Sprints With Evan: Facebook Creatives & Building a Successful Team | Motion's Kyra Richards

Evan: make sure that we have it.

Evan: Perfecto. Perfecto.

Evan: Uh, okay. Uh, everybody, like I said earlier, really excited to all have you all here. Um, and for this chat in particular, it's so exciting to always welcome a new team member, but someone exactly like Kira is where I get the most excited about. So Kira's ultimately someone I I truly respect at the end of the day. Um, and what we're here to talk about is we're really going in depth around like creative strategy as it relates to Facebook creatives, and then also talking about like the necessary teams to get that going. But before I dive into any of the good stuff of what we're chatting about, let me go ahead and share my screen.

Evan: What I always like to cover first is just from like a motion standpoint, what the world looks like on our end.

Evan: So really at Motion, when we're presenting these events, we like to think of ourselves as the hub for creative strategy.

Evan: And when we focus on creative strategy, why that's so important is ultimately creative has become the most important lever for for success when it comes to paid advertising.

Evan: And we know that ultimately there's two sides of the brains at play. We have the media buying team who's very data and analytics heavy, whereas we have the creative teams who are exactly that, creative and conceptual.

Evan: In between, there's almost this gap that exists, like we see here, and we call that gap creative strategy. So this entire series of Sprints with Evan is really dedicated towards how do we fill that gap, not only with motion on our end, but also just from a process standpoint.

Evan: But for those who are interested on the motion side, we think of creative strategy as a flywheel, as many of you have been to events before and know.

Evan: And how we help is we make it easy to analyze the information that's coming up,

Evan: visualize it so everyone can understand what's going on,

Evan: and ultimately share these insights across the board to make that happen.

Evan: Amazing. Um, a couple housekeeping pieces that I also like to mention. So first things first on the question side, if you have questions, my ask for you all, and I don't think I have, uh, Q and A enabled, but please throw those questions into our chat. So that way both myself and Kira can get to it, but also anybody else who's here, so everyone can start contributing and we can share that insights. And then the second thing I'll notice that this recording will be made available after our event, and if you've registered, I will send it out via email.

Evan: Amazing. Okay, so now let's get into the meat and potatoes of what we have going on here. Uh, the presentation you will, the only thing is from a presentation standpoint, there won't be too much content that'll be sharing on that point of cash.

Evan: But when I talk about like introduction wise, um, this is Kira. She has joined us to really lead customer success at Motion. Kira is, like I said earlier, someone I respect, someone who's awesome. Her background is based in like so many great areas, I'd say. So she started out on the media buying side at an agency living that life. She's actually worked at Facebook before, so I've got a peek behind the curtain, and she's really helped scale growth at Tonal. I know everyone has seen those Tonal ads that pop up featured by everybody. So she's the perfect, perfect person to chat with us today really around like, hey, Facebook, knowing that she was there, how can I think about running my creative tests, which media buyers I know you're going to love. And then secondary at Tonal, really helping scale that program, what's the proper way to actually structure your team so you have a humming process in play. So any managers in this world or creative team members who are looking for support, just know Kira's got our backs. She's going to walk us through all that good stuff. Cool. Sweet. So, um, with a first with a first introduction in place, I know I didn't do her justice. Can we just get a quick like round of applause for everybody who's here in the audience? If you can, throw in your emojis in there, give her some love.

Kyra: Amazing.

Evan: Amazing.

Kyra: Welcoming community. I love this.

Evan: Of course, of course, of course. Um, and then with that in mind, I think like before I even get into, um, like some of the questions that I have for you, Kira, I really feel like I didn't give you justice on that introduction. Can you talk to everyone who's here just a little bit about like, um, the decisions you've made through your career and how that's positioned you in a place to like come into motion?

Kyra: Yeah, for sure. So I think when I was at Facebook, they always used to describe careers as jungle gyms instead of linear paths because a career probably only makes sense when you're actually looking back from where you end up at the end of it, of how all of the different things that you've learned kind of come to play. And I think that's what I'm starting to see as I've landed at motion of how all of these random aspects of my career are now really coming to a culmination here. Um, so as Evan mentioned, I started on agency side. Um, coming out of school, I studied marketing, but digital marketing really wasn't a thing yet. It was still pretty early days. And I was lucky enough to make my way to a digital agency. So there I was running, um, media buying for Google, Facebook, um, as well as some of the other platforms like Pinterest, a little bit of display. Um, and I was working with our clients to really do the nitty gritty media buying, shifting things around. It was right when like dynamic ads were coming out too. So I got to be a part of that, um, of understanding like there's these new things happening, it's always changing. And I think that's where I caught the bug of our industry of like, it's so fun because there's so much to constantly learn. And I think curiosity is one of the things that really drives me. And so when I was on the agency side, I was like, man, I'm spending all of this time trying to figure out like, how do I make my like Facebook ads better? How do I make my Google ads better? And I really fell in love with paid social on Facebook because you could do like full funnel advertising in one place. So I could like get people hooked on a brand and I could get them to convert all in one place. And so I was like, okay, like that's really cool. I want to understand like how this actually works and like why people are able to be so successful because I feel like there's a lot of stuff that Facebook is not telling us. When I would like talk to my reps in the day, I was like, man, like I really want to know, but like I couldn't get the right answers out of them. And so I was like, you know what? Like, let's go try and work at Facebook. So I ended up getting on with them over there. I was on their account management team for the e-commerce vertical. And I know a lot of people in the audience are probably like, oh my gosh, she was an account manager. I'm going to tune out for the rest of this. I know, I know. I've had some tough account managers and some problems with support in the past too, but I promise you that is not the case here. Um, I had a lot of clients that I loved working with and actually Tonal was one of my clients at Facebook and we had such a great relationship that I ended up going to work with them after Facebook, um, to build out their program. But what's cool about Facebook is like sometimes your account managers may not understand the day-to-day that you are in, but they have access to so much more information, so many tools, so many reports that you just don't even realize they have access to. So it's really cool when you understand how to start to harness the power of some of those reports or like questions that you can ask. Like one of my favorites is you can get them to pull a comparative report for you that will show you all of the benchmarks for other people that are in your vertical if you have an account rep. But you have to know to ask for it because a lot of times reps don't know if that's actually helpful for you or not. Um, but it was really cool because I got to see internally at Facebook, like here's all of the different reports we can pull. And then also like here's how our auction team at Facebook thinks about the auction and why it works. And here's our creative team at Facebook and this is how they think about what a best in class creative strategy looks like. And then you have marketing science who's like, this is how you actually should think about measuring a strategy. So it was really cool to work with experts for a little bit and get their perspective on more of the how, like how is this working on the back end? And then I was like, okay, cool, I kind of understand this now. I have this awesome brand Tonal that's one of my clients. It's a really expensive piece of equipment, about $4,000. And so they're running Facebook ads and they're able to get people to buy a $4,000 product off of a Facebook ad. So I was like, okay, this is a fun playground to go and actually see how this works. So I took a lot of that stuff that I had learned at Facebook, went over to Tonal and we started to really implement things, do a bunch of testing and really bring it to life to learn in a real environment what was happening. Um, and so that's kind of what took me there. And then after that, I've done a little bit of consulting, kind of seeing a lot of different businesses from different standpoints just to fill in and kind of round out my like D to C e-commerce background because that's where I have been my whole career. But I was like, I should probably just for context, like know what's going on on like B to B or like, you know, it's like app installs and like some other things that maybe aren't just like specifically my D to C e-com. So I've rounded out of there and then I was lucky enough to make my way back to Motion, um, where I get to take all of these cool things that I've learned over my career and come to this cool community to like brainstorm with y'all on how we can really blow this thing up. Like we're at a really cool inflection point where we all get to learn together and really figure out like what is best in class creative strategy and how are these things really going to come to life over the next, you know, three years, honestly, as creative strategy becomes the new focal point of of the paid industry, honestly.

Evan: I just know that I would have loved to have Kira as my as my rep. I think that would have been the best experience ever. So thanks Kira for introducing yourself to the audience there. And I think you just leaded uh, or you lend yourself to the nicest segue talking about creative strategy being a really important side of things. Um, so on your end, can you talk to talk to us about like what creative strategy means to you?

Kyra: Yeah, it's a new term and so I think people have a lot of different definitions about it. I think when I think about what creative strategy is, it is really having the right processes and rituals in place to understand why a creative is working so that you can then recreate your results and scale them out to drive more favorable outcomes for your business. But it's the it's the piece of like we have to have a replicable process in there so that we can really understand the things that I think is really important.

Evan: Gotcha. And something that I agree with for sure. And I think like the biggest question I always think about is like, why the heck is it actually important? We talk creative strategy all the time. Why is it necessary, especially now?

Kyra: Yeah, so there's been an interesting shift. Um, I think when I think about like paid advertising, especially with Facebook, I almost think about it in eras, right? So if we think back to like the beginning of Facebook, people were trying to get likes, guys, we were literally paying money for likes on posts, okay? Then it quickly transitioned and Facebook's like, hey, we can actually drive purchases for you. Don't you think that would be cool? Like if we can get clicks and like they turn into purchases. We had dynamic ads come out and it was like this whole new era of like really segmented targeted approaches of being able to drive results because Facebook was now smart enough to really figure it out and do that for us. We are now entering another era with Facebook. And so what has happened is Facebook has now jumped up again and the algorithm's gotten a lot smarter. So it no longer, you know, like before we were just looking at like, could someone take a click was what the algorithm was optimizing for. Now it's like, okay, we're optimizing towards purchase and it would use all the inputs that a media buyer would give it. Now it is actually able to pull context from the creative that you're uploading because it can take that thumbnail, it can digest what you're putting in there of like text overlays. It's going to think about like, you know, what type of content might be in your video, things like that. And because the algorithm can now digest that, we're moving to another era where your creative is a lot of your targeting. It's a lot of the inputs that like media buyers used to set up on that side and get in the nitty gritty. But now it's the creative that's driving that. And it's hard because we don't get as much context from Facebook about why that's working or data points around it, which is really hard because in this last era, we had very specific data points on everything. So we could always optimize. Now it's a little bit fuzzier. So we're having to get more creative on how we can build data around why our creative is working to really pull those insights out and be able to really come up with hypotheses of why it's working so that we can kind of build that into a more robust strategy. But that like creative is going to be what drives your performance now. I would say 80 to 90% of it. Media buying's not dead. You have to have the right structures in place for this to work, but creative is going to be one of those really big levers that you can pull.

Evan: So the reason that I'm smiling so much is because there was so much good stuff in there that we should unpack. We can glaze over it for sure on why it's important, but I think it's really important to go to the details. And I think to just add my two layers of context, one of the things that I enjoy about chatting with Kira is like, I almost think about learning in two different buckets, right? Like one is a net new thing you might have not known before, but a second piece might just be a deeper understanding or a repositioning of what's working, right? Like we all say the algorithm is strong, but how many of us here are just like, all right, cool. Like I don't know really know what that means, but let that thing fly, right? Um, so Kira to let to let's unpack that a little bit. Your agency world really set the stage for being able to say like, I can run these ads, I know the structures, I know creative is important. Let's go there. But something that I'm curious about is if you can speak to the data points a little bit more. So if we can actually go through step by step and talk about like pre iOS 14 things, like what was the world like in the tracking availability there? The second thing is like post iOS 14 when you talk about the algorithm getting smarter, like what does that actually mean? And then we'll take it from there. Is that sound okay?

Kyra: Cool. Yeah. So I think like specifically thinking about data points, one of the things that first opened my eyes to what the algorithm could do was when we were running some pretty advanced tactics on dynamic product ads back when they were fairly new. I was lucky enough to work with a pretty sizable retail brand that had a lot of apparel. And so one of their problems that they were facing as a business was, man, like the products that we're selling are low margin products and like we're not making a lot off of this. So there's not much room for us to actually profit. And so we took that business insight and we said, okay, we're going to actually tell Facebook how much margin we have for each product by making that a column in our feed so that it can ingest that data to better target our dynamic ads. When we did that, it fundamentally changed how Facebook started to allocate impressions to different products within our catalog. It then also allowed us to set up different ad sets to make it focus on specific products that we knew customers would buy. And so when I started to understand that the data you give to Facebook will change how it actually serves your ads and I saw that in real time from the performance we were driving. I was like, oh my gosh, mind blown a little bit. Like this thing's really powerful. We just have to figure out what to feed it. Now, iOS 14 was a whole curve ball and it was something that like Facebook honestly wasn't ready for. They were planning on cookies going away and kind of working against Google. And so they were really focused on like conversions API and signal resiliency. If you've worked with Facebook reps, I'm sure that you've heard those terms kind of come around. But what happened is Apple pulled the trigger before Google did. And so it was like this, oh my gosh moment at Facebook and I was actually there in the couple of months leading up to iOS 14. Talk about a crazy time to be at a company. Um, and so everyone was like, oh my gosh, like Facebook was driving a considerable portion of Tonal's business at that time. So this was like big risk, like board of director risk and like investor risk where they were like, um, hey, like are you guys going to be okay? Like we're not sure we want to invest anymore in you because like your Facebook's driving your business and like that's about to like catch on fire. Um, and so that was really fun to start a new job with like that kind of pressure. But what we did is we like started to assess one, how can we get more efficient on Facebook, but two, how can we start to diversify our media? And so coming in, that was kind of the lens that I was thinking about. Um, so the first thing that I did when I came in was like, we just had to get all of our foundations cleaned up. And Evan will know like this is where I always start a new job. It's like, get the foundations, get the data, make sure we're all clear on like what is happening in the background and now we can use that to kind of lean into it. And so once I had that cleaned up, we got naming conventions overhauled so that we would have clear data coming in. And then I started to build out the media team. The reason that I started there is because if I work with my creative team to produce phenomenal assets and we're getting into creative strategy, but we don't have the muscle strength of someone that is able to go in there, get everything trafficked flawlessly, which if you have never trafficked an ad, it's actually like a much bigger pain than you would ever imagine. Facebook's always erroring out. There's like, there's a lot to it that like I feel like sometimes we don't give media buyers enough credit for what they're doing, but like you have to have those people that are paying very close attention when they're trafficking all of your stuff, making sure those naming conventions are right, ensuring that you have the right structures that will allow you to actually get creative learnings. Um, and so we built out that team. I got everybody trained up, made sure that we had a really, really strong thing there. We had strong analysis coming in. Once we had the foundation set up of what our program was, that's where we really started to take this new lens of like, we have to have like a performance creative team. When I was working at Tonal, we had brand and we had growth, okay? I sat on the growth side, we needed to make money for the business. The brand side sat over here, they wanted to make sure that everyone remembered our brand and like really loved us. Very different approaches to like what we were trying to drive. Um, and so our brand team is where our creative team sat and that's pretty normal within client orgs. So our creative team is thinking about how do we have people remember us and how do we make people love us? But my goals are, well, I just need people to purchase this thing. So it was like this interesting like conflict of very different views. And so I was like, okay, like that stuff's perfect and we need some of the brand content so that we can really nurture people. But I also need this second layer of like a performance creative team that can come in and think through it in the same lens that I do. So I was super lucky to have a video editor on the team that was really hungry and really just wanted to like understand the paid media side once I was over there. And so what we were able to do is we were able to kind of pull him out of the brand creative team. He would still work on some projects, but I would say like 90% of his job ended up skewing to be more so like how do we iterate on this? How do we think about like the different pieces that are coming together? He did a lot of work on like recipes for assets that he thinks would like work well or things that he wanted to learn. And so once we had that appetite from someone on the creative team, it was actually a fairly natural process where we created that pod type structure where we had like media strategy, we had a creative strategist, and then we had a video editor and we had our like media buyers. And so we could all come together and we could brainstorm. And I think that's the powerful thing, brainstorming. We don't do enough brainstorming together. People are seeing different things all the time. They have different thoughts. We have to have a place to talk about it so that everyone can come up with these like ideas that we want to test. And so by shifting to that pod structure, it made us much more agile to where I could be like, yo, Tyler, like kick this out in like a day if you have time, like let's prioritize like getting this switched out because this is what we're seeing. So great for agility, but then also awesome for information sharing because we had this like very casual environment that no one was scared to ask questions or learn. Um, and it's scary. It's scary when these teams are coming together. I get nervous sometimes when I talk to creatives still because I'm like, okay, you think in a totally different way, you know all of these things about the terminologies of like what it means to drag this like button box that I call it over here and you have this fancy word for it. We speak different languages, but we have to bridge that gap if we want to be successful in the next era. Like we have to. And so you have to create these like safe small team environments where you can have those conversations and learn. Um, and I think that's part of why that approach was really successful at my time at Tonal.

Evan: That's incredible. I feel like you touched upon like three major buckets there, right? It's like team assembly, it's the the culture, so psychological safety and like just feeling good in your in your shoes there, but then also just like the day-to-day work, right? And if I can give like a quick summary really quickly of the things that I heard, it's like when you jumped in, it was like we have brand and performance side, there was a director of growth and it was just like an agency kind of chugging away, but you needed there. And when you came in, the first thing was, of course, getting your data right, making sure you're good to go, making sure media buying was something that resonated in house. So it's like knowing how to traffic those ads and then built out the creative team. One key question that I have in there is around the decision related to like, um, onboarding a media buying team before actually leaning into the creative side of things, knowing that creative is one of the biggest levers to success.

Kyra: Yeah. So my thing was that I wasn't going to be able to make the business case for pulling in my designer full time, um, to work on my growth projects if I didn't have the infrastructure to have all the ads trafficked. My role didn't give me the capacity to be that person that was trafficking the ads. Um, I think if we would have been in a scenario where we could have handed it off to an agency, it might have been different and I think I would have taken a different approach. But with us knowing that we really needed to build that strong team and have to really go, we were in housing media at the same time. Like I needed to make sure that I had a media buyer that could actually traffic the things that my creative team was building for me or else they were going to build, it was going to sit, it would eventually get put out, but we wouldn't have those quick feedback loops that would make it so effective.

Evan: Yeah, that's a that's a really important part too. It's just like everybody, we spoke about naming conventions a little bit earlier being like, but ultimately, as Kira's mentioning, it's like, what am I actually looking for? What are the questions that I need answers to and making sure those foundational layers across the biz that are really setting that up. Another thing that you had mentioned in there, Kira, which is like, I love the way you put it, just like speaking a different language between both sides. And I mentioned it earlier too, like data on one end, creative and conceptual on the other end, right? So we talk about bridging that gap, but in your world, like how did you actually bridge that gap? How did you bring the creative team members up to speed on this language that those teams speak?

Kyra: Lots of conversations, lots of training time. We just spent time together, honestly, and we asked each other questions. Like, I think we both came to the table with learning mindsets because I needed to learn the creative side as much as they needed to learn the media side. And so it was this really, it was honestly fun, which and I don't think most people would would name that transition as fun. But I think if you can come come to it with like a human perspective of like, okay, like I just like your world's really interesting to me and I want to learn. I think that that will help it make it smoother. Um, more tactically what we did is like I would walk through reports with them and data scared my creative team at one point. They were like, could you not put data in the slides because like it just I we don't like it. Can you just go ahead and write it into a sentence? I was like, okay, I get it. Um, but I think what's what's really cool is that when a creative understands data, it is so powerful, man. Like they have different perspectives. Like creative's brains work in a different way fundamentally. And so when they can look at a couple of metrics like a thumb stop rate, a click through rate and a conversion rate, and that becomes a story in their brain of, okay, like I got this many people to stop scrolling, this many people actually took the action that I wanted them to. Oh man, and now like these people are actually buying our product. When they feel empowered to look at that on their own, oh my gosh, the questions that their brains generate and the way that they think about that data is like so cool to watch. So like just spend some time together, look at metrics, ask questions and make sure you really understand what a metric means at the foundational layer when you're starting to learn this stuff and it will take you really, really far.

Evan: And when we're talking about metrics for all of the creatives in the room because even the word like kind of just encompasses everything and anything, right? Like do the creatives truly need to know like every single metric out there or is there ones that are more important to them than others?

Kyra: It'll depend on your business too and what you're working on because I think some metrics are going to be more important than others for different businesses. Um, but what I would say is like there's a there's a core set of metrics that most of us are using. Um, and it's kind of like the funnel has slowly extended more to like creative, right? We used to just think about like website funnels, but now it's like we have like this whole creative funnel. So I think website funnels are probably what people are more familiar with and I think creatives have actually picked up a lot of that kind of stuff of like, oh, this person dropped off when they like added to cart. We have cart abandoners. Like I think that that one was an easier one to track with with my creative team because they've talked about it a little bit more. I think the pieces that are trickier is this like what I would call the creative funnel. And so that's where we get into like, okay, like did someone like stop scrolling in the thumb stop ratio? Like that's a really, really important metric there. And then you go to like, okay, like how many people made it 25% through my video or 50% through my video and what was average watch time? So if you're really heavily investing in video and you're a video editor, really get to know your video metrics. If you're a designer on the other hand, probably not as much of an emphasis on the video metrics initially. I would focus more on a lot of the stuff of just like your click through rates and how people are engaging with that and then what's happening with those people when they go to site. Um, so you're going to have different things for different people to focus on initially, but I would say for the most part, there's probably those what, call it 10 metrics, I would say that kind of even out to that kind of gets you from initial first watching a creative all the way kind of through your website funnel that people can look at. There's a million other metrics. People always like to come up with new metrics. I have a lot of fun metrics that like I love playing around with that are like way too advanced and that's one tip I will give to media buyers, account managers, creative strategists that are trying to train creative teams. Keep it simple. Give them a second to like catch their breath and get comfortable and then like level it up as you go. But a lot of times like those metrics are fun and meaningful for us, but until we can really make a good story out of it, it's harder to connect the dots with the creative team.

Evan: Makes a ton of sense. Yeah, I I when I'm when I'm training creative teams, I dive into like a high-level video funnel and like that's where we'll start. So it tells that story. So it makes makes a ton of sense. Uh, and then can you remind everyone on like the structure of the pods that you were mentioning?

Kyra: Yeah. So our pod, so we had like a little extra resourcing. So we actually had like what I would call media strategy and then we had a creative strategist and then we had a video editor/designer. So he would kind of do all of it. We were 95% video at Tonal, so really the video editing was the most important piece and then he could like slap together a decent enough design to work for our static images when we needed to. Um, and then we had our media buyers. And so I think most people will probably have that like media strategy and creative strategist probably one person that's really called creative strategist and what that role is coming into. So usually it's like a three-person pod. You have the creative, you have the media buyer, and then you have a strategist that's kind of sitting over the top. But when you have instances where it makes sense for your business or the set of clients that you're working with if you're an agency, it might make sense to kind of make that team a little bit more robust in different areas if you need to.

Evan: Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. And I I'm thinking about the creative team members in particular of like, well, who can I lean on? Who can I get this insight from, right? So in your world, were the actual like media buyers, the one who are training on metrics or who did that responsibility fall onto?

Kyra: So that would be media strategy is what I would say. So that's kind of what I considered myself. It was like a combo of creative strategy and media strategy. So it was like between me and the creative strategist, we were the ones that were usually in most of the conversations. Honestly, I didn't have my media buyers come to a lot of those conversations just because like it wasn't as helpful for them because like I needed their brain power like going in and like making optimizations and getting things to work. And then I would connect the dots of hearing things from them of what was going on to then bring back to these media to to bring back to the creatives that I was talking to or my creative strategist. And so I think it's it's okay to still be siloed and focused in your role that you're doing, but you have to have that connector if you're going to do it of someone that can at least gather what's going on and share it out with other people. Um, and that's that's the piece that starts to tie it together.

Evan: Entirely, entirely. And even like between the lines because we're talking to so many different situations that might exist for people here, for people out there in the world, all that kind of stuff. And I always like to talk about especially these roles that help bridge the gap almost as a hat, right? Because that framing for everybody who's in the room because there's probably some media buyers here who are like, hey, I'm the media buyer, media strategist, creative strategist. Oh my gosh, like what's going on? And I think once you know which hat you're deciding to put on, it gets easier to frame. So instead of being in the account all the time, it's like I'm putting my creative strategist hat on to have a conversation with the creative team. That makes it a lot easier. And even internally what I've seen be successful is like creative team members when you're tugging on your media buyer's back, it's just like, hey, hey, hey, I let you do your thing, help us scale the account, but I almost want you to put on a different hat so we can have this conversation. So it gets you in a spot where those uh conversations are ultimately fruitful. Sweet. Um, okay, well, Kira, we're coming up on the last seven minutes here. We have uh like a healthy chat that's starting to build up with different types of questions and it's great because there's our community chiming in and answering the questions with their thoughts, which is helpful for that full circle. And I think like one of the primary places that the conversation started was just around advantage plus shopping campaigns. Now, you and I have chatted about this a little bit, but do you have any um, like thoughts on how creative testing is evolving with advantage plus coming in? Seems like people are being pushed, Roy asks, seems like people are being pushed to test within Evergreen now.

Kyra: Yeah, Facebook wants you on advantage plus. Um, so here's what I understand about advantage plus. It's still very new and I think we need more data points. And so I'm actually interested to hear from you guys like what you've been seeing with it. I haven't had enough time working with it to have a strong opinion, honestly. Um, but basically the gist of it is that Facebook is wanting to take a little bit more ownership and power over what is happening and their ability to serve it to different audiences because Facebook feels like it can drive better results for your business if it's able to just hand it over to the algorithm to do it. And so a lot of the elements of advantage plus are going to be leaning into dynamic aspects. Um, so you're going to have a lot of dynamic creative where you're giving Facebook, you know, like five or seven assets and then you're saying, you go figure out what asset you want to show to different people. Um, and so that does add another element to creative testing when you now have multiple creatives in an ad, right? So it makes it a little bit more complicated. But I think that's where, you know, you can start to take a similar methodology where you start to break it down and you say, okay, if this ad is working well, what creative in that ad is actually driving most of it? Where is my spend going so that I know what's happening. Um, so I think that's like just one extra layer to look at when you're doing it. I would say as far as structures, man, I don't know. Like hit me up like after this if you're running advantage plus shopping and thinking about these structures and like let's jam on it. Like I want to see like what's happening in your account, how you're thinking about structures and all of that and like maybe we can come up with like some cool things to test to really figure it out. Um, but it's still early days for advantage plus and I think we'll see a lot of movement in that over the next probably 2023 and the year we'll see really big strides.

Evan: Entirely, entirely. And Jason brought up a pretty good point like if it's sounding like DCO, DCT, DCA or dynamic creative testing, like everyone talks about. And ultimately, when we're talking about advantage plus, it almost falls into two separate buckets from our understanding at least, right? Like there's the shopping elements that exist, but then you can almost treat it as like a DCO, DCT or however the language anyone uses. So there's opportunities on both ends. Um, and I think like again, Kira, from an experience standpoint, I know, I know you haven't had a chance to necessarily run these on your own, but based on your experiences, um, another question that we got here is like related to to creative testing, um, creative testing like within advantage plus or outside of it? Like what should be done essentially?

Kyra: Oh, within it or outside of it? I think it's just different testing based on what you want to learn. So here's my initial gut reaction to it of what I would think. Um, when you're putting, what I would want to probably do is I'd probably want to take more of like a sandbox structure when working with, and I'm talking about the dynamic creative side of this, not the shopping side for a second. I'll hit on shopping after this. So with the with the dynamic creative side, I would honestly like think less about dynamic creative as a testing element and more of like an optimization lever you can pull to scale. Like figure out what works and then feed it to the dynamic creative for it to be able to allocate resources in real time based on who's logging into the platform. Um, so my hunch would be keep it out of it, but I don't know, test it. Like see what happens if you start feeding it ones like in a bunch of creatives for dynamic creative and if you can actually get clear results. If you can, let me know too. I want to see what that looks like.

Evan: Educated testing, so important and then sharing the information with the community brings it home. Uh, we have time for one more question and the last one that we have here is uh, I'm seeing it come up a lot is just about like remarketing, right? So we're in a new world, right? Like your knowledge of the algorithm, your knowledge of ads, like what are your thoughts about remarketing? I'm seeing people saying they they separate it into its own campaign. I'm seeing people saying like, I don't do it anymore, let Facebook do its thing. Like what do you think on this one?

Kyra: Oh, I have opinions. I have a lot of opinions on this one. Um, so I think it I think it's really important to break out your remarketing if you are spending a considerable amount on Facebook. Okay, the reason I say that is because when you start to bundle your remarketing with all of your other audiences, you don't get a clear read on frequency because you're flooding that pool with a lot of other people. And so what you're doing is you're risking that you might just be like hammering people. And I'm guilty of this at Tonal. So you heard Evan like mentioned at the beginning of like, um, yeah, like if you've probably seen a Tonal ad. If you're in the US, I hope you've seen a Tonal ad. Our frequencies were a little bit out of control for a little while. Um, and part of that was because we were trying some new funnel structures post iOS 14 to see what was happening. Um, and we couldn't gauge frequency anymore. And so that was like really risky. The other thing that I think is an advantage of breaking retargeting out is you can start to understand audience penetration. This is um a little bit of a different viewpoint, but what I would like to do is I would always see how big my full like website visitor or honestly giving you a little pro tip, post iOS 14, we started to do social engager audiences because it was based on the click and not the website visit, which Facebook would lose visibility to. So we'd actually do social engagers. So I'd say, okay, if I have 3 million social engagers that have interacted with me before, um, oh my gosh, my retargeting campaigns are only reaching a unique million people for the last six months. I've only been reaching a third of my audience. Oh my gosh, I have to put in some new creatives that that Facebook's willing to show to these other audiences. So I think there's a risk when you combine it that you're missing out on some clear metrics that are happening. Now, caveat, if your spend is lower, you may not have the ability to split your retargeting out yet because you can't break that budget. And that's okay. If your spend's that low, you're probably not going to run into these issues of like really high frequency and things like that. So I think there's use cases where it's okay to keep everything combined and lean into the algorithm, but I think as you start to scale, there are a lot of benefits to breaking it out and being able to just get some more learnings from it.

Evan: Amazing. And with that said, that's almost the mic drop. Um, this is why I'm so excited to have Kira here just with like insights like this, the way she thinks about creative strategy, the way she thinks about teams. So at Motion, we're going to be doing a lot of things like building out different templates related to the flywheel, like I speak about. Um, and essentially, I've shared it in the chat here, but if you are interested, come check us out. Like I'd mentioned at the beginning, or if you want to talk to myself or Kira some more, like book some time with us so you can learn more about what we do here at Motion. Um, but Kira, thank you, thank you, thank you. You are the best. I'm excited to do more of these with you.

Kyra: Me too. And thanks to the community. Y'all have been so fun. Like thanks for asking questions. I'm excited to be like cranking out all this with you guys. So can't wait to meet more of you, um, as we're here. And Evan, thanks for all the good questions today. What a fun combo.

Evan: Amazing, amazing. Everybody, enjoy your January. Again, happy New Year. I'm going to say it to the end of the month and keep it going. If you ever have any questions for us, you know where to find us. Um, and excited to keep these conversations going. Thank you, thank you. Talk to you soon.

Kyra: Bye everyone.

Evan: Bye everybody. See ya.