Sprints With Evan: Bridging the Gap Between Media Buyers and Designers | Venture Beyond

Evan Lee: Perfecto. And I am super, super excited and Brockton's making the, making the chart go up. That's the only way it needs to go up. So that's super exciting.

Evan Lee: But now, as I share my screen,

Evan Lee: I have the, I have the real pleasure to kick off with a couple dudes that I really respect. So I'm really excited to dive in today. They have a bunch of systems that they're excited to share about and all those good things. And what we're really going to be focusing on today is how do we bridge that gap between media buyers and designers. There's a whole lot of talk about this right now, especially. So we want to make sure that heading into the new year, everyone's prepared. You have systems in mind, you have best practices in place, and you're really taking off.

Evan Lee: But before I get into the actual, like, walk through, questions for these guys and getting all of their insights, would love to just give a high level on like, um, what Motion is about for everyone who might not be in the loop.

Evan Lee: So on our end, everyone here, hopefully, or will know that we're primarily focused on creative reporting and analytics, and we claim that we are the creative strategist's hub.

Evan Lee: And essentially what that means is that we know that creative has become mission critical and the number one lever of success, especially when it comes to your paid ads, because of all the things that you can see on my screen.

Evan Lee: And because of this, what we know as well is what we're here to talk about today is our media buyers are very analytical, whereas our creative teams are a little bit more, exactly that, creative.

Evan Lee: So what we really want to be able to do is bridge that gap between both of them, which is what we've deemed the creative strategy workflow.

Evan Lee: And the final thing I'll note is when I talk about the creative strategy workflow, I think about it in this wheel that we'll get into in more detail in a second here.

Evan Lee: And at Motion, we like to empower this wheel by making it easy to analyze,

Evan Lee: making it easy to visualize,

Evan Lee: and ultimately to share these insights across the board. So that's the high-level spiel about where we're about.

Evan Lee: But, um, before I, before I kick off these introductions, I also like to tackle housekeeping just for how this chat is going to go here. And basically, anybody who has questions throughout, please throw it into the chat. I like to refrain from using the Q&A section just because they get a little bit divided. And more importantly, we have a ton of great brains here. So if you have thoughts, also throw your thoughts into the chat. The recording is going to be made available to everybody, so don't even worry about it. And anybody who's interested in potentially, uh, checking out Motion after this call, because we're working with the VB team, you'll get 10% off for three months by using that code VB10. Perfecto.

Evan Lee: Okay. So that's the high-level spiel. Now, let's get into the good stuff. And I think before I even like start asking questions, it's really important to know like why I respect these guys more than anything.

Evan Lee: So the first person I'd like to introduce everyone to, if you don't already know, is Shahbaz. Uh, Shahbaz is the CEO at Venture Beyond. He's basically, and both of them have been basically lifelong entrepreneurs, but Shahbaz has 17 years in the game. Um, it's ranges from all different types of experiences from ultimately team building and building a company, but also really heavy on like the production and design side. So he's going to be able to bring that really creative brain with that business acumen that's accompanied with that.

Evan Lee: And then on the other end, we have Jem. So Jem, we've already said it, lifelong entrepreneur, crushing the game, but Jem has five years just like running paid ads, funnels and all that kind of stuff. And in digital marketing, we know that's basically a lifetime, right? So he's been absolutely crushing it on Twitter if you haven't seen him, just posting all different types of things related to scaling, UGC scripts, and everything to do with creative and just performance overall. So overall, super excited to have these guys. Welcome to the party. Welcome to the party.

Cem Verghese: Thank you very much. Good to be here.

Shahbaz Khokhar: That's a solid introduction, man. 17 years experience, you're making me feel really old now.

Evan Lee: Stop this. We were talking about it earlier though. We're still hip. We're still hip. We know what's going on with TikTok. We know what's going on everywhere.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Just about.

Cem Verghese: Hanging in there. Hanging in there.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Hanging in there.

Evan Lee: Awesome, guys. So, to kick off our event, I'll keep my screen up, but if you'd like to share throughout, please just let me know and you know you've got that. But I think like, just to ask a very broad question up front when we're here to talk about like the main topic we are, something I'm curious about is in your words, and Shahbaz, I'll throw this to you first, what is the ideal relationship between media buyers and then designers or creative teams? And why is that so important?

Shahbaz Khokhar: Yeah, I think you kind of like the picture of the brain was good because it's it's where there's always like a conflict between left brain and right brain thinkers, right? So, um, media buyers, super analytical, spreadsheets, data, um, you know, tracking attribution, website, CRO. Um, it's a whole different kind of like way of thinking to a creative team. And also, you know, when when you get a classic data person and a classic creative person to talk to each other, sometimes watching them in a room is like, it's like a battle, right? It's pretty, it's pretty challenging. We've seen it several times. And they just literally do not talk each other's language for the most part, right? So, so I guess what we've done is like to solve that problem is actually like build a process that allows them to communicate, you know, putting structure into things. And I think honestly, building that relationship between the two is really, really important. Motion's definitely helped, and again, this is a loose plug, but it is a plug. Like it it has helped us actually to bridge that gap because effectively, it's broken down the data in a way that the creative team can really understand what's going on. And we've customized our reports in such a way that, um, the GS's and the media, well, the media buyers, we call them growth strategists, um, and the creative team, of which we have like quite a few different roles, they all take talk the same language now because they're like, oh, hey, check that report. What's that metric? Um, whereas before it's like, you'd say a number on a spreadsheet and your video editor didn't really understand what that meant. Um, so yeah, for that, I just want to give props to you guys for building a tool that made sense for us. Um, and yeah, like I think kind of managing that relationship is absolutely key to driving performance because the growth strategist really know like what's working in the account, but the creative strategist is the one that put it there in the first place. So it's kind of like, it's like yin and yang. You've got to have this like symbiotic relationship between the two in my opinion.

Evan Lee: I love the yin and yang reference right at the end there because it's exactly that. And like, Jem, when we're talking about that yin and yang, like we know that you lean into those funnels and being able to build the appropriate structure and like scale there. I guess like the question I'd ask to you is when we talk about this harmonious relationship between the two sides of the brain, what role, uh, do you think media buyers play in that like leveling up along the way?

Cem Verghese: Yeah, so definitely like the way we look at like media buyers here in VB is like not just media buyers, they've got to be growth strategists, right? So they've got to understand, okay, creative to a high level. You know, they don't have to know how to do Photoshop or Premiere Pro or anything like that, but they've got to know, okay, what does a performance creative look like? How should a hook look? How should the script look, right? Be good enough to know what a good creative looks like, but not necessarily need to be in the weeds of like, you know, writing the script and the thing, right? Um, because ultimately the growth strategists for us, they drive the team forward, they hold the team accountable to the, to the spend and the ROAS target. Um, where they really come into the flow is being able to, let's say, analyze the data from like you said, recent creative tests, right? Being able to dissect with Motion, okay, this creative's are working, here's why, because of the high hook rate, because of the attention rate, um, because of the high CTR. Um, and then being able to communicate that with the designers, but in like a very simplistic manner. So like, you know, we used to really drown in like spreadsheets, right? And then trying to get designers to like read the numbers and trying to show them our correlation analysis and all that stuff and it just, it was just really difficult. So what you need is like the media buyer to be able to take all the data and just present a really nice, simple case, like literally green, red, this ad is working because of this hook, because the hook rate is 30%, this is why I want you to use this hook in the next brief for the next batch of ads. Pretty much our media buyers kind of run the mini teams that we have, we call them pods, right? Um, and it's like they, it it they almost give like a shopping list to the creative strategists and the creative team of like, hey, focus on new concepts or focus on variations. Like, of the tests, we're going to run this many new concepts and this many variations because I've got this much budget that's scaling and this much that I need to find new opportunity with, right? So they actually dictate like the overall volume of of creative, um, and what gets focused on, right? And then they present the data to the strategist to say, hey, within new concepts and variations, like try these different things because I see them working in the numbers. Um, and then from there, the creative team then goes and delivers that, executes it, you know, using, we use like agile methodology to get that done. And, and yeah, the media buyers and I'm probably skipping a gun here, but we'll get to it.

Evan Lee: No, it's all good. It's all good. I think this is the stuff that I, I see the excitement, right? So it's like when the passion starts flowing through, this is what gets helpful. I think like when I start reading between the lines, what I really love is as much as we're talking about like, okay, the creative strategy, these loops and that stuff. When you're talking about your processes, it's like people know what they're responsible for at the end of the day. So when we're talking about bridging this gap, it's almost like, how do we make sure that everyone knows what needs to be done? And to bring it back to, um, like just to kick off our conversation of how we dig into this process a little bit, I just wanted to start talking about in, in how we view it being the wheel here, I just wanted to start talking about research up front more than anything. So I'd like to think, and correct me if I'm wrong, that the first thing is just getting acquainted with the brands you're working with and caught up to speed, right? So what I'm curious around if honestly both of you could shed light into is just from a research perspective, who leads that process and where do you even start for the most part?

Cem Verghese: So, so the person who drives that process is generally the creative strategist, right? Because they've got to be really in tune with like the the brand, the messaging, um, they're the ones who are going to be researching the competitive creatives and landing pages anyway. So that's the one who drives it, but in terms of, uh, they're not going to be the single person that does it. So the growth strategist, again, media buyers will also get involved in filling out the the research document, which we can screen share and show you. Um, the copywriters who'll be writing the the copy for like the advertorials and sales pages, they will need to be involved and they generally have some of the strongest research skills as well, um, naturally, you know, being, being copywriters. So we we get them involved, um, as well. So generally like just the whole team working on the account will go through it. The designers will research the creatives, they'll go on like ads library, they'll save the creatives on Foreplay, um, they'll go on to, um, like ad spy and stuff and put all their creatives in. So really the whole team generally contributes into, you know, what we call the the client 101 document. Um, so on this, we'll we'll literally go through like there's so many different things in here, right? But kind of in summary, you can kind of see the list of things that we do here, right? So we, we go, we go deep on like our competitors, like we, we're constantly watching our competitors, like almost every day. Um, so you better watch out guys if you can see any of our brands competitors. But, um, so we're going through kind of all their ad libraries, um, we're looking at all their landing pages, we keep in a full log of like their landing pages, which is saved here. Um, we pick up all the products that our brand is is kind of selling, go through all the features, the benefits, kind of write those all down. Again, this like as Jem was saying, the strategist kind of leads that process. Um, they also write down like what objections that customers may have. And you can pick those up from Amazon, Amazon FAQs, you can pick them up from the website, you can ask the brand, um, you know, they usually have a kind of deep insight into this. Um, let me see here, we've got like a list of competitors, we go through all their landing pages. Um, and then we do something called, I'll just show you one of these. So we do a process called review mining. So where we literally get all the reviews from like the website, from Amazon, Trustpilot, Google, Facebook. Um, and we just, we do like a word cloud. So the list ends up being like 2, 3,000, for example, for a brand, right? We have an admin staff who does actually sit through every single one of them and and writes out like a, just categorizes them in summary. Um, and even though it's a really lengthy process, it's worth doing because actually some of our angles come from that. So, so our messaging, our copywriting, our hooks, scripts, you know, our content creator scripts, all starts, starts from there. Before it starts from our brain and we make things up, we actually go through the reviews because like why would we try to re-engineer people who we already know are the customers, right? So we literally start from there. And there's been cases where we've literally just run a review and it's worked amazingly or we've taken something that a customer has said and we've literally just put that in the hook and it's crushed it, right? Um, so we do go through a lengthy process on that to start with. You can see we even like do a sentiment analysis. And then we kind of like summarize this all together in like a a summary table, right? Um, yeah, so that's kind of like the client 101 that we do in the strategy, the creative strategist actually leads that at the beginning with input from various members of the team. Um, separate to that, and I don't think I have one I could show you immediately, but maybe if someone wanted one, I could probably ping it afterwards. We have a second document which is called the creative guidance. So the creative guidance is more like the visual side of things. So it's more like, okay, what, how should it look from a brand point of view? Are there any branding constraints? Um, what can we say, what can't we say? Wording guidelines go into that. Um, if we're doing any production, it's like, ah, if it's a watch, for example, you've got to make sure the face of the watch is clean. And you'd be surprised at how many times that's a problem. Um, and it's got to be at 10 to two, right? The the hours. So all these kind of intricate details end up getting compiled into this document. So usually between the client 101, which is a deeper research into our customers, reviews, products, landing pages, competitors, we also have the creative guidance which covers the visual side of things. And that makes up like our compendium of research that we do on a client before we even start. Um, in my view, you can't rush that process and it does take a couple of weeks, you know, to do it properly. Um, and then that really helps to inform the strategy. And and I think like, we've made this, we've made this mistake in the past, right? We've grown like through this, but early days, you know, we'd make a lot of creative and we'd just chuck everything at the wall and expect something to stick, right? Which is I know a process that like probably a lot of people go through when they're running accounts. Definitely when we audit accounts, we see that all the time. Like the amount of like learning limited and stuff because people are just launching too many ads, disaggregating their data across so many ad sets, so many different ads, right? Um, and like, you know how the algorithm works, right? It needs to consolidate data to make it smart. So we've kind of progressively now moving towards what we call sequential testing, which is like, okay, do one thing first, then do the next thing, then do the next thing. Don't try and like scattergun everything all in one go because you can actually just reduce your overall effectiveness of ads massively. So that's my general kind of framework for doing it, like one, one to eight. Um, and I'd say, yeah, like one point, sorry, final point on there, like you've written them down, written them down there, so I just remembered. So six and seven, I'd probably say is you want to check, the next thing is test your content creators. So like, once you've got all your winning angles, hooks, concepts, work with creators that you regularly work with, so you've got an easy relationship to quickly test these things. Then once you've got that one to five like, you know, locked in, um, then five, 10, 20 content creators, um, get them to do their own slight variations on things. Um, and that will add its own randomness and that's fine. But I'd say that's the next thing to test because it's more expensive to get more creators on board, right? And outreach and do all that, it's a lot of work. Um, and then the final thing I'd say is like design variations. And these are by the way in order of sequence from most important to least important. And it does change depending on the condition of the account, if we've got winning angles, that kind of thing. Um, and by design variations, I mean, change a color, change the style of the, uh, um, subtitles, um, change the color of the CTA, change the banner, right? These small, small things. Um, that's my general framework for doing it, like one to eight. Um, and I'd say, yeah, like, I think one of the key things for me is like with this, is I always, I always kind of drill this into the team. I'm like, hey, never test anything unless you've got a hypothesis. Right? And I keep saying it again and again and again, like, why are you testing? Why are you testing? Why are you testing? Because every test costs money. And people forget that money's not free, right? It's like, so like, you can run an ad and it will tank and it'll cost you money. So like, you have to really think about like, what are you trying to learn from this test? And we use a scientific method. So we literally have like, I have this thing in my head which is like, first of all, you need a hypothesis, right? So it's like, if this, then that will happen because of this, right? IFTTT, I'm always with that. If this happens, then that will happen because of this. So I always try and give a reason behind my hypothesis, right? Um, it might be that, ah, if we include, uh, a certain thing in the first frame of the ad, we've seen that that's consistently been a pattern that works through whatever inductive reasoning or whatever you want to call it, you'll come up with a hypothesis that, hey, we should always do this. So then we test that against other kind of evergreen ads, chucking something at the front of the ad, right? I can show you some examples, but, um, that then becomes a learning for the agency, which we document inside that creative guidance doc that I mentioned. Um, and then every time we do a new test, we're always looking back at this learning to be like, okay, collectively as a team, what do we know to be true or and what do we think to be true? And what's the next thing we want to figure out? Um, and unless you apply that approach, you'll always be wasting money on tests. Um, it's, it's the like number one takeaway, like honestly, like you'll just optimize everything if you think like that. And reduce the number of briefs you do and just increase the quality and increase the quality of your thinking. Um, you can also pick up inferences from looking at your competition. That's free. That's the free testing. Like they've tested for you, right? So just go on ad library, look at what, look at which ad has been, sorry, look at which creative has been repeated the most number of times, you'll probably get an indication of like, ah, that's a winning ad. Stuff that's been running the longest as well, you can also tell. And if you use ad spy, it tell, you can rank by engagement, I think as well. So you can actually see, hey, this got the most engagement. So you use those things in combination. Um, and obviously you know certain advertisers are just on their shit and they're good. So you just kind of use all those things to be like, ah, okay, that's my free learning. Now what do I have to pay for my learning, right? And you add those things together and then you decide what to do next. Um, and that just compounds again and again and again until you get better and better and better results, right? So, so I guess what we've done is like to solve that problem is actually like build a process that allows them to communicate, you know, putting structure into things. And I think honestly, building that relationship between the two is really, really important. Motion's definitely helped, and again, this is a loose plug, but it is a plug. Like it it has helped us actually to bridge that gap because effectively, it's broken down the data in a way that the creative team can really understand what's going on. And we've customized our reports in such a way that, um, the GS's and the media, well, the media buyers, we call them growth strategists, um, and the creative team, of which we have like quite a few different roles, they all take talk the same language now because they're like, oh, hey, check that report. What's that metric? Um, whereas before it's like, you'd say a number on a spreadsheet and your video editor didn't really understand what that meant. Um, so yeah, for that, I just want to give props to you guys for building a tool that made sense for us. Um, and yeah, like I think kind of managing that relationship is absolutely key to driving performance because the growth strategist really know like what's working in the account, but the creative strategist is the one that put it there in the first place. So it's kind of like, it's like yin and yang. You've got to have this like symbiotic relationship between the two in my opinion.

Evan Lee: I love the yin and yang reference right at the end there because it's exactly that. And like, Jem, when we're talking about that yin and yang, like we know that you lean into those funnels and being able to build the appropriate structure and like scale there. I guess like the question I'd ask to you is when we talk about this harmonious relationship between the two sides of the brain, what role, uh, do you think media buyers play in that like leveling up along the way?

Cem Verghese: Yeah, so definitely like the way we look at like media buyers here in VB is like not just media buyers, they've got to be growth strategists, right? So they've got to understand, okay, creative to a high level. You know, they don't have to know how to do Photoshop or Premiere Pro or anything like that, but they've got to know, okay, what does a performance creative look like? How should a hook look? How should the script look, right? Be good enough to know what a good creative looks like, but not necessarily need to be in the weeds of like, you know, writing the script and the thing, right? Um, because ultimately the growth strategists for us, they drive the team forward, they hold the team accountable to the, to the spend and the ROAS target. Um, where they really come into the flow is being able to, let's say, analyze the data from like you said, recent creative tests, right? Being able to dissect with Motion, okay, this creative's are working, here's why, because of the high hook rate, because of the attention rate, um, because of the high CTR. Um, and then being able to communicate that with the designers, but in like a very simplistic manner. So like, you know, we used to really drown in like spreadsheets, right? And then trying to get designers to like read the numbers and trying to show them our correlation analysis and all that stuff and it just, it was just really difficult. So what you need is like the media buyer to be able to take all the data and just present a really nice, simple case, like literally green, red, this ad is working because of this hook, because the hook rate is 30%, this is why I want you to use this hook in the next brief for the next batch of ads. Pretty much our media buyers kind of run the mini teams that we have, we call them pods, right? Um, and it's like they, it it they almost give a shopping list to the creative strategists and the creative team of like, hey, focus on new concepts or focus on variations. Like, of the tests, we're going to run this many new concepts and this many variations because I've got this much budget that's scaling and this much that I need to find new opportunity with, right? So they actually dictate like the overall volume of of creative, um, and what gets focused on, right? And then they present the data to the strategist to say, hey, within new concepts and variations, like try these different things because I see them working in the numbers. Um, and then from there, the creative team then goes and delivers that, executes it, you know, using, we use like agile methodology to get that done. And, and yeah, the media buyers and I'm probably skipping a gun here, but we'll get to it.

Evan Lee: No, it's all good. It's all good. I think this is the stuff that I, I see the excitement, right? So it's like when the passion starts flowing through, this is what gets helpful. I think like when I start reading between the lines, what I really love is as much as we're talking about like, okay, the creative strategy, these loops and that stuff. When you're talking about your processes, it's like people know what they're responsible for at the end of the day. So when we're talking about bridging this gap, it's almost like, how do we make sure that everyone knows what needs to be done? And to bring it back to, um, like just to kick off our conversation of how we dig into this process a little bit, I just wanted to start talking about in, in how we view it being the wheel here, I just wanted to start talking about research up front more than anything. So I'd like to think, and correct me if I'm wrong, that the first thing is just getting acquainted with the brands you're working with and caught up to speed, right? So what I'm curious around if honestly both of you could shed light into is just from a research perspective, who leads that process and where do you even start for the most part?

Cem Verghese: So, so the person who drives that process is generally the creative strategist, right? Because they've got to be really in tune with like the the brand, the messaging, um, they're the ones who are going to be researching the competitive creatives and landing pages anyway. So that's the one who drives it, but in terms of, uh, they're not going to be the single person that does it. So the growth strategist, again, media buyers will also get involved in filling out the the research document, which we can screen share and show you. Um, the copywriters who'll be writing the the copy for like the advertorials and sales pages, they will need to be involved and they generally have some of the strongest research skills as well, um, naturally, you know, being, being copywriters. So we we get them involved, um, as well. So generally like just the whole team working on the account will go through it. The designers will research the creatives, they'll go on like ads library, they'll save the creatives on Foreplay, um, they'll go on to, um, like ad spy and stuff and put all their creatives in. So really the whole team generally contributes into, you know, what we call the the client 101 document. Um, so on this, we'll we'll literally go through like there's so many different things in here, right? But kind of in summary, you can kind of see the list of things that we do here, right? So we, we go, we go deep on like our competitors, like we, we're constantly watching our competitors, like almost every day. Um, so you better watch out guys if you can see any of our brands competitors. But, um, so we're going through kind of all their ad libraries, um, we're looking at all their landing pages, we keep in a full log of like their landing pages, which is saved here. Um, we pick up all the products that our brand is is kind of selling, go through all the features, the benefits, kind of write those all down. Again, this like as Jem was saying, the strategist kind of leads that process. Um, they also write down like what objections that customers may have. And you can pick those up from Amazon, Amazon FAQs, you can pick them up from the website, you can ask the brand, um, you know, they usually have a kind of deep insight into this. Um, let me see here, we've got like a list of competitors, we go through all their landing pages. Um, and then we do something called, I'll just show you one of these. So we do a process called review mining. So where we literally get all the reviews from like the website, from Amazon, Trustpilot, Google, Facebook. Um, and we just, we do like a word cloud. So the list ends up being like 2, 3,000, for example, for a brand, right? We have an admin staff who does actually sit through every single one of them and and writes out like a, just categorizes them in summary. Um, and even though it's a really lengthy process, it's worth doing because actually some of our angles come from that. So, so our messaging, our copywriting, our hooks, scripts, you know, our content creator scripts, all starts, starts from there. Before it starts from our brain and we make things up, we actually go through the reviews because like why would we try to re-engineer people who we already know are the customers, right? So we literally start from there. And there's been cases where we've literally just run a review and it's worked amazingly or we've taken something that a customer has said and we've literally just put that in the hook and it's crushed it, right? Um, so we do go through a lengthy process on that to start with. You can see we even like do a sentiment analysis. And then we kind of like summarize this all together in like a a summary table, right? Um, yeah, so that's kind of like the client 101 that we do in the strategy, the creative strategist actually leads that at the beginning with input from various members of the team. Um, separate to that, and I don't think I have one I could show you immediately, but maybe if someone wanted one, I could probably ping it afterwards. We have a second document which is called the creative guidance. So the creative guidance is more like the visual side of things. So it's more like, okay, what, how should it look from a brand point of view? Are there any branding constraints? Um, what can we say, what can't we say? Wording guidelines go into that. Um, if we're doing any production, it's like, ah, if it's a watch, for example, you've got to make sure the face of the watch is clean. And you'd be surprised at how many times that's a problem. Um, and it's got to be at 10 to two, right? The the hours. So all these kind of intricate details end up getting compiled into this document. So usually between the client 101, which is a deeper research into our customers, reviews, products, landing pages, competitors, we also have the creative guidance which covers the visual side of things. And that makes up like our compendium of research that we do on a client before we even start. Um, in my view, you can't rush that process and it does take a couple of weeks, you know, to do it properly. Um, and then that really helps to inform the strategy. And and I think like, we've made this, we've made this mistake in the past, right? We've grown like through this, but early days, you know, we'd make a lot of creative and we'd just chuck everything at the wall and expect something to stick, right? Which is I know a process that like probably a lot of people go through when they're running accounts. Definitely when we audit accounts, we see that all the time. Like the amount of like learning limited and stuff because people are just launching too many ads, disaggregating their data across so many ad sets, so many different ads, right? Um, and like, you know how the algorithm works, right? It needs to consolidate data to make it smart. So we've kind of progressively now moving towards what we call sequential testing, which is like, okay, do one thing first, then do the next thing, then do the next thing. Don't try and like scattergun everything all in one go because you can actually just reduce your overall effectiveness of ads massively. So that's the process we're moving towards. Now it's not like a on and off switch, right? You can't like get it perfect. So we're like slowly, slowly getting towards this. Um, and with sequential testing, we do try and mix between new concepts and variations. So it's kind of like, we start with a concept and then we, once we get a bit of a winner from it, we try to then create variations from that. Sometimes a variation is so good that we turn that into a concept in itself. And that becomes the new start of the tree. And then from there we create more variations. Um, but the key thing is not to do too many things all in one go. And kind of spinning off topic here, but always focus on variations first because they're cheap. When I say they're cheap, they're cheaper to produce, easier to produce, faster to produce, right? You can get 20, 30, 40 variations out of a winner very quickly, whereas getting a winner in the first place is pretty tough. Um, and our creative success rate on winners is usually double of what we have on new concepts as well. So you always want to like just, as soon as you've got a winning creative, like you can squeeze a lot more juice out of that that creative by just, you know, identifying is it the hook that could be iterated? Is it the, you know, you swap the model around? Is it the off like there's a lot more you can squeeze once you've got one winning creative, like don't just have a few winning creatives in your account and like coast on that.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Yeah, but by the way, there's a world where if you, depending on how big your video editing teams get, right? But like if you have, um, let's say more senior video editors and more junior video editors, right? And you have a file sync system in place. We don't yet have this actually, we're going to be looking into this in the next couple of months because it's a bit expensive. Um, I think it, I think there's a software that if anybody wants it, I can link them afterwards. I can't remember the name of it. Resilio, that's the one, Resilio. Um, it's like $100 a month per person. But it allows immediate file sync from all editors, including all the project files, all the bins inside Premiere Pro, all the assets, seamlessly within like seconds to a more junior editor who might be in a different part of the world at a different, you know, lower labor rate or just less experience, let's say. In those situations, it's actually, if you have that ability, you can actually produce those variations super quick and very cost effectively. But if you don't, like I don't recommend it at the beginning. Um, for the reasons that Jem said, you know, it's resource management, right? You'd much rather spend that on new concept testing or hook variations, right? Um, I'd say there's like probably a one caveat is like when you're doing, um, let's say a fashion brand, when you've just got to make it look bang. It's just got to like look right from the offset. Um, I can't even put that into words really, but like, yeah, when you're doing direct response, you can kind of get away with the four fives in the stories, but I feel like when you've got a fashion brand and you want it to just pop, um, sometimes 9:16 just has to happen.

Cem Verghese: Yeah, and also sale ads, you would always want to make the 9:16 variants and your confidence level on those working being profitable is is high anyway. So, yeah, yeah.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Yeah.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. Okay. Um, first of all, thank you so much. Like we're getting up to time here. Uh, I I really appreciate the level of depth you've given. Even though the best part to me is how many times we've talked about like you're only talking about the tip of the iceberg, there's so much more we can uncover. So everyone who's in attendance, everyone who's checking out the the recording of this, like, I hope this has been super helpful. Throw some love in the chat first of all with different emojis and whatever you can for these guys because I know personally I learned a ton and I've really, really, really appreciated their time today. So thank you so much, guys. Appreciate you both.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Thank you, man. Appreciate you having us on. And like, yeah, if anyone wants to reach out for any of the templates or anything, I'll redrop my link in here. That's like how to get in touch with us. And any templates that are not on that link, like just email me and I'll I'll sort you guys out.

Evan Lee: Amazing. And I'm going to be sending out a follow-up that includes the recording and all this good stuff, and I'll be sure to include, um, not only the links, but just like the contact information so you can make these kind, uh, the connections. And as everybody knows, follow these guys on Twitter, follow them on LinkedIn. I'll include that in the email too, so we can just stay all connected. Strong community we got here, so let's let's continue pushing forward.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Appreciate it, man.

Cem Verghese: Appreciate it. Thank you for your time.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Appreciate it, folks. Thank you so much.

Evan Lee: Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Talk to you real soon.

Evan Lee: Bye-bye.

Shahbaz Khokhar: Bye-bye.