that like perfect original idea, but copy variations or like quick, you know, changes that someone would have to manually like we have ads that will have like location-based ads that will have 50 versions that it's the same template. Like I wouldn't mind like a little robot doing that for us. That would be phenomenal. And so I'm super open and I think like anyone that's in this space is technical and so the same way we don't mind when like Figma can spell check or whatever, like it's all just helping us do our jobs. And there's no threat because if you learn to use the technology, then you just are smarter. It's like people used to be scared of computers. It's like gonna happen, you know.

Evan Lee I love it. I love it. There's a common thread of like efficiency that's created and and lean into it and how you can best uh like use it rather than allow it to control you in the grand scheme of things too is what I'm hearing. Awesome. Okay, Hayden has a question that is now the most upvoted uh upvoted. Thoughts on quantity versus quality? So I know you've alluded to some of this um in your in your talk, but Ari I'll throw this one to you first.

Ari Murray I love this question. I think you begin with quality. You like decide these are the five like strategic concepts we want to make um this month like that we want to base our hunch around the market or our hunch around the offer. Let's start with like really flushed out versions that spend a lot of time. And then quantity, instead of trying to make 50 crazy ideas a month, let's go make five versions of those crazy five ideas and change just a few different things about them. Get them all in market and then decide which of those five ideas were actually stupid. And then we can make new versions and test and move. But I don't think anyone should be spending all of their time and money like thinking any idea should no ad should take months to make. If you're spending months making anything, that might be quality, but what if you like put it up and like it's got like an under one click-through and you have like a CAC that's $50 more than expected. And then like how how wasteful is that quality? Because quality is in terms of like approved, it's not actually quality if it doesn't do the thing it's supposed to go do. So I would say like be intentional and like think about the quality of the idea and then make a few versions, get them out, and then decide which of those ideas weren't quality. But I'm not precious about any of it and like I just want whatever's gonna work. And I think quality too can often like disguise um like we just want it to be perfect and nothing's perfect unless it works.

Evan Lee Most definitely. And Dan, I'm I'm curious on your thoughts here because on on one hand, I also know Ari referred to earlier, it's just like posting consistently. You pen your your own newsletter and own site too. So I'm curious if you have thoughts on um quantity versus quality.

Daniel Murray Yeah, I'm gonna take it from a different angle. I think for organic, you need quality to get to quantity. Um I'm I think you need at-bats, testing to know what works on the platform. I think if you put a something out once a week or once a month, it's not going to um you're never going to know what's going to perform. And organic is a great way to see it gives you instant feedback. Is this working or that it's not working. So at the beginning, I think you need at-bats to get to um quality. I also think people have a misconception that they think something is quality, but you have to I said this earlier, I think quality is what your audience thinks is quality, not what you think is quality. So I think people spend so much time perfecting production and making this look pretty or making internally making this look great instead of like putting together at 80% of the way quicker as possible because I do think speed is a a competitive advantage to get out in the market. So for at least for social, I think you need at-bat reps to get to quality.

Evan Lee I love it. I love it. It rounds out the entire experience. Uh a question from Liam is voted in. I think this is going to be more to our like agency brains on the side, uh but also internal championing I guess. But how do you balance branding initiatives and performance initiatives? How do you best feel about educating the client on the importance of performance marketing creative versus brand creative? Ari, you had touched upon some of this earlier. I'll throw it to you first.

Ari Murray So no one thinks their baby's ugly, but there is a problem if you inherit or like work with a client or you as a brand come into a brand and like what if what's on brand is awful? And what if it's uninteresting? What if all the assets look the same or they feel really flat or what if there's just nothing about this that you know no matter like how cute the copy is or how you know we can treat the animation. If the base of the branding needs help, then that's gonna hurt your performance. And it's really easy to market products that have strong like visual cues. And so I think that's not the question, but I'll start there and then I'll go into my real answer. So first of all, if your brand is like strong and if it's selling and if we we look at it with our editors, I have six editors. If we all look at it, we're like okay we can work with this, let's go like push the boundaries. That's a great place to be. Let's let me then go like break some rules and get in trouble and like meet you in the middle of your branding. But if the branding and if the assets are like what if you have a brand and you want 30 ads we have to make for you and there's like nine assets that the entire account has. That's a big problem. And so that's not the question, but balancing them both, this just happens too often. So that's just like a disclaimer that not every like brand that is set is like should be set in stone the way it is. But I think that like there's a question about like prestige or beauty brands or how should they treat ugly ads. And I think that like beauty brands have to sell to normal people. And so they need to like I've worked at a beauty brand in the past where every photo was like retouched to hell and our site was slow because we couldn't take the asset and compress it because of like the pixelation. And then that doesn't work because you're not actually showing anything like real. If you're a skincare brand and the skin's retouched, like what are you doing? But balancing brand and performance for me it's okay we for Black Friday the brand is like green and blue and orange and those are the only colors that are allowed in the brand book. But I know based off my history and what I've just done in the past that a dark mode or like introducing like a moodiness for Black Friday like signifies to my shoppers that like this is for Black Friday. And if I just make this like muted ombre baby green brand like try to fit into this moody environment that they're gonna go up against, then I'm gonna not stand out. So we might turn in an ad that is on brand with the dark mode that we're pitching and say like could we try this and hope that they say yes and hope that one of them works. And I don't care which one works, but you have to be able to like push the brand and be receptive. Um and I think that you you have to just try new things all the time.

Evan Lee Amazing. Painting the story and then getting into the actual details. Daniel, I have a similar type of question for you uh just related to like how to go about communicating some of this stuff. So Sean has a question of how do you go about convincing a a person or a client to get out of their comfort zone and just let you test it at the end of the day?

Daniel Murray Yeah, I think that's a it's a hard question to to I think everybody's different. Um 100%. But I think at the end of the day, I think everybody can agree that revenue is the most important metric at the end of the day. And I think you can do things with a smaller budget that is not going to affect a lot of people are not going to see it. So I think starting with small tests and proving it with numbers is the best way. And also if you can take examples from other accounts you're working on or other people that are doing it and showing that okay when they do this, this is the amount of revenue they're doing um or when they're doing this, this is the conversion rate. I think you with people like that, most people you have to show it through storytelling through numbers and showing that okay it's worked in the past for these people, it's should work for us, let's just try it at a small budget. And also say this is going to only go to a tiny percentage of our audience, not everybody's going to see it, let's just show it and and test it and see what what will happen. So I think I think the balance of how much do you actually care about revenue at the end of the day because I think a lot of people are are not willing to especially a small brand are not willing to sacrifice revenue in the sake of making everything perfectly branded. I I think most people can agree on that. I think the first goal for most brands are get revenue and then think about how to be branded once you actually start making money as a brand.

Evan Lee Coming back to the data is so important. The next question and everybody we're coming up on 10 minutes here so get into the Q&A, upvote if anything you see that resonates with you or throw your questions in there. The next one that's popped up here is more of a tactical question than anything. So what we're looking at here is what's your formula for ads shorter than 15 seconds? So whether that be the the blocks themselves or any method to the madness. So Ari, I know you live this. Uh talk us through it.

Ari Murray I don't have a specific single formula because almost every ad we make is around or under 15 seconds. I love a six second ad and I think that no matter what we do, like most ads are watched for just a few seconds if we're lucky. And so for me the hook is like where any of us no matter how long the ad, we have to spend the most amount of time thinking about and changing up that first like frame or slide. But I think whenever we think of an ad that's shorter than 15 seconds, it for UGC that's that's tough. Like they really need to like show like a before after and then like an offer or whatever it's gonna be. But it's still like very much can and should be done. And the formula I guess is like don't forget that there's a whole like other version of short form video content which is gifs. And I have worked at brands where we sell like a sweater and it comes in 19 colors and if the entire ad is just like the single sweater and just like changes the color. And that it works every time. And I think that sometimes we think that in 15 seconds we have to say like every value prop that it's machine washable, founded by women, like you know comes with a pony, like whatever it is. And sometimes like either there's just not time, so you just need to lean on the visuals and like one single message. And if you're gonna cut and do like many different frames, then just pay the most attention to the earlier frames always. But I think in an ad like life cycle, like most ads are going to be under 15 seconds. And when they're under 15 seconds, try like a short six second almost always against any ad style. And then make sure that you just lean on color and on like quick pacing and changes and um don't count too much on music too because I think that when um an ad is like short, people will try to put like a great song and they'll spend forever on it and I who listens to like their my phone never has sound. And so I think we should just focus on like the initial message, not trying to say everything, and then um just like getting them to click. That's all we need. We don't need to say why this entire brand exists.

Evan Lee For sure. And something I'm curious about is if there are creatives that you're making that are uh greater than 15 seconds, so longer than 15 seconds in your world, is there a formula that applies there or is it a similar approach in the grand scheme of things?

Ari Murray Not really. I think it's similar. I think though for UGC or like a founder story, that's where we go past 15 all the time and it works really well. We have captions, we'll try like different cuts and try to film them like straight to phone on iPhone. But we still will always have an end card or almost always have an end card. We will still have captions and then we will just kind of do many different styles. And I think we even go past 15 seconds when it's not UGC and it'll just be like a long form story or animation or whatever it might be. But that we consider like a brand hype reel and those are the ones that have like really quick pacing and like lots of different colors and animations and tricks. But there's no formula because I want all of them and I want them all to be really different.

Evan Lee I want it all. Let's make it happen. So the next question that's popping up here and I'm gonna throw it to both of you, maybe Dan you can jump in first. But can you talk or can you both talk about key discussions that you've had with your media buying team to get them to align on how you're deploying creative?

Daniel Murray Ari, you want to take it first?

Ari Murray Yeah. So I think however you're deploying creative, when we think about like new creative that's entering the account, um there was a question earlier about like how do you track all these tests. And that's the question that like you should ask before you're deploying just new creatives all the time because you need to know what the creative the benchmarks are like for the business as usual for that brand. And so new creative, it can be we have a testing like ad set, we try to always spend around 20% of our entire budget on net new creatives and then move them in to the rest of our um campaigns and ad sets as they show legs. But I think you need a spreadsheet or some like we have Motion reports for this, but we need somewhere to really like track this was the start date, this was the spend, this was the benchmark, this is the variance against the goal, and then like see it over enough time before you're deciding like what to turn off and what to move in to implement more. So I guess that's the like the instruction to the to the buyer is like what's the actual measurement here. And then whenever we're running um new tests too, I want to make sure that we're also testing like new audiences or we're like testing existing audiences that we're just not like throwing this like single creative in and just like if it doesn't apply or if we're taking a hair care angle against a brand that's never done this and the brand can also be used for fitness and that's like a completely different audience. So it's not just about the actual asset. So I think it's about everyone understanding like what does this creative look like, what does it do, and then what would they suggest versus just like saying go put this up, go deploy it, let me know what it's done. I want them to like look at it, think about it, and then make their recommendation.

Daniel Murray Cool. And I think we have time for for one final question here or maybe we can fit in another one. But Nathan asks, is there a different strategy between a product brand versus a service brand? Um Ari, you want to jump in with this one?

Ari Murray I think so. So product brand, what what would we define that as?

Daniel Murray Uh like the DTC brands that you described, so like HexClad, the Ories of the world, those ones. And then service could be like a SaaS business along those lines.

Ari Murray I think that they're more similar than we think. And I don't mean that like, you know, UGC and like all these little things can be done the same way, but I think even a SaaS brand that sells communication software can still have their founder like at the front or show the history of the brand. Like I always think about that like photo of Jeff Bezos like in his like old ugly office. And like that has heart and like I know now he's like got a yacht and all these things, but every time I see that I'm like oh that's nice. And it makes you remember like the history and it almost makes you proud of the founder. And so I think even big brands or service brands that have made it or SaaS brands that like people don't really need to see who's behind it, they actually like could very well like see who's behind it and root for those people. And I think that's like one way to think about it. But I think there's more to do on the DTC side usually because we need that like direct purchase and we can track it right then and move through it. And I think there's less tolerance for like some of these wacky ideas if the business is too big and it's, you know, got shareholders and all those things. But I think the the product versus service, both should just make sure that they're marketing like in an interesting way. And we've all landed on all the SaaS sites that have all like begun to look the same. And I think too like you don't want all your ad creative like if you're a communications company and a SaaS brand, do you want um like your ads to look like all the other SaaS brands or do you want your ads to look like maybe um the other brands your customer would buy from. So I think that's a way to think about it too.

Daniel Murray I would also add one thing is I think the big difference is just like the margins and then the contract value and the cost per lead. And so knowing your metrics on that funnel can help you make better decisions on actually for a SaaS maybe you could do more education ads, more um more things to get get the audience ready to buy where DTC the margins are pretty for most brands are pretty small so they have to make the sale faster where SaaS brands could take a little more time to get because they have a the the average cost per lead, cost per op, cost per sale is a little higher so they can do more to spend to get a lead than a DTC brand.

Evan Lee Makes a ton of sense. And I think that's the perfect way to round it out because we touched upon the creative element, so the art of what it should look like, and then the actual science of the numbers that back into the creative. So I think that's a perfect place to conclude here. Ari, Daniel, I really, really appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on and having uh having everybody listen in and learn along the way. Thanks a million. Thanks a million.