Sprints with Evan: UGC Creative Strategy For Profitable Growth | Micah Whitehead

Evan Lee: share my screen here.

Perfecto.

Okay, everybody. Well, like Micah had kicked us off with, I'm very, very excited to chat about all things UGC. We know how important UGC is, especially related to like paid advertising right now and everything else involved. Um, but before I introduce the main man, the man of the hour, I just wanted to to start off with just level setting on like why we're here to chat today.

And essentially, here at Motion, we are the hub for creative strategy.

And essentially what that means is we know that so many things have changed, but we know that creative has become the most important lever for success, especially when it comes to paid advertising.

But what we also know is that there's almost two sides to the equation. On one hand, we have our performance marketing teams. On the other hand, we have our creative teams. Now, performance marketers are more analytical, data-driven, whereas creative team members might be exactly that, more creative and conceptual. So at Motion, when we talk about creative strategy, we want to help bridge that gap between the two teams.

And how we help do that is essentially by making it easier to to follow a set uh number of steps to produce the optimal creative that Micah is going to help us dive into.

And at Motion, we make it easy to analyze,

visualize, and share these insights to everyone involved.

Okay. So that's the high level.

Before I introduce Micah officially, I just wanted to couple of cover a couple housekeeping pieces here. So number one is just related to your questions. So I know they're going to pop up and if you have them, please, please, please throw them into our chat. And something that I like to encourage is like our community knows their stuff. So if you have any answers to questions that come up, also throw your thoughts into the chat. We really want to hear from you. So let's make it happen there, but Micah is also going to be able to share his expertise. And then finally, I know everyone asks, but the recording will be made available after this call. So you'll be able to get it on YouTube through the email if you've registered. Everything, we've got you covered.

Perfecto.

But now it's time for the main man, the man of the hour, Micah.

So Micah and I, as well as his partner Riley, have had a chance to know each other for over a year now. I can't believe that time flies. And I've always been super impressed with their impressed with their tenacity approach and everything in between. So Micah comes from a pretty diverse background in all honesty. So he started at a company and he's going to be able to to to give a little bit more context, but he he started at the company uh at a company as the first marketing hire where he really dove into the creative side, the content side, and ultimately leading to exit before starting this agency at Zero to one where he's going to be diving into UGC. One of the really cool things that I think Micah brings from a perspective, um, is that he actually worked on the brand side, so working with the team to exit is really, really helpful. And being that bringing that knowledge to the agency end and applying it to so many different brands is something that allows him to excel. But Micah, I feel like I didn't do you justice there. Is there any other context that you'd like to tell the people?

Micah Whitehead: You know, um, you know, being being on the brand side, Shipped was the company. Um, first hire. There's being involved in a fast growth, um, rapidly growing brand like that and all the different evolutions across the stages of the company. We got to see really the good, bad and the ugly of, um, agency relationships. Worked with a lot of agencies that didn't work out. They really weren't built, um, for that level of scale that we were were working with. And so, you know, don't have an agency background. Um, certainly brand background, I understand that sort of entrepreneurial DNA and that was the opportunity that we saw. I think you mentioned it on your earlier slide.

There's this, especially enterprise level companies, there's a disconnect between, you know, often like brand creative and and growth teams. Um, and if you're on the growth side, you know, it's like really hard to get creative at the speed and the pace that you need to scale your accounts. Um, and on the flip side, brand teams aren't really driven by the same KPIs and don't really understand the power of short-term response. It's more of a longer time horizon. And so getting that done, especially at bigger companies is really hard. And we didn't find an agency that kind of was suited to kind of be that missing piece between the two. And so that's where Zero to one was was born and founded and that's why we focus on what we focus on, but just helping helping our clients do, um, what we did on on the brand side today and that's done through the power of content.

Evan Lee: I love it. Well, welcome to the party, Micah. Can we get some love in the chat? Just some fire emojis, all the good emojis that we can send some love so we can make sure that everyone's feeling welcome. So amazing.

Um, without further ado, what I really want to start diving into is like, again, UGC is the main topic of conversation, but there's so many parts of this flywheel that ultimately let you get to the ideal UGC pieces. And I think before we dive into to parts of these flywheel, I just wanted to like get your thoughts on a high-level topic and it might seem basic, but I'm just curious, like why is UGC so important in today's landscape?

Micah Whitehead: Well, I was starting to touch on it in that super long intro, um, that I was giving on the how was how was Q1 treating you, but, you know, especially right now, um, when teams are trying to do more with less, uh, we Zero to one started as more of a traditional production uh approach to to creative, which is more expensive, longer timelines and that model isn't really set for success in the paid media landscape. So especially today, we're just trying to do more with less. UGC is the most cost-effective uh and affordable way to produce creative that also you can scale uh with short sort of sprints. Um, and it just happens to be a top performing format, um, kind of regardless of the platform. So if you're not utilizing UGC, um, you need to be as soon as possible.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Most definitely. Okay. So I know a lot of people are going to want to dive into like, well, how do we actually source creators? How are we creating the right pieces? But something that I'm always curious about is this initial bucket of like our audits and our researching before anything. So what that means is like you're introduced to a brand, you're having that dialogue of even trying to figure out what to do. And this is applicable again on the agency side, for someone working in house, everyone involved. On your end, where are you typically conducting research to start informing the strategy that you're going to build?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean there's a few different pieces to that equation. I mean, I certainly motion, I'll I'll plug motion right now. Um, we introduce motion in a couple different, um, parts of the process. Initially, before you get into name conventions and structures and reporting build outs, you're going to get like a high-level look. So we like to connect up the ad account, look at longer time frames, really to identify top performing, worst performing creatives, any sort of like initial trends that sort of stand out that you can pull insights from and build on top of. Um, so we'll do that. We have a creative strategy, um, framework that's got like common sort of baseline building information where you're going to want to audit past past campaigns, um, key messages, um, figure out like what your ideal hooks are. You're going to look at reviews, um, testimonials, um, press, like you kind of start with a wide canvas, competitor research is super important too. Um, because often times you can see, you know, low hanging fruit and opportunity area. If you there's a certain concept or style that you're not testing and you see that happen across a couple different competitors, it's an indicator that you probably should should at least test that and try that. So we'll do all those things. Um, we spend two weeks to 30 days at sort of analyzing and and building out like an MVP of a creative strategy, um, initial concepts that we want to test, uh, and then a like a testing framework and that also applies to the account structure. So there's a lot that goes into it. Um, but it's definitely the secret sauce. Um, it's how you get started. Uh, you're going to want to cast a wide net towards the beginning and and test a wide variety of concepts. Um, usually we're starting with like three to five creators and each are doing three to five concepts with the goal of identifying a formula that's going to work, um, identifying a creator that's going to resonate with your brand that you can build on top of month over month and then concepts that are going to deliver results that you can iterate on. Um, and then you have kind of a jumping off point after that like a 30 to 60-day testing period. But definitely want to start with a pretty robust analysis across the board of what you're working with.

Evan Lee: Love it. And I love that you cast a wide net. I think everybody should. There's so many places you can go like Micah had mentioned directly in the ad accounts, just like overall reviews, YouTube pages, Reddit, whatever it might be to get your information. And I think one of the pieces that's interesting is like we can have all this information, but we have to look at it and say like, okay, what are we actually pulling from? And something that you had talked about was, I think it was your recipe builder or your um, like just creative strategy template that you're thinking about. So I'm wondering, like after you have that wide net cast and you are starting to look for those trends, how are you starting to document that out so you're able to start informing the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I'm going to I can actually probably pull up a screen share on this.

Evan Lee: Perfecto. Okay, let me cancel mine out.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, this is an example. I this is a template too. Like I'm also game to share out this recipe builder template, um, as like a follow up.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Let me share my screen.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, you see see this?

Evan Lee: Yep, we got you.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, so what we do, um, we obviously we're pretty plugged in by running lots of different creatives with creators, you know, thousands over the years. We've got a pretty good sense of like what formulas work. We call it a recipe. Um, lots of ingredients. We treat sort of a concept as a collection of ingredients that you can sort of play with and dial up and dial back. But there are concepts that work that are tried and true, um, that we sort of collect over time, stuff that bubbles to the surface as like cross category, um, formats that, you know, we can utilize regardless of client. Um, and so over time as things perform, we'll test new things, but we'll collect those. And this is the recipe builder sort of template. We'll start to like house them. So like, you know, problem solution or before after, this is a recipe. So we'll we'll get an example of this. We know this works across clients and so we'll, um, have this as almost like a base. And so when we're onboarding with a new client, we have a set of these, probably like 10 to 15 like tried and true. If you do not have these in your account and you've not tested these, this is probably a good place to start. You pair that with your creative strategy and your key messaging, you can kind of tailor it a bit to the brand. Um, but certainly want to collect these over time. We do this through client work, but also just through, um, making sure we're plugged into the industry. It's a daily, it's called a must conquer daily for our team, but every day they're going into the TikTok, um, top ads, uh, where you can discover and filter by, you know, performance. We're looking at competitors, other agencies in the space. There's a couple of key voices that are active on Twitter that will talk about this stuff. And every day we'll go in and sort of canvas the landscape and if we see a concept that, um, kind of checks all the boxes that we want to test, we'll we'll go ahead and implement that with a client and then if it resonates, we'll add that to our recipe builder. So this is a collection that is built over time that we use for all of our clients, but you could certainly do this in house as as well. But this, we've also, you know, we'll collect visual hooks. Um, you know, as we're researching every day, something will pop up, we will record that, drop it here, um, can even categorize this by category, but this gives you a reference point as you're looking to iterate into the future and build new concepts.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. So basically, just to give everyone a high level, like these are not only research based related to like the brands that you might be working with. Of course that exists in this equation, but what you're also doing is just making sure that you have a finger on the pulse. So it's TikTok top ads, like all over the place. You would to say, what are these trends and how should we test them?

Micah Whitehead: Yep.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. Perfect. So once you have your research, that brings you to a place of like having an idea of what you want to do. Um, I think one of the big things that I think about next is when we talk about like UGC itself, the very first thing is just starting to think about the creators that you're working with. Now, there's a million different ways that we can take this. If I'm not starting in the right place, if there's more context that you can't share, please, please, please let me know. But I think the first question that I have for you is related to sourcing on that end. So on your end, um, how many creators are ideal and then how are you finding those creators to put together and match the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, how many is ideal, um, is really an answer to a question that is answered after you have benchmarks. Um, you know, you can calculate there there's some ways you can look at like average spend per creator and a target spend in the account. We do that with motion, um, where we'll look at if they have like sort of a baseline, we'll look at say the average is $1,000 spent per ad and they're looking to spend 10k or 50k or 100k, you can sort of extrapolate a number of creatives you need to test. Um, and then back out a number of creators from there. Most typically, it's like three to five creators per month in a sprint and each of those creators developing three to five concepts, which especially early on when you're kind of trying to build that baseline where you're testing a little bit wider, um, you're going to want to do that, um, to figure out, okay, of the three to five creators, here are the two that really resonate with the brand that are going to perform well that we can build on over time. Um, maybe you cut the losers and and add a net new as part of like an iterative process going on going forward. Um, and then same thing with the concepts. You're going to identify winning concepts that you can match with future net new creators that that are resonating with the brand and kind of vice versa. In terms of, uh, where you source them. So it kind of depends on the goal of the campaign, the brand, the product. There's, but there's different buckets. There's the influencers or micro-influencers, which is, you know, they're going to be a benefit if you're looking to borrow their level of expertise, um, their credibility, if you're trying to white list or run spark ads, like that's all kind of a a realm that you could play in there. There's also the UGC creators. We're often, most often playing with UGC creators who are going to be great at executing a brief. They understand sort of the mechanics of performance, um, and how to translate that to their creative. Um, and then actors is another that we've been playing with a lot, um, more and more, the actor community is getting involved with content creation and UGC. They're going to be really good at executing a a script and delivering it in an authentic and relatable way and being a little bit more diverse, but not so good on the content side. So depending on what bucket you need to focus on, will also determine the level of, um, hand holding and relationship and the briefing process required for those. But in terms of identifying them, finding them, you've got, you know, of course you've got the platforms like, you know, Grin, um, Creator IQ, etc. I don't like those as much. I mean, they're good for the discovery. Um, but often times you're kind of working through their CRM to and so getting responses, um, can be hard. You know, you're trying to build a relationship with them at the end of the day. So it's a good starting place, especially if you have one. Um, but you can be a lot more scrappy than that. I think, you know, we'll do like a casting call on Twitter, like the UGC community, if you do a post around some hashtags, like you can have people almost do a casting call and have people opt in and have a wide base to sort of audit and select from. You can even push them to more of a funnel where they are self-selecting and giving you some information to choose from. So we'll do that. Um, search for hashtags, particularly if it's a like a really niche brand, um, that may be appropriate. Um, you can do that as well through just like DM and and cold outbound email. Um, to do that well, it needs to be conversation-based. So avoid like giving them the whole nut up front, just like, you know, start a conversation, give them a personal compliment, build that relationship and then work with them over time. I think the goal with any creator, we've found success in building longer-term relationships, um, as opposed to kind of starting fresh new list every time. Like you want to over time, figure out which creator is going to work with you and refine that process with them and they'll get better at delivering new content. Um, they'll understand the brand, they'll develop a brand love. And so you can kind of even start to give them a little bit more creative liberty as that relationship progresses. So that's always our North star. Um, always trying to find really level 10 creators that we can work with again and again and again. Um, we love, we've got our own creator community that we've built, um, and have given them a path to becoming a per preferred creator. So if you opt into our network and become a preferred creator, there's a little bit of training that's involved and then they get access to like top top deals with brands they want to work with. And then from our perspective of being creative strategists and growth marketers, helping them refine what they do. Um, and then making that process really simple and easy to work with and streamlined. And so they they get a lot of value out of working with us as well as connections to new opportunities. Um, and then the community being connected to the community of other like-minded creators. So that's a different approach. Um, we sort of own and nurture that community. But on the other side for the brands, um, you're you're trying to build a, almost like a brand army, a community of advocates, um, that love your brand. So I think a good start with a lot of times I've seen success with just seating product without like a a deliverable so to speak. Like if you're leading with the deliverable and the request, then that just kind of starts a relationship in a certain way. So if you want to start kind of wide and get your product out as as like a adding value to them first, the data shows that most of those creators will post organically and then from there you can identify, okay, this one was great. They really love the brand. I can tell they can make good video content. And that's a good jumping off point for a conversation. You can ask to license the content they posted organically or engage them for a more formal, um, campaign. So that's one way to go about it. But, um, working with them to make sure that process is easy, celebrating the wins. If you get like a campaign that does really well, let them know, kind of let them into the metrics, give them a case study, um, and then use that to continually go back to them and just keep them a part of that community, keep them fed with new opportunities. Um, that's the best way to go about that.

Evan Lee: Fantastic. Fantastic. And I think like just for my own curiosity here, like you've mentioned actors and with actors, it's like, give me those raw videos, we can edit it, we can stitch them together the way that they're required. And on the other side with the creators that you work with, do you have that same um, like expectation where it's just like raw files, cool, we'll do what we need.

Micah Whitehead: We do. Yeah. Typically, and I mean there's there's exceptions to that. Um, that's an important piece of our process because we've got more an iterative approach where like we don't think a video should be made once, for example. Like a simple change on the first three seconds can 10x the result. And so you need that ability to create iterations from the content. So if you're leaning into a creator to produce that, then you're getting into deliverables and price per deliverable and it's more difficult and you're you're more limited. So getting that library of assets, you have to put the kind of the the planning and the creative strategy into that process to know what you need. But often times we'll get enough content to develop multiple concepts out of that library and we have that knowledge going into what the ask is. And then on the back end, we can do, um, you know, five different concepts from a library they deliver, but also we're we're pre-recording like multiple options of the hook. And so we may test, you know, a couple versions of the hook, but we've got a bank to go back to. So if we hit a winning concept that scales really well or a creator that has a winning concept that scales really well, we can go backwards and swap that first three seconds, maybe change the structure and we can double down on the success of that ad because we're able to scale it because we've got the ammunition to be able to do that from the beginning.

Evan Lee: Love it. Love it. Okay, well, welcome to the party, Micah. Can we get some love in the chat? Just some fire emojis, all the good emojis that we can send some love so we can make sure that everyone's feeling welcome. So amazing. Um, without further ado, what I really want to start diving into is like, again, UGC is the main topic of conversation, but there's so many parts of this flywheel that ultimately let you get to the ideal UGC pieces. And I think before we dive into to parts of these flywheel, I just wanted to like get your thoughts on a high-level topic and it might seem basic, but I'm just curious, like why is UGC so important in today's landscape?

Micah Whitehead: Well, I was starting to touch on it in that super long intro, um, that I was giving on the how was how was Q1 treating you, but, you know, especially right now, um, when teams are trying to do more with less, uh, we Zero to one started as more of a traditional production uh approach to to creative, which is more expensive, longer timelines and that model isn't really set for success in the paid media landscape. So especially today, we're just trying to do more with less. UGC is the most cost-effective uh and affordable way to produce creative that also you can scale uh with short sort of sprints. Um, and it just happens to be a top performing format, um, kind of regardless of the platform. So if you're not utilizing UGC, um, you need to be as soon as possible.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Most definitely. Okay. So I know a lot of people are going to want to dive into like, well, how do we actually source creators? How are we creating the right pieces? But something that I'm always curious about is this initial bucket of like our audits and our researching before anything. So what that means is like you're introduced to a brand, you're having that dialogue of even trying to figure out what to do. And this is applicable again on the agency side, for someone working in house, everyone involved. On your end, where are you typically conducting research to start informing the strategy that you're going to build?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean there's a few different pieces to that equation. I mean, I certainly motion, I'll I'll plug motion right now. Um, we introduce motion in a couple different, um, parts of the process. Initially, before you get into name conventions and structures and reporting build outs, you're going to get like a high-level look. So we like to connect up the ad account, look at longer time frames, really to identify top performing, worst performing creatives, any sort of like initial trends that sort of stand out that you can pull insights from and build on top of. Um, so we'll do that. We have a creative strategy, um, framework that's got like common sort of baseline building information where you're going to want to audit past past campaigns, um, key messages, um, figure out like what your ideal hooks are. You're going to look at reviews, um, testimonials, um, press, like you kind of start with a wide canvas, competitor research is super important too. Um, because often times you can see, you know, low hanging fruit and opportunity area. If you there's a certain concept or style that you're not testing and you see that happen across a couple different competitors, it's an indicator that you probably should should at least test that and try that. So we'll do all those things. Um, we spend two weeks to 30 days at sort of analyzing and and building out like an MVP of a creative strategy, um, initial concepts that we want to test, uh, and then a like a testing framework and that also applies to the account structure. So there's a lot that goes into it. Um, but it's definitely the secret sauce. Um, it's how you get started. Uh, you're going to want to cast a wide net towards the beginning and and test a wide variety of concepts. Um, usually we're starting with like three to five creators and each are doing three to five concepts with the goal of identifying a formula that's going to work, um, identifying a creator that's going to resonate with your brand that you can build on top of month over month and then concepts that are going to deliver results that you can iterate on. Um, and then you have kind of a jumping off point after that like a 30 to 60-day testing period. But definitely want to start with a pretty robust analysis across the board of what you're working with.

Evan Lee: Love it. And I love that you cast a wide net. I think everybody should. There's so many places you can go like Micah had mentioned directly in the ad accounts, just like overall reviews, YouTube pages, Reddit, whatever it might be to get your information. And I think one of the pieces that's interesting is like we can have all this information, but we have to look at it and say like, okay, what are we actually pulling from? And something that you had talked about was, I think it was your recipe builder or your um, like just creative strategy template that you're thinking about. So I'm wondering, like after you have that wide net cast and you are starting to look for those trends, how are you starting to document that out so you're able to start informing the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I'm going to I can actually probably pull up a screen share on this.

Evan Lee: Perfecto. Okay, let me cancel mine out.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, this is an example. I this is a template too. Like I'm also game to share out this recipe builder template, um, as like a follow up.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Let me share my screen.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, you see see this?

Evan Lee: Yep, we got you.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, so what we do, um, we obviously we're pretty plugged in by running lots of different creatives with creators, you know, thousands over the years. We've got a pretty good sense of like what formulas work. We call it a recipe. Um, lots of ingredients. We treat sort of a concept as a collection of ingredients that you can sort of play with and dial up and dial back. But there are concepts that work that are tried and true, um, that we sort of collect over time, stuff that bubbles to the surface as like cross category, um, formats that, you know, we can utilize regardless of client. Um, and so over time as things perform, we'll test new things, but we'll collect those. And this is the recipe builder sort of template. We'll start to like house them. So like, you know, problem solution or before after, this is a recipe. So we'll we'll get an example of this. We know this works across clients and so we'll, um, have this as almost like a base. And so when we're onboarding with a new client, we have a set of these, probably like 10 to 15 like tried and true. If you do not have these in your account and you've not tested these, this is probably a good place to start. You pair that with your creative strategy and your key messaging, you can kind of tailor it a bit to the brand. Um, but certainly want to collect these over time. We do this through client work, but also just through, um, making sure we're plugged into the industry. It's a daily, it's called a must conquer daily for our team, but every day they're going into the TikTok, um, top ads, uh, where you can discover and filter by, you know, performance. We're looking at competitors, other agencies in the space. There's a couple of key voices that are active on Twitter that will talk about this stuff. And every day we'll go in and sort of canvas the landscape and if we see a concept that, um, kind of checks all the boxes that we want to test, we'll we'll go ahead and implement that with a client and then if it resonates, we'll add that to our recipe builder. So this is a collection that is built over time that we use for all of our clients, but you could certainly do this in house as as well. But this, we've also, you know, we'll collect visual hooks. Um, you know, as we're researching every day, something will pop up, we will record that, drop it here, um, can even categorize this by category, but this gives you a reference point as you're looking to iterate into the future and build new concepts.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. So basically, just to give everyone a high level, like these are not only research based related to like the brands that you might be working with. Of course that exists in this equation, but what you're also doing is just making sure that you have a finger on the pulse. So it's TikTok top ads, like all over the place. You would to say, what are these trends and how should we test them?

Micah Whitehead: Yep.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. Perfect. So once you have your research, that brings you to a place of like having an idea of what you want to do. Um, I think one of the big things that I think about next is when we talk about like UGC itself, the very first thing is just starting to think about the creators that you're working with. Now, there's a million different ways that we can take this. If I'm not starting in the right place, if there's more context that you can't share, please, please, please let me know. But I think the first question that I have for you is related to sourcing on that end. So on your end, um, how many creators are ideal and then how are you finding those creators to put together and match the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, how many is ideal, um, is really an answer to a question that is answered after you have benchmarks. Um, you know, you can calculate there there's some ways you can look at like average spend per creator and a target spend in the account. We do that with motion, um, where we'll look at if they have like sort of a baseline, we'll look at say the average is $1,000 spent per ad and they're looking to spend 10k or 50k or 100k, you can sort of extrapolate a number of creatives you need to test. Um, and then back out a number of creators from there. Most typically, it's like three to five creators per month in a sprint and each of those creators developing three to five concepts, which especially early on when you're kind of trying to build that baseline where you're testing a little bit wider, um, you're going to want to do that, um, to figure out, okay, of the three to five creators, here are the two that really resonate with the brand that are going to perform well that we can build on over time. Um, maybe you cut the losers and and add a net new as part of like an iterative process going on going forward. Um, and then same thing with the concepts. You're going to identify winning concepts that you can match with future net new creators that that are resonating with the brand and kind of vice versa. In terms of, uh, where you source them. So it kind of depends on the goal of the campaign, the brand, the product. There's, but there's different buckets. There's the influencers or micro-influencers, which is, you know, they're going to be a benefit if you're looking to borrow their level of expertise, um, their credibility, if you're trying to white list or run spark ads, like that's all kind of a a realm that you could play in there. There's also the UGC creators. We're often, most often playing with UGC creators who are going to be great at executing a brief. They understand sort of the mechanics of performance, um, and how to translate that to their creative. Um, and then actors is another that we've been playing with a lot, um, more and more, the actor community is getting involved with content creation and UGC. They're going to be really good at executing a a script and delivering it in an authentic and relatable way and being a little bit more diverse, but not so good on the content side. So depending on what bucket you need to focus on, will also determine the level of, um, hand holding and relationship and the briefing process required for those. But in terms of identifying them, finding them, you've got, you know, of course you've got the platforms like, you know, Grin, um, Creator IQ, etc. I don't like those as much. I mean, they're good for the discovery. Um, but often times you're kind of working through their CRM to and so getting responses, um, can be hard. You know, you're trying to build a relationship with them at the end of the day. So it's a good starting place, especially if you have one. Um, but you can be a lot more scrappy than that. I think, you know, we'll do like a casting call on Twitter, like the UGC community, if you do a post around some hashtags, like you can have people almost do a casting call and have people opt in and have a wide base to sort of audit and select from. You can even push them to more of a funnel where they are self-selecting and giving you some information to choose from. So we'll do that. Um, search for hashtags, particularly if it's a like a really niche brand, um, that may be appropriate. Um, you can do that as well through just like DM and and cold outbound email. Um, to do that well, it needs to be conversation-based. So avoid like giving them the whole nut up front, just like, you know, start a conversation, give them a personal compliment, build that relationship and then work with them over time. I think the goal with any creator, we've found success in building longer-term relationships, um, as opposed to kind of starting fresh new list every time. Like you want to over time, figure out which creator is going to work with you and refine that process with them and they'll get better at delivering new content. Um, they'll understand the brand, they'll develop a brand love. And so you can kind of even start to give them a little bit more creative liberty as that relationship progresses. So that's always our North star. Um, always trying to find really level 10 creators that we can work with again and again and again. Um, we love, we've got our own creator community that we've built, um, and have given them a path to becoming a per preferred creator. So if you opt into our network and become a preferred creator, there's a little bit of training that's involved and then they get access to like top top deals with brands they want to work with. And then from our perspective of being creative strategists and growth marketers, helping them refine what they do. Um, and then making that process really simple and easy to work with and streamlined. And so they they get a lot of value out of working with us as well as connections to new opportunities. Um, and then the community being connected to the community of other like-minded creators. So that's a different approach. Um, we sort of own and nurture that community. But on the other side for the brands, um, you're you're trying to build a, almost like a brand army, a community of advocates, um, that love your brand. So I think a good start with a lot of times I've seen success with just seating product without like a a deliverable so to speak. Like if you're leading with the deliverable and the request, then that just kind of starts a relationship in a certain way. So if you want to start kind of wide and get your product out as as like a adding value to them first, the data shows that most of those creators will post organically and then from there you can identify, okay, this one was great. They really love the brand. I can tell they can make good video content. And that's a good jumping off point for a conversation. You can ask to license the content they posted organically or engage them for a more formal, um, campaign. So that's one way to go about it. But, um, working with them to make sure that process is easy, celebrating the wins. If you get like a campaign that does really well, let them know, kind of let them into the metrics, give them a case study, um, and then use that to continually go back to them and just keep them a part of that community, keep them fed with new opportunities. Um, that's the best way to go about that.

Evan Lee: Fantastic. Fantastic. And I think like just for my own curiosity here, like you've mentioned actors and with actors, it's like, give me those raw videos, we can edit it, we can stitch them together the way that they're required. And on the other side with the creators that you work with, do you have that same um, like expectation where it's just like raw files, cool, we'll do what we need.

Micah Whitehead: We do. Yeah. Typically, and I mean there's there's exceptions to that. Um, that's an important piece of our process because we've got more an iterative approach where like we don't think a video should be made once, for example. Like a simple change on the first three seconds can 10x the result. And so you need that ability to create iterations from the content. So if you're leaning into a creator to produce that, then you're getting into deliverables and price per deliverable and it's more difficult and you're you're more limited. So getting that library of assets, you have to put the kind of the the planning and the creative strategy into that process to know what you need. But often times we'll get enough content to develop multiple concepts out of that library and we have that knowledge going into what the ask is. And then on the back end, we can do, um, you know, five different concepts from a library they deliver, but also we're we're pre-recording like multiple options of the hook. And so we may test, you know, a couple versions of the hook, but we've got a bank to go back to. So if we hit a winning concept that scales really well or a creator that has a winning concept that scales really well, we can go backwards and swap that first three seconds, maybe change the structure and we can double down on the success of that ad because we're able to scale it because we've got the ammunition to be able to do that from the beginning.

Evan Lee: Love it. Love it. Okay, well, welcome to the party, Micah. Can we get some love in the chat? Just some fire emojis, all the good emojis that we can send some love so we can make sure that everyone's feeling welcome. So amazing. Um, without further ado, what I really want to start diving into is like, again, UGC is the main topic of conversation, but there's so many parts of this flywheel that ultimately let you get to the ideal UGC pieces. And I think before we dive into to parts of these flywheel, I just wanted to like get your thoughts on a high-level topic and it might seem basic, but I'm just curious, like why is UGC so important in today's landscape?

Micah Whitehead: Well, I was starting to touch on it in that super long intro, um, that I was giving on the how was how was Q1 treating you, but, you know, especially right now, um, when teams are trying to do more with less, uh, we Zero to one started as more of a traditional production uh approach to to creative, which is more expensive, longer timelines and that model isn't really set for success in the paid media landscape. So especially today, we're just trying to do more with less. UGC is the most cost-effective uh and affordable way to produce creative that also you can scale uh with short sort of sprints. Um, and it just happens to be a top performing format, um, kind of regardless of the platform. So if you're not utilizing UGC, um, you need to be as soon as possible.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Most definitely. Okay. So I know a lot of people are going to want to dive into like, well, how do we actually source creators? How are we creating the right pieces? But something that I'm always curious about is this initial bucket of like our audits and our researching before anything. So what that means is like you're introduced to a brand, you're having that dialogue of even trying to figure out what to do. And this is applicable again on the agency side, for someone working in house, everyone involved. On your end, where are you typically conducting research to start informing the strategy that you're going to build?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean there's a few different pieces to that equation. I mean, I certainly motion, I'll I'll plug motion right now. Um, we introduce motion in a couple different, um, parts of the process. Initially, before you get into name conventions and structures and reporting build outs, you're going to get like a high-level look. So we like to connect up the ad account, look at longer time frames, really to identify top performing, worst performing creatives, any sort of like initial trends that sort of stand out that you can pull insights from and build on top of. Um, so we'll do that. We have a creative strategy, um, framework that's got like common sort of baseline building information where you're going to want to audit past past campaigns, um, key messages, um, figure out like what your ideal hooks are. You're going to look at reviews, um, testimonials, um, press, like you kind of start with a wide canvas, competitor research is super important too. Um, because often times you can see, you know, low hanging fruit and opportunity area. If you there's a certain concept or style that you're not testing and you see that happen across a couple different competitors, it's an indicator that you probably should should at least test that and try that. So we'll do all those things. Um, we spend two weeks to 30 days at sort of analyzing and and building out like an MVP of a creative strategy, um, initial concepts that we want to test, uh, and then a like a testing framework and that also applies to the account structure. So there's a lot that goes into it. Um, but it's definitely the secret sauce. Um, it's how you get started. Uh, you're going to want to cast a wide net towards the beginning and and test a wide variety of concepts. Um, usually we're starting with like three to five creators and each are doing three to five concepts with the goal of identifying a formula that's going to work, um, identifying a creator that's going to resonate with your brand that you can build on top of month over month and then concepts that are going to deliver results that you can iterate on. Um, and then you have kind of a jumping off point after that like a 30 to 60-day testing period. But definitely want to start with a pretty robust analysis across the board of what you're working with.

Evan Lee: Love it. And I love that you cast a wide net. I think everybody should. There's so many places you can go like Micah had mentioned directly in the ad accounts, just like overall reviews, YouTube pages, Reddit, whatever it might be to get your information. And I think one of the pieces that's interesting is like we can have all this information, but we have to look at it and say like, okay, what are we actually pulling from? And something that you had talked about was, I think it was your recipe builder or your um, like just creative strategy template that you're thinking about. So I'm wondering, like after you have that wide net cast and you are starting to look for those trends, how are you starting to document that out so you're able to start informing the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I'm going to I can actually probably pull up a screen share on this.

Evan Lee: Perfecto. Okay, let me cancel mine out.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, this is an example. I this is a template too. Like I'm also game to share out this recipe builder template, um, as like a follow up.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Let me share my screen.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, you see see this?

Evan Lee: Yep, we got you.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, so what we do, um, we obviously we're pretty plugged in by running lots of different creatives with creators, you know, thousands over the years. We've got a pretty good sense of like what formulas work. We call it a recipe. Um, lots of ingredients. We treat sort of a concept as a collection of ingredients that you can sort of play with and dial up and dial back. But there are concepts that work that are tried and true, um, that we sort of collect over time, stuff that bubbles to the surface as like cross category, um, formats that, you know, we can utilize regardless of client. Um, and so over time as things perform, we'll test new things, but we'll collect those. And this is the recipe builder sort of template. We'll start to like house them. So like, you know, problem solution or before after, this is a recipe. So we'll we'll get an example of this. We know this works across clients and so we'll, um, have this as almost like a base. And so when we're onboarding with a new client, we have a set of these, probably like 10 to 15 like tried and true. If you do not have these in your account and you've not tested these, this is probably a good place to start. You pair that with your creative strategy and your key messaging, you can kind of tailor it a bit to the brand. Um, but certainly want to collect these over time. We do this through client work, but also just through, um, making sure we're plugged into the industry. It's a daily, it's called a must conquer daily for our team, but every day they're going into the TikTok, um, top ads, uh, where you can discover and filter by, you know, performance. We're looking at competitors, other agencies in the space. There's a couple of key voices that are active on Twitter that will talk about this stuff. And every day we'll go in and sort of canvas the landscape and if we see a concept that, um, kind of checks all the boxes that we want to test, we'll we'll go ahead and implement that with a client and then if it resonates, we'll add that to our recipe builder. So this is a collection that is built over time that we use for all of our clients, but you could certainly do this in house as as well. But this, we've also, you know, we'll collect visual hooks. Um, you know, as we're researching every day, something will pop up, we will record that, drop it here, um, can even categorize this by category, but this gives you a reference point as you're looking to iterate into the future and build new concepts.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. So basically, just to give everyone a high level, like these are not only research based related to like the brands that you might be working with. Of course that exists in this equation, but what you're also doing is just making sure that you have a finger on the pulse. So it's TikTok top ads, like all over the place. You would to say, what are these trends and how should we test them?

Micah Whitehead: Yep.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. Perfect. So once you have your research, that brings you to a place of like having an idea of what you want to do. Um, I think one of the big things that I think about next is when we talk about like UGC itself, the very first thing is just starting to think about the creators that you're working with. Now, there's a million different ways that we can take this. If I'm not starting in the right place, if there's more context that you can't share, please, please, please let me know. But I think the first question that I have for you is related to sourcing on that end. So on your end, um, how many creators are ideal and then how are you finding those creators to put together and match the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, how many is ideal, um, is really an answer to a question that is answered after you have benchmarks. Um, you know, you can calculate there there's some ways you can look at like average spend per creator and a target spend in the account. We do that with motion, um, where we'll look at if they have like sort of a baseline, we'll look at say the average is $1,000 spent per ad and they're looking to spend 10k or 50k or 100k, you can sort of extrapolate a number of creatives you need to test. Um, and then back out a number of creators from there. Most typically, it's like three to five creators per month in a sprint and each of those creators developing three to five concepts, which especially early on when you're kind of trying to build that baseline where you're testing a little bit wider, um, you're going to want to do that, um, to figure out, okay, of the three to five creators, here are the two that really resonate with the brand that are going to perform well that we can build on over time. Um, maybe you cut the losers and and add a net new as part of like an iterative process going on going forward. Um, and then same thing with the concepts. You're going to identify winning concepts that you can match with future net new creators that that are resonating with the brand and kind of vice versa. In terms of, uh, where you source them. So it kind of depends on the goal of the campaign, the brand, the product. There's, but there's different buckets. There's the influencers or micro-influencers, which is, you know, they're going to be a benefit if you're looking to borrow their level of expertise, um, their credibility, if you're trying to white list or run spark ads, like that's all kind of a a realm that you could play in there. There's also the UGC creators. We're often, most often playing with UGC creators who are going to be great at executing a brief. They understand sort of the mechanics of performance, um, and how to translate that to their creative. Um, and then actors is another that we've been playing with a lot, um, more and more, the actor community is getting involved with content creation and UGC. They're going to be really good at executing a a script and delivering it in an authentic and relatable way and being a little bit more diverse, but not so good on the content side. So depending on what bucket you need to focus on, will also determine the level of, um, hand holding and relationship and the briefing process required for those. But in terms of identifying them, finding them, you've got, you know, of course you've got the platforms like, you know, Grin, um, Creator IQ, etc. I don't like those as much. I mean, they're good for the discovery. Um, but often times you're kind of working through their CRM to and so getting responses, um, can be hard. You know, you're trying to build a relationship with them at the end of the day. So it's a good starting place, especially if you have one. Um, but you can be a lot more scrappy than that. I think, you know, we'll do like a casting call on Twitter, like the UGC community, if you do a post around some hashtags, like you can have people almost do a casting call and have people opt in and have a wide base to sort of audit and select from. You can even push them to more of a funnel where they are self-selecting and giving you some information to choose from. So we'll do that. Um, search for hashtags, particularly if it's a like a really niche brand, um, that may be appropriate. Um, you can do that as well through just like DM and and cold outbound email. Um, to do that well, it needs to be conversation-based. So avoid like giving them the whole nut up front, just like, you know, start a conversation, give them a personal compliment, build that relationship and then work with them over time. I think the goal with any creator, we've found success in building longer-term relationships, um, as opposed to kind of starting fresh new list every time. Like you want to over time, figure out which creator is going to work with you and refine that process with them and they'll get better at delivering new content. Um, they'll understand the brand, they'll develop a brand love. And so you can kind of even start to give them a little bit more creative liberty as that relationship progresses. So that's always our North star. Um, always trying to find really level 10 creators that we can work with again and again and again. Um, we love, we've got our own creator community that we've built, um, and have given them a path to becoming a per preferred creator. So if you opt into our network and become a preferred creator, there's a little bit of training that's involved and then they get access to like top top deals with brands they want to work with. And then from our perspective of being creative strategists and growth marketers, helping them refine what they do. Um, and then making that process really simple and easy to work with and streamlined. And so they they get a lot of value out of working with us as well as connections to new opportunities. Um, and then the community being connected to the community of other like-minded creators. So that's a different approach. Um, we sort of own and nurture that community. But on the other side for the brands, um, you're you're trying to build a, almost like a brand army, a community of advocates, um, that love your brand. So I think a good start with a lot of times I've seen success with just seating product without like a a deliverable so to speak. Like if you're leading with the deliverable and the request, then that just kind of starts a relationship in a certain way. So if you want to start kind of wide and get your product out as as like a adding value to them first, the data shows that most of those creators will post organically and then from there you can identify, okay, this one was great. They really love the brand. I can tell they can make good video content. And that's a good jumping off point for a conversation. You can ask to license the content they posted organically or engage them for a more formal, um, campaign. So that's one way to go about it. But, um, working with them to make sure that process is easy, celebrating the wins. If you get like a campaign that does really well, let them know, kind of let them into the metrics, give them a case study, um, and then use that to continually go back to them and just keep them a part of that community, keep them fed with new opportunities. Um, that's the best way to go about that.

Evan Lee: Fantastic. Fantastic. And I think like just for my own curiosity here, like you've mentioned actors and with actors, it's like, give me those raw videos, we can edit it, we can stitch them together the way that they're required. And on the other side with the creators that you work with, do you have that same um, like expectation where it's just like raw files, cool, we'll do what we need.

Micah Whitehead: We do. Yeah. Typically, and I mean there's there's exceptions to that. Um, that's an important piece of our process because we've got more an iterative approach where like we don't think a video should be made once, for example. Like a simple change on the first three seconds can 10x the result. And so you need that ability to create iterations from the content. So if you're leaning into a creator to produce that, then you're getting into deliverables and price per deliverable and it's more difficult and you're you're more limited. So getting that library of assets, you have to put the kind of the the planning and the creative strategy into that process to know what you need. But often times we'll get enough content to develop multiple concepts out of that library and we have that knowledge going into what the ask is. And then on the back end, we can do, um, you know, five different concepts from a library they deliver, but also we're we're pre-recording like multiple options of the hook. And so we may test, you know, a couple versions of the hook, but we've got a bank to go back to. So if we hit a winning concept that scales really well or a creator that has a winning concept that scales really well, we can go backwards and swap that first three seconds, maybe change the structure and we can double down on the success of that ad because we're able to scale it because we've got the ammunition to be able to do that from the beginning.

Evan Lee: Love it. Love it. Okay, well, welcome to the party, Micah. Can we get some love in the chat? Just some fire emojis, all the good emojis that we can send some love so we can make sure that everyone's feeling welcome. So amazing. Um, without further ado, what I really want to start diving into is like, again, UGC is the main topic of conversation, but there's so many parts of this flywheel that ultimately let you get to the ideal UGC pieces. And I think before we dive into to parts of these flywheel, I just wanted to like get your thoughts on a high-level topic and it might seem basic, but I'm just curious, like why is UGC so important in today's landscape?

Micah Whitehead: Well, I was starting to touch on it in that super long intro, um, that I was giving on the how was how was Q1 treating you, but, you know, especially right now, um, when teams are trying to do more with less, uh, we Zero to one started as more of a traditional production uh approach to to creative, which is more expensive, longer timelines and that model isn't really set for success in the paid media landscape. So especially today, we're just trying to do more with less. UGC is the most cost-effective uh and affordable way to produce creative that also you can scale uh with short sort of sprints. Um, and it just happens to be a top performing format, um, kind of regardless of the platform. So if you're not utilizing UGC, um, you need to be as soon as possible.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Most definitely. Okay. So I know a lot of people are going to want to dive into like, well, how do we actually source creators? How are we creating the right pieces? But something that I'm always curious about is this initial bucket of like our audits and our researching before anything. So what that means is like you're introduced to a brand, you're having that dialogue of even trying to figure out what to do. And this is applicable again on the agency side, for someone working in house, everyone involved. On your end, where are you typically conducting research to start informing the strategy that you're going to build?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean there's a few different pieces to that equation. I mean, I certainly motion, I'll I'll plug motion right now. Um, we introduce motion in a couple different, um, parts of the process. Initially, before you get into name conventions and structures and reporting build outs, you're going to get like a high-level look. So we like to connect up the ad account, look at longer time frames, really to identify top performing, worst performing creatives, any sort of like initial trends that sort of stand out that you can pull insights from and build on top of. Um, so we'll do that. We have a creative strategy, um, framework that's got like common sort of baseline building information where you're going to want to audit past past campaigns, um, key messages, um, figure out like what your ideal hooks are. You're going to look at reviews, um, testimonials, um, press, like you kind of start with a wide canvas, competitor research is super important too. Um, because often times you can see, you know, low hanging fruit and opportunity area. If you there's a certain concept or style that you're not testing and you see that happen across a couple different competitors, it's an indicator that you probably should should at least test that and try that. So we'll do all those things. Um, we spend two weeks to 30 days at sort of analyzing and and building out like an MVP of a creative strategy, um, initial concepts that we want to test, uh, and then a like a testing framework and that also applies to the account structure. So there's a lot that goes into it. Um, but it's definitely the secret sauce. Um, it's how you get started. Uh, you're going to want to cast a wide net towards the beginning and and test a wide variety of concepts. Um, usually we're starting with like three to five creators and each are doing three to five concepts with the goal of identifying a formula that's going to work, um, identifying a creator that's going to resonate with your brand that you can build on top of month over month and then concepts that are going to deliver results that you can iterate on. Um, and then you have kind of a jumping off point after that like a 30 to 60-day testing period. But definitely want to start with a pretty robust analysis across the board of what you're working with.

Evan Lee: Love it. And I love that you cast a wide net. I think everybody should. There's so many places you can go like Micah had mentioned directly in the ad accounts, just like overall reviews, YouTube pages, Reddit, whatever it might be to get your information. And I think one of the pieces that's interesting is like we can have all this information, but we have to look at it and say like, okay, what are we actually pulling from? And something that you had talked about was, I think it was your recipe builder or your um, like just creative strategy template that you're thinking about. So I'm wondering, like after you have that wide net cast and you are starting to look for those trends, how are you starting to document that out so you're able to start informing the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I'm going to I can actually probably pull up a screen share on this.

Evan Lee: Perfecto. Okay, let me cancel mine out.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, this is an example. I this is a template too. Like I'm also game to share out this recipe builder template, um, as like a follow up.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Let me share my screen.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, you see see this?

Evan Lee: Yep, we got you.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, so what we do, um, we obviously we're pretty plugged in by running lots of different creatives with creators, you know, thousands over the years. We've got a pretty good sense of like what formulas work. We call it a recipe. Um, lots of ingredients. We treat sort of a concept as a collection of ingredients that you can sort of play with and dial up and dial back. But there are concepts that work that are tried and true, um, that we sort of collect over time, stuff that bubbles to the surface as like cross category, um, formats that, you know, we can utilize regardless of client. Um, and so over time as things perform, we'll test new things, but we'll collect those. And this is the recipe builder sort of template. We'll start to like house them. So like, you know, problem solution or before after, this is a recipe. So we'll we'll get an example of this. We know this works across clients and so we'll, um, have this as almost like a base. And so when we're onboarding with a new client, we have a set of these, probably like 10 to 15 like tried and true. If you do not have these in your account and you've not tested these, this is probably a good place to start. You pair that with your creative strategy and your key messaging, you can kind of tailor it a bit to the brand. Um, but certainly want to collect these over time. We do this through client work, but also just through, um, making sure we're plugged into the industry. It's a daily, it's called a must conquer daily for our team, but every day they're going into the TikTok, um, top ads, uh, where you can discover and filter by, you know, performance. We're looking at competitors, other agencies in the space. There's a couple of key voices that are active on Twitter that will talk about this stuff. And every day we'll go in and sort of canvas the landscape and if we see a concept that, um, kind of checks all the boxes that we want to test, we'll we'll go ahead and implement that with a client and then if it resonates, we'll add that to our recipe builder. So this is a collection that is built over time that we use for all of our clients, but you could certainly do this in house as as well. But this, we've also, you know, we'll collect visual hooks. Um, you know, as we're researching every day, something will pop up, we will record that, drop it here, um, can even categorize this by category, but this gives you a reference point as you're looking to iterate into the future and build new concepts.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. So basically, just to give everyone a high level, like these are not only research based related to like the brands that you might be working with. Of course that exists in this equation, but what you're also doing is just making sure that you have a finger on the pulse. So it's TikTok top ads, like all over the place. You would to say, what are these trends and how should we test them?

Micah Whitehead: Yep.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. Perfect. So once you have your research, that brings you to a place of like having an idea of what you want to do. Um, I think one of the big things that I think about next is when we talk about like UGC itself, the very first thing is just starting to think about the creators that you're working with. Now, there's a million different ways that we can take this. If I'm not starting in the right place, if there's more context that you can't share, please, please, please let me know. But I think the first question that I have for you is related to sourcing on that end. So on your end, um, how many creators are ideal and then how are you finding those creators to put together and match the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, how many is ideal, um, is really an answer to a question that is answered after you have benchmarks. Um, you know, you can calculate there there's some ways you can look at like average spend per creator and a target spend in the account. We do that with motion, um, where we'll look at if they have like sort of a baseline, we'll look at say the average is $1,000 spent per ad and they're looking to spend 10k or 50k or 100k, you can sort of extrapolate a number of creatives you need to test. Um, and then back out a number of creators from there. Most typically, it's like three to five creators per month in a sprint and each of those creators developing three to five concepts, which especially early on when you're kind of trying to build that baseline where you're testing a little bit wider, um, you're going to want to do that, um, to figure out, okay, of the three to five creators, here are the two that really resonate with the brand that are going to perform well that we can build on over time. Um, maybe you cut the losers and and add a net new as part of like an iterative process going on going forward. Um, and then same thing with the concepts. You're going to identify winning concepts that you can match with future net new creators that that are resonating with the brand and kind of vice versa. In terms of, uh, where you source them. So it kind of depends on the goal of the campaign, the brand, the product. There's, but there's different buckets. There's the influencers or micro-influencers, which is, you know, they're going to be a benefit if you're looking to borrow their level of expertise, um, their credibility, if you're trying to white list or run spark ads, like that's all kind of a a realm that you could play in there. There's also the UGC creators. We're often, most often playing with UGC creators who are going to be great at executing a brief. They understand sort of the mechanics of performance, um, and how to translate that to their creative. Um, and then actors is another that we've been playing with a lot, um, more and more, the actor community is getting involved with content creation and UGC. They're going to be really good at executing a a script and delivering it in an authentic and relatable way and being a little bit more diverse, but not so good on the content side. So depending on what bucket you need to focus on, will also determine the level of, um, hand holding and relationship and the briefing process required for those. But in terms of identifying them, finding them, you've got, you know, of course you've got the platforms like, you know, Grin, um, Creator IQ, etc. I don't like those as much. I mean, they're good for the discovery. Um, but often times you're kind of working through their CRM to and so getting responses, um, can be hard. You know, you're trying to build a relationship with them at the end of the day. So it's a good starting place, especially if you have one. Um, but you can be a lot more scrappy than that. I think, you know, we'll do like a casting call on Twitter, like the UGC community, if you do a post around some hashtags, like you can have people almost do a casting call and have people opt in and have a wide base to sort of audit and select from. You can even push them to more of a funnel where they are self-selecting and giving you some information to choose from. So we'll do that. Um, search for hashtags, particularly if it's a like a really niche brand, um, that may be appropriate. Um, you can do that as well through just like DM and and cold outbound email. Um, to do that well, it needs to be conversation-based. So avoid like giving them the whole nut up front, just like, you know, start a conversation, give them a personal compliment, build that relationship and then work with them over time. I think the goal with any creator, we've found success in building longer-term relationships, um, as opposed to kind of starting fresh new list every time. Like you want to over time, figure out which creator is going to work with you and refine that process with them and they'll get better at delivering new content. Um, they'll understand the brand, they'll develop a brand love. And so you can kind of even start to give them a little bit more creative liberty as that relationship progresses. So that's always our North star. Um, always trying to find really level 10 creators that we can work with again and again and again. Um, we love, we've got our own creator community that we've built, um, and have given them a path to becoming a per preferred creator. So if you opt into our network and become a preferred creator, there's a little bit of training that's involved and then they get access to like top top deals with brands they want to work with. And then from our perspective of being creative strategists and growth marketers, helping them refine what they do. Um, and then making that process really simple and easy to work with and streamlined. And so they they get a lot of value out of working with us as well as connections to new opportunities. Um, and then the community being connected to the community of other like-minded creators. So that's a different approach. Um, we sort of own and nurture that community. But on the other side for the brands, um, you're you're trying to build a, almost like a brand army, a community of advocates, um, that love your brand. So I think a good start with a lot of times I've seen success with just seating product without like a a deliverable so to speak. Like if you're leading with the deliverable and the request, then that just kind of starts a relationship in a certain way. So if you want to start kind of wide and get your product out as as like a adding value to them first, the data shows that most of those creators will post organically and then from there you can identify, okay, this one was great. They really love the brand. I can tell they can make good video content. And that's a good jumping off point for a conversation. You can ask to license the content they posted organically or engage them for a more formal, um, campaign. So that's one way to go about it. But, um, working with them to make sure that process is easy, celebrating the wins. If you get like a campaign that does really well, let them know, kind of let them into the metrics, give them a case study, um, and then use that to continually go back to them and just keep them a part of that community, keep them fed with new opportunities. Um, that's the best way to go about that.

Evan Lee: Fantastic. Fantastic. And I think like just for my own curiosity here, like you've mentioned actors and with actors, it's like, give me those raw videos, we can edit it, we can stitch them together the way that they're required. And on the other side with the creators that you work with, do you have that same um, like expectation where it's just like raw files, cool, we'll do what we need.

Micah Whitehead: We do. Yeah. Typically, and I mean there's there's exceptions to that. Um, that's an important piece of our process because we've got more an iterative approach where like we don't think a video should be made once, for example. Like a simple change on the first three seconds can 10x the result. And so you need that ability to create iterations from the content. So if you're leaning into a creator to produce that, then you're getting into deliverables and price per deliverable and it's more difficult and you're you're more limited. So getting that library of assets, you have to put the kind of the the planning and the creative strategy into that process to know what you need. But often times we'll get enough content to develop multiple concepts out of that library and we have that knowledge going into what the ask is. And then on the back end, we can do, um, you know, five different concepts from a library they deliver, but also we're we're pre-recording like multiple options of the hook. And so we may test, you know, a couple versions of the hook, but we've got a bank to go back to. So if we hit a winning concept that scales really well or a creator that has a winning concept that scales really well, we can go backwards and swap that first three seconds, maybe change the structure and we can double down on the success of that ad because we're able to scale it because we've got the ammunition to be able to do that from the beginning.

Evan Lee: Love it. Love it. Okay, well, welcome to the party, Micah. Can we get some love in the chat? Just some fire emojis, all the good emojis that we can send some love so we can make sure that everyone's feeling welcome. So amazing. Um, without further ado, what I really want to start diving into is like, again, UGC is the main topic of conversation, but there's so many parts of this flywheel that ultimately let you get to the ideal UGC pieces. And I think before we dive into to parts of these flywheel, I just wanted to like get your thoughts on a high-level topic and it might seem basic, but I'm just curious, like why is UGC so important in today's landscape?

Micah Whitehead: Well, I was starting to touch on it in that super long intro, um, that I was giving on the how was how was Q1 treating you, but, you know, especially right now, um, when teams are trying to do more with less, uh, we Zero to one started as more of a traditional production uh approach to to creative, which is more expensive, longer timelines and that model isn't really set for success in the paid media landscape. So especially today, we're just trying to do more with less. UGC is the most cost-effective uh and affordable way to produce creative that also you can scale uh with short sort of sprints. Um, and it just happens to be a top performing format, um, kind of regardless of the platform. So if you're not utilizing UGC, um, you need to be as soon as possible.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Most definitely. Okay. So I know a lot of people are going to want to dive into like, well, how do we actually source creators? How are we creating the right pieces? But something that I'm always curious about is this initial bucket of like our audits and our researching before anything. So what that means is like you're introduced to a brand, you're having that dialogue of even trying to figure out what to do. And this is applicable again on the agency side, for someone working in house, everyone involved. On your end, where are you typically conducting research to start informing the strategy that you're going to build?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean there's a few different pieces to that equation. I mean, I certainly motion, I'll I'll plug motion right now. Um, we introduce motion in a couple different, um, parts of the process. Initially, before you get into name conventions and structures and reporting build outs, you're going to get like a high-level look. So we like to connect up the ad account, look at longer time frames, really to identify top performing, worst performing creatives, any sort of like initial trends that sort of stand out that you can pull insights from and build on top of. Um, so we'll do that. We have a creative strategy, um, framework that's got like common sort of baseline building information where you're going to want to audit past past campaigns, um, key messages, um, figure out like what your ideal hooks are. You're going to look at reviews, um, testimonials, um, press, like you kind of start with a wide canvas, competitor research is super important too. Um, because often times you can see, you know, low hanging fruit and opportunity area. If you there's a certain concept or style that you're not testing and you see that happen across a couple different competitors, it's an indicator that you probably should should at least test that and try that. So we'll do all those things. Um, we spend two weeks to 30 days at sort of analyzing and and building out like an MVP of a creative strategy, um, initial concepts that we want to test, uh, and then a like a testing framework and that also applies to the account structure. So there's a lot that goes into it. Um, but it's definitely the secret sauce. Um, it's how you get started. Uh, you're going to want to cast a wide net towards the beginning and and test a wide variety of concepts. Um, usually we're starting with like three to five creators and each are doing three to five concepts with the goal of identifying a formula that's going to work, um, identifying a creator that's going to resonate with your brand that you can build on top of month over month and then concepts that are going to deliver results that you can iterate on. Um, and then you have kind of a jumping off point after that like a 30 to 60-day testing period. But definitely want to start with a pretty robust analysis across the board of what you're working with.

Evan Lee: Love it. And I love that you cast a wide net. I think everybody should. There's so many places you can go like Micah had mentioned directly in the ad accounts, just like overall reviews, YouTube pages, Reddit, whatever it might be to get your information. And I think one of the pieces that's interesting is like we can have all this information, but we have to look at it and say like, okay, what are we actually pulling from? And something that you had talked about was, I think it was your recipe builder or your um, like just creative strategy template that you're thinking about. So I'm wondering, like after you have that wide net cast and you are starting to look for those trends, how are you starting to document that out so you're able to start informing the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I'm going to I can actually probably pull up a screen share on this.

Evan Lee: Perfecto. Okay, let me cancel mine out.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, this is an example. I this is a template too. Like I'm also game to share out this recipe builder template, um, as like a follow up.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Let me share my screen.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, you see see this?

Evan Lee: Yep, we got you.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, so what we do, um, we obviously we're pretty plugged in by running lots of different creatives with creators, you know, thousands over the years. We've got a pretty good sense of like what formulas work. We call it a recipe. Um, lots of ingredients. We treat sort of a concept as a collection of ingredients that you can sort of play with and dial up and dial back. But there are concepts that work that are tried and true, um, that we sort of collect over time, stuff that bubbles to the surface as like cross category, um, formats that, you know, we can utilize regardless of client. Um, and so over time as things perform, we'll test new things, but we'll collect those. And this is the recipe builder sort of template. We'll start to like house them. So like, you know, problem solution or before after, this is a recipe. So we'll we'll get an example of this. We know this works across clients and so we'll, um, have this as almost like a base. And so when we're onboarding with a new client, we have a set of these, probably like 10 to 15 like tried and true. If you do not have these in your account and you've not tested these, this is probably a good place to start. You pair that with your creative strategy and your key messaging, you can kind of tailor it a bit to the brand. Um, but certainly want to collect these over time. We do this through client work, but also just through, um, making sure we're plugged into the industry. It's a daily, it's called a must conquer daily for our team, but every day they're going into the TikTok, um, top ads, uh, where you can discover and filter by, you know, performance. We're looking at competitors, other agencies in the space. There's a couple of key voices that are active on Twitter that will talk about this stuff. And every day we'll go in and sort of canvas the landscape and if we see a concept that, um, kind of checks all the boxes that we want to test, we'll we'll go ahead and implement that with a client and then if it resonates, we'll add that to our recipe builder. So this is a collection that is built over time that we use for all of our clients, but you could certainly do this in house as as well. But this, we've also, you know, we'll collect visual hooks. Um, you know, as we're researching every day, something will pop up, we will record that, drop it here, um, can even categorize this by category, but this gives you a reference point as you're looking to iterate into the future and build new concepts.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. So basically, just to give everyone a high level, like these are not only research based related to like the brands that you might be working with. Of course that exists in this equation, but what you're also doing is just making sure that you have a finger on the pulse. So it's TikTok top ads, like all over the place. You would to say, what are these trends and how should we test them?

Micah Whitehead: Yep.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. Perfect. So once you have your research, that brings you to a place of like having an idea of what you want to do. Um, I think one of the big things that I think about next is when we talk about like UGC itself, the very first thing is just starting to think about the creators that you're working with. Now, there's a million different ways that we can take this. If I'm not starting in the right place, if there's more context that you can't share, please, please, please let me know. But I think the first question that I have for you is related to sourcing on that end. So on your end, um, how many creators are ideal and then how are you finding those creators to put together and match the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, how many is ideal, um, is really an answer to a question that is answered after you have benchmarks. Um, you know, you can calculate there there's some ways you can look at like average spend per creator and a target spend in the account. We do that with motion, um, where we'll look at if they have like sort of a baseline, we'll look at say the average is $1,000 spent per ad and they're looking to spend 10k or 50k or 100k, you can sort of extrapolate a number of creatives you need to test. Um, and then back out a number of creators from there. Most typically, it's like three to five creators per month in a sprint and each of those creators developing three to five concepts, which especially early on when you're kind of trying to build that baseline where you're testing a little bit wider, um, you're going to want to do that, um, to figure out, okay, of the three to five creators, here are the two that really resonate with the brand that are going to perform well that we can build on over time. Um, maybe you cut the losers and and add a net new as part of like an iterative process going on going forward. Um, and then same thing with the concepts. You're going to identify winning concepts that you can match with future net new creators that that are resonating with the brand and kind of vice versa. In terms of, uh, where you source them. So it kind of depends on the goal of the campaign, the brand, the product. There's, but there's different buckets. There's the influencers or micro-influencers, which is, you know, they're going to be a benefit if you're looking to borrow their level of expertise, um, their credibility, if you're trying to white list or run spark ads, like that's all kind of a a realm that you could play in there. There's also the UGC creators. We're often, most often playing with UGC creators who are going to be great at executing a brief. They understand sort of the mechanics of performance, um, and how to translate that to their creative. Um, and then actors is another that we've been playing with a lot, um, more and more, the actor community is getting involved with content creation and UGC. They're going to be really good at executing a a script and delivering it in an authentic and relatable way and being a little bit more diverse, but not so good on the content side. So depending on what bucket you need to focus on, will also determine the level of, um, hand holding and relationship and the briefing process required for those. But in terms of identifying them, finding them, you've got, you know, of course you've got the platforms like, you know, Grin, um, Creator IQ, etc. I don't like those as much. I mean, they're good for the discovery. Um, but often times you're kind of working through their CRM to and so getting responses, um, can be hard. You know, you're trying to build a relationship with them at the end of the day. So it's a good starting place, especially if you have one. Um, but you can be a lot more scrappy than that. I think, you know, we'll do like a casting call on Twitter, like the UGC community, if you do a post around some hashtags, like you can have people almost do a casting call and have people opt in and have a wide base to sort of audit and select from. You can even push them to more of a funnel where they are self-selecting and giving you some information to choose from. So we'll do that. Um, search for hashtags, particularly if it's a like a really niche brand, um, that may be appropriate. Um, you can do that as well through just like DM and and cold outbound email. Um, to do that well, it needs to be conversation-based. So avoid like giving them the whole nut up front, just like, you know, start a conversation, give them a personal compliment, build that relationship and then work with them over time. I think the goal with any creator, we've found success in building longer-term relationships, um, as opposed to kind of starting fresh new list every time. Like you want to over time, figure out which creator is going to work with you and refine that process with them and they'll get better at delivering new content. Um, they'll understand the brand, they'll develop a brand love. And so you can kind of even start to give them a little bit more creative liberty as that relationship progresses. So that's always our North star. Um, always trying to find really level 10 creators that we can work with again and again and again. Um, we love, we've got our own creator community that we've built, um, and have given them a path to becoming a per preferred creator. So if you opt into our network and become a preferred creator, there's a little bit of training that's involved and then they get access to like top top deals with brands they want to work with. And then from our perspective of being creative strategists and growth marketers, helping them refine what they do. Um, and then making that process really simple and easy to work with and streamlined. And so they they get a lot of value out of working with us as well as connections to new opportunities. Um, and then the community being connected to the community of other like-minded creators. So that's a different approach. Um, we sort of own and nurture that community. But on the other side for the brands, um, you're you're trying to build a, almost like a brand army, a community of advocates, um, that love your brand. So I think a good start with a lot of times I've seen success with just seating product without like a a deliverable so to speak. Like if you're leading with the deliverable and the request, then that just kind of starts a relationship in a certain way. So if you want to start kind of wide and get your product out as as like a adding value to them first, the data shows that most of those creators will post organically and then from there you can identify, okay, this one was great. They really love the brand. I can tell they can make good video content. And that's a good jumping off point for a conversation. You can ask to license the content they posted organically or engage them for a more formal, um, campaign. So that's one way to go about it. But, um, working with them to make sure that process is easy, celebrating the wins. If you get like a campaign that does really well, let them know, kind of let them into the metrics, give them a case study, um, and then use that to continually go back to them and just keep them a part of that community, keep them fed with new opportunities. Um, that's the best way to go about that.

Evan Lee: Fantastic. Fantastic. And I think like just for my own curiosity here, like you've mentioned actors and with actors, it's like, give me those raw videos, we can edit it, we can stitch them together the way that they're required. And on the other side with the creators that you work with, do you have that same um, like expectation where it's just like raw files, cool, we'll do what we need.

Micah Whitehead: We do. Yeah. Typically, and I mean there's there's exceptions to that. Um, that's an important piece of our process because we've got more an iterative approach where like we don't think a video should be made once, for example. Like a simple change on the first three seconds can 10x the result. And so you need that ability to create iterations from the content. So if you're leaning into a creator to produce that, then you're getting into deliverables and price per deliverable and it's more difficult and you're you're more limited. So getting that library of assets, you have to put the kind of the the planning and the creative strategy into that process to know what you need. But often times we'll get enough content to develop multiple concepts out of that library and we have that knowledge going into what the ask is. And then on the back end, we can do, um, you know, five different concepts from a library they deliver, but also we're we're pre-recording like multiple options of the hook. And so we may test, you know, a couple versions of the hook, but we've got a bank to go back to. So if we hit a winning concept that scales really well or a creator that has a winning concept that scales really well, we can go backwards and swap that first three seconds, maybe change the structure and we can double down on the success of that ad because we're able to scale it because we've got the ammunition to be able to do that from the beginning.

Evan Lee: Love it. Love it. Okay, well, welcome to the party, Micah. Can we get some love in the chat? Just some fire emojis, all the good emojis that we can send some love so we can make sure that everyone's feeling welcome. So amazing. Um, without further ado, what I really want to start diving into is like, again, UGC is the main topic of conversation, but there's so many parts of this flywheel that ultimately let you get to the ideal UGC pieces. And I think before we dive into to parts of these flywheel, I just wanted to like get your thoughts on a high-level topic and it might seem basic, but I'm just curious, like why is UGC so important in today's landscape?

Micah Whitehead: Well, I was starting to touch on it in that super long intro, um, that I was giving on the how was how was Q1 treating you, but, you know, especially right now, um, when teams are trying to do more with less, uh, we Zero to one started as more of a traditional production uh approach to to creative, which is more expensive, longer timelines and that model isn't really set for success in the paid media landscape. So especially today, we're just trying to do more with less. UGC is the most cost-effective uh and affordable way to produce creative that also you can scale uh with short sort of sprints. Um, and it just happens to be a top performing format, um, kind of regardless of the platform. So if you're not utilizing UGC, um, you need to be as soon as possible.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Most definitely. Okay. So I know a lot of people are going to want to dive into like, well, how do we actually source creators? How are we creating the right pieces? But something that I'm always curious about is this initial bucket of like our audits and our researching before anything. So what that means is like you're introduced to a brand, you're having that dialogue of even trying to figure out what to do. And this is applicable again on the agency side, for someone working in house, everyone involved. On your end, where are you typically conducting research to start informing the strategy that you're going to build?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean there's a few different pieces to that equation. I mean, I certainly motion, I'll I'll plug motion right now. Um, we introduce motion in a couple different, um, parts of the process. Initially, before you get into name conventions and structures and reporting build outs, you're going to get like a high-level look. So we like to connect up the ad account, look at longer time frames, really to identify top performing, worst performing creatives, any sort of like initial trends that sort of stand out that you can pull insights from and build on top of. Um, so we'll do that. We have a creative strategy, um, framework that's got like common sort of baseline building information where you're going to want to audit past past campaigns, um, key messages, um, figure out like what your ideal hooks are. You're going to look at reviews, um, testimonials, um, press, like you kind of start with a wide canvas, competitor research is super important too. Um, because often times you can see, you know, low hanging fruit and opportunity area. If you there's a certain concept or style that you're not testing and you see that happen across a couple different competitors, it's an indicator that you probably should should at least test that and try that. So we'll do all those things. Um, we spend two weeks to 30 days at sort of analyzing and and building out like an MVP of a creative strategy, um, initial concepts that we want to test, uh, and then a like a testing framework and that also applies to the account structure. So there's a lot that goes into it. Um, but it's definitely the secret sauce. Um, it's how you get started. Uh, you're going to want to cast a wide net towards the beginning and and test a wide variety of concepts. Um, usually we're starting with like three to five creators and each are doing three to five concepts with the goal of identifying a formula that's going to work, um, identifying a creator that's going to resonate with your brand that you can build on top of month over month and then concepts that are going to deliver results that you can iterate on. Um, and then you have kind of a jumping off point after that like a 30 to 60-day testing period. But definitely want to start with a pretty robust analysis across the board of what you're working with.

Evan Lee: Love it. And I love that you cast a wide net. I think everybody should. There's so many places you can go like Micah had mentioned directly in the ad accounts, just like overall reviews, YouTube pages, Reddit, whatever it might be to get your information. And I think one of the pieces that's interesting is like we can have all this information, but we have to look at it and say like, okay, what are we actually pulling from? And something that you had talked about was, I think it was your recipe builder or your um, like just creative strategy template that you're thinking about. So I'm wondering, like after you have that wide net cast and you are starting to look for those trends, how are you starting to document that out so you're able to start informing the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I'm going to I can actually probably pull up a screen share on this.

Evan Lee: Perfecto. Okay, let me cancel mine out.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, this is an example. I this is a template too. Like I'm also game to share out this recipe builder template, um, as like a follow up.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Let me share my screen.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, you see see this?

Evan Lee: Yep, we got you.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, so what we do, um, we obviously we're pretty plugged in by running lots of different creatives with creators, you know, thousands over the years. We've got a pretty good sense of like what formulas work. We call it a recipe. Um, lots of ingredients. We treat sort of a concept as a collection of ingredients that you can sort of play with and dial up and dial back. But there are concepts that work that are tried and true, um, that we sort of collect over time, stuff that bubbles to the surface as like cross category, um, formats that, you know, we can utilize regardless of client. Um, and so over time as things perform, we'll test new things, but we'll collect those. And this is the recipe builder sort of template. We'll start to like house them. So like, you know, problem solution or before after, this is a recipe. So we'll we'll get an example of this. We know this works across clients and so we'll, um, have this as almost like a base. And so when we're onboarding with a new client, we have a set of these, probably like 10 to 15 like tried and true. If you do not have these in your account and you've not tested these, this is probably a good place to start. You pair that with your creative strategy and your key messaging, you can kind of tailor it a bit to the brand. Um, but certainly want to collect these over time. We do this through client work, but also just through, um, making sure we're plugged into the industry. It's a daily, it's called a must conquer daily for our team, but every day they're going into the TikTok, um, top ads, uh, where you can discover and filter by, you know, performance. We're looking at competitors, other agencies in the space. There's a couple of key voices that are active on Twitter that will talk about this stuff. And every day we'll go in and sort of canvas the landscape and if we see a concept that, um, kind of checks all the boxes that we want to test, we'll we'll go ahead and implement that with a client and then if it resonates, we'll add that to our recipe builder. So this is a collection that is built over time that we use for all of our clients, but you could certainly do this in house as as well. But this, we've also, you know, we'll collect visual hooks. Um, you know, as we're researching every day, something will pop up, we will record that, drop it here, um, can even categorize this by category, but this gives you a reference point as you're looking to iterate into the future and build new concepts.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. So basically, just to give everyone a high level, like these are not only research based related to like the brands that you might be working with. Of course that exists in this equation, but what you're also doing is just making sure that you have a finger on the pulse. So it's TikTok top ads, like all over the place. You would to say, what are these trends and how should we test them?

Micah Whitehead: Yep.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. Perfect. So once you have your research, that brings you to a place of like having an idea of what you want to do. Um, I think one of the big things that I think about next is when we talk about like UGC itself, the very first thing is just starting to think about the creators that you're working with. Now, there's a million different ways that we can take this. If I'm not starting in the right place, if there's more context that you can't share, please, please, please let me know. But I think the first question that I have for you is related to sourcing on that end. So on your end, um, how many creators are ideal and then how are you finding those creators to put together and match the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, how many is ideal, um, is really an answer to a question that is answered after you have benchmarks. Um, you know, you can calculate there there's some ways you can look at like average spend per creator and a target spend in the account. We do that with motion, um, where we'll look at if they have like sort of a baseline, we'll look at say the average is $1,000 spent per ad and they're looking to spend 10k or 50k or 100k, you can sort of extrapolate a number of creatives you need to test. Um, and then back out a number of creators from there. Most typically, it's like three to five creators per month in a sprint and each of those creators developing three to five concepts, which especially early on when you're kind of trying to build that baseline where you're testing a little bit wider, um, you're going to want to do that, um, to figure out, okay, of the three to five creators, here are the two that really resonate with the brand that are going to perform well that we can build on over time. Um, maybe you cut the losers and and add a net new as part of like an iterative process going on going forward. Um, and then same thing with the concepts. You're going to identify winning concepts that you can match with future net new creators that that are resonating with the brand and kind of vice versa. In terms of, uh, where you source them. So it kind of depends on the goal of the campaign, the brand, the product. There's, but there's different buckets. There's the influencers or micro-influencers, which is, you know, they're going to be a benefit if you're looking to borrow their level of expertise, um, their credibility, if you're trying to white list or run spark ads, like that's all kind of a a realm that you could play in there. There's also the UGC creators. We're often, most often playing with UGC creators who are going to be great at executing a brief. They understand sort of the mechanics of performance, um, and how to translate that to their creative. Um, and then actors is another that we've been playing with a lot, um, more and more, the actor community is getting involved with content creation and UGC. They're going to be really good at executing a a script and delivering it in an authentic and relatable way and being a little bit more diverse, but not so good on the content side. So depending on what bucket you need to focus on, will also determine the level of, um, hand holding and relationship and the briefing process required for those. But in terms of identifying them, finding them, you've got, you know, of course you've got the platforms like, you know, Grin, um, Creator IQ, etc. I don't like those as much. I mean, they're good for the discovery. Um, but often times you're kind of working through their CRM to and so getting responses, um, can be hard. You know, you're trying to build a relationship with them at the end of the day. So it's a good starting place, especially if you have one. Um, but you can be a lot more scrappy than that. I think, you know, we'll do like a casting call on Twitter, like the UGC community, if you do a post around some hashtags, like you can have people almost do a casting call and have people opt in and have a wide base to sort of audit and select from. You can even push them to more of a funnel where they are self-selecting and giving you some information to choose from. So we'll do that. Um, search for hashtags, particularly if it's a like a really niche brand, um, that may be appropriate. Um, you can do that as well through just like DM and and cold outbound email. Um, to do that well, it needs to be conversation-based. So avoid like giving them the whole nut up front, just like, you know, start a conversation, give them a personal compliment, build that relationship and then work with them over time. I think the goal with any creator, we've found success in building longer-term relationships, um, as opposed to kind of starting fresh new list every time. Like you want to over time, figure out which creator is going to work with you and refine that process with them and they'll get better at delivering new content. Um, they'll understand the brand, they'll develop a brand love. And so you can kind of even start to give them a little bit more creative liberty as that relationship progresses. So that's always our North star. Um, always trying to find really level 10 creators that we can work with again and again and again. Um, we love, we've got our own creator community that we've built, um, and have given them a path to becoming a per preferred creator. So if you opt into our network and become a preferred creator, there's a little bit of training that's involved and then they get access to like top top deals with brands they want to work with. And then from our perspective of being creative strategists and growth marketers, helping them refine what they do. Um, and then making that process really simple and easy to work with and streamlined. And so they they get a lot of value out of working with us as well as connections to new opportunities. Um, and then the community being connected to the community of other like-minded creators. So that's a different approach. Um, we sort of own and nurture that community. But on the other side for the brands, um, you're you're trying to build a, almost like a brand army, a community of advocates, um, that love your brand. So I think a good start with a lot of times I've seen success with just seating product without like a a deliverable so to speak. Like if you're leading with the deliverable and the request, then that just kind of starts a relationship in a certain way. So if you want to start kind of wide and get your product out as as like a adding value to them first, the data shows that most of those creators will post organically and then from there you can identify, okay, this one was great. They really love the brand. I can tell they can make good video content. And that's a good jumping off point for a conversation. You can ask to license the content they posted organically or engage them for a more formal, um, campaign. So that's one way to go about it. But, um, working with them to make sure that process is easy, celebrating the wins. If you get like a campaign that does really well, let them know, kind of let them into the metrics, give them a case study, um, and then use that to continually go back to them and just keep them a part of that community, keep them fed with new opportunities. Um, that's the best way to go about that.

Evan Lee: Fantastic. Fantastic. And I think like just for my own curiosity here, like you've mentioned actors and with actors, it's like, give me those raw videos, we can edit it, we can stitch them together the way that they're required. And on the other side with the creators that you work with, do you have that same um, like expectation where it's just like raw files, cool, we'll do what we need.

Micah Whitehead: We do. Yeah. Typically, and I mean there's there's exceptions to that. Um, that's an important piece of our process because we've got more an iterative approach where like we don't think a video should be made once, for example. Like a simple change on the first three seconds can 10x the result. And so you need that ability to create iterations from the content. So if you're leaning into a creator to produce that, then you're getting into deliverables and price per deliverable and it's more difficult and you're you're more limited. So getting that library of assets, you have to put the kind of the the planning and the creative strategy into that process to know what you need. But often times we'll get enough content to develop multiple concepts out of that library and we have that knowledge going into what the ask is. And then on the back end, we can do, um, you know, five different concepts from a library they deliver, but also we're we're pre-recording like multiple options of the hook. And so we may test, you know, a couple versions of the hook, but we've got a bank to go back to. So if we hit a winning concept that scales really well or a creator that has a winning concept that scales really well, we can go backwards and swap that first three seconds, maybe change the structure and we can double down on the success of that ad because we're able to scale it because we've got the ammunition to be able to do that from the beginning.

Evan Lee: Love it. Love it. Okay, well, welcome to the party, Micah. Can we get some love in the chat? Just some fire emojis, all the good emojis that we can send some love so we can make sure that everyone's feeling welcome. So amazing. Um, without further ado, what I really want to start diving into is like, again, UGC is the main topic of conversation, but there's so many parts of this flywheel that ultimately let you get to the ideal UGC pieces. And I think before we dive into to parts of these flywheel, I just wanted to like get your thoughts on a high-level topic and it might seem basic, but I'm just curious, like why is UGC so important in today's landscape?

Micah Whitehead: Well, I was starting to touch on it in that super long intro, um, that I was giving on the how was how was Q1 treating you, but, you know, especially right now, um, when teams are trying to do more with less, uh, we Zero to one started as more of a traditional production uh approach to to creative, which is more expensive, longer timelines and that model isn't really set for success in the paid media landscape. So especially today, we're just trying to do more with less. UGC is the most cost-effective uh and affordable way to produce creative that also you can scale uh with short sort of sprints. Um, and it just happens to be a top performing format, um, kind of regardless of the platform. So if you're not utilizing UGC, um, you need to be as soon as possible.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Most definitely. Okay. So I know a lot of people are going to want to dive into like, well, how do we actually source creators? How are we creating the right pieces? But something that I'm always curious about is this initial bucket of like our audits and our researching before anything. So what that means is like you're introduced to a brand, you're having that dialogue of even trying to figure out what to do. And this is applicable again on the agency side, for someone working in house, everyone involved. On your end, where are you typically conducting research to start informing the strategy that you're going to build?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean there's a few different pieces to that equation. I mean, I certainly motion, I'll I'll plug motion right now. Um, we introduce motion in a couple different, um, parts of the process. Initially, before you get into name conventions and structures and reporting build outs, you're going to get like a high-level look. So we like to connect up the ad account, look at longer time frames, really to identify top performing, worst performing creatives, any sort of like initial trends that sort of stand out that you can pull insights from and build on top of. Um, so we'll do that. We have a creative strategy, um, framework that's got like common sort of baseline building information where you're going to want to audit past past campaigns, um, key messages, um, figure out like what your ideal hooks are. You're going to look at reviews, um, testimonials, um, press, like you kind of start with a wide canvas, competitor research is super important too. Um, because often times you can see, you know, low hanging fruit and opportunity area. If you there's a certain concept or style that you're not testing and you see that happen across a couple different competitors, it's an indicator that you probably should should at least test that and try that. So we'll do all those things. Um, we spend two weeks to 30 days at sort of analyzing and and building out like an MVP of a creative strategy, um, initial concepts that we want to test, uh, and then a like a testing framework and that also applies to the account structure. So there's a lot that goes into it. Um, but it's definitely the secret sauce. Um, it's how you get started. Uh, you're going to want to cast a wide net towards the beginning and and test a wide variety of concepts. Um, usually we're starting with like three to five creators and each are doing three to five concepts with the goal of identifying a formula that's going to work, um, identifying a creator that's going to resonate with your brand that you can build on top of month over month and then concepts that are going to deliver results that you can iterate on. Um, and then you have kind of a jumping off point after that like a 30 to 60-day testing period. But definitely want to start with a pretty robust analysis across the board of what you're working with.

Evan Lee: Love it. And I love that you cast a wide net. I think everybody should. There's so many places you can go like Micah had mentioned directly in the ad accounts, just like overall reviews, YouTube pages, Reddit, whatever it might be to get your information. And I think one of the pieces that's interesting is like we can have all this information, but we have to look at it and say like, okay, what are we actually pulling from? And something that you had talked about was, I think it was your recipe builder or your um, like just creative strategy template that you're thinking about. So I'm wondering, like after you have that wide net cast and you are starting to look for those trends, how are you starting to document that out so you're able to start informing the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I'm going to I can actually probably pull up a screen share on this.

Evan Lee: Perfecto. Okay, let me cancel mine out.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, this is an example. I this is a template too. Like I'm also game to share out this recipe builder template, um, as like a follow up.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Let me share my screen.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, you see see this?

Evan Lee: Yep, we got you.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, so what we do, um, we obviously we're pretty plugged in by running lots of different creatives with creators, you know, thousands over the years. We've got a pretty good sense of like what formulas work. We call it a recipe. Um, lots of ingredients. We treat sort of a concept as a collection of ingredients that you can sort of play with and dial up and dial back. But there are concepts that work that are tried and true, um, that we sort of collect over time, stuff that bubbles to the surface as like cross category, um, formats that, you know, we can utilize regardless of client. Um, and so over time as things perform, we'll test new things, but we'll collect those. And this is the recipe builder sort of template. We'll start to like house them. So like, you know, problem solution or before after, this is a recipe. So we'll we'll get an example of this. We know this works across clients and so we'll, um, have this as almost like a base. And so when we're onboarding with a new client, we have a set of these, probably like 10 to 15 like tried and true. If you do not have these in your account and you've not tested these, this is probably a good place to start. You pair that with your creative strategy and your key messaging, you can kind of tailor it a bit to the brand. Um, but certainly want to collect these over time. We do this through client work, but also just through, um, making sure we're plugged into the industry. It's a daily, it's called a must conquer daily for our team, but every day they're going into the TikTok, um, top ads, uh, where you can discover and filter by, you know, performance. We're looking at competitors, other agencies in the space. There's a couple of key voices that are active on Twitter that will talk about this stuff. And every day we'll go in and sort of canvas the landscape and if we see a concept that, um, kind of checks all the boxes that we want to test, we'll we'll go ahead and implement that with a client and then if it resonates, we'll add that to our recipe builder. So this is a collection that is built over time that we use for all of our clients, but you could certainly do this in house as as well. But this, we've also, you know, we'll collect visual hooks. Um, you know, as we're researching every day, something will pop up, we will record that, drop it here, um, can even categorize this by category, but this gives you a reference point as you're looking to iterate into the future and build new concepts.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. So basically, just to give everyone a high level, like these are not only research based related to like the brands that you might be working with. Of course that exists in this equation, but what you're also doing is just making sure that you have a finger on the pulse. So it's TikTok top ads, like all over the place. You would to say, what are these trends and how should we test them?

Micah Whitehead: Yep.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. Perfect. So once you have your research, that brings you to a place of like having an idea of what you want to do. Um, I think one of the big things that I think about next is when we talk about like UGC itself, the very first thing is just starting to think about the creators that you're working with. Now, there's a million different ways that we can take this. If I'm not starting in the right place, if there's more context that you can't share, please, please, please let me know. But I think the first question that I have for you is related to sourcing on that end. So on your end, um, how many creators are ideal and then how are you finding those creators to put together and match the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, how many is ideal, um, is really an answer to a question that is answered after you have benchmarks. Um, you know, you can calculate there there's some ways you can look at like average spend per creator and a target spend in the account. We do that with motion, um, where we'll look at if they have like sort of a baseline, we'll look at say the average is $1,000 spent per ad and they're looking to spend 10k or 50k or 100k, you can sort of extrapolate a number of creatives you need to test. Um, and then back out a number of creators from there. Most typically, it's like three to five creators per month in a sprint and each of those creators developing three to five concepts, which especially early on when you're kind of trying to build that baseline where you're testing a little bit wider, um, you're going to want to do that, um, to figure out, okay, of the three to five creators, here are the two that really resonate with the brand that are going to perform well that we can build on over time. Um, maybe you cut the losers and and add a net new as part of like an iterative process going on going forward. Um, and then same thing with the concepts. You're going to identify winning concepts that you can match with future net new creators that that are resonating with the brand and kind of vice versa. In terms of, uh, where you source them. So it kind of depends on the goal of the campaign, the brand, the product. There's, but there's different buckets. There's the influencers or micro-influencers, which is, you know, they're going to be a benefit if you're looking to borrow their level of expertise, um, their credibility, if you're trying to white list or run spark ads, like that's all kind of a a realm that you could play in there. There's also the UGC creators. We're often, most often playing with UGC creators who are going to be great at executing a brief. They understand sort of the mechanics of performance, um, and how to translate that to their creative. Um, and then actors is another that we've been playing with a lot, um, more and more, the actor community is getting involved with content creation and UGC. They're going to be really good at executing a a script and delivering it in an authentic and relatable way and being a little bit more diverse, but not so good on the content side. So depending on what bucket you need to focus on, will also determine the level of, um, hand holding and relationship and the briefing process required for those. But in terms of identifying them, finding them, you've got, you know, of course you've got the platforms like, you know, Grin, um, Creator IQ, etc. I don't like those as much. I mean, they're good for the discovery. Um, but often times you're kind of working through their CRM to and so getting responses, um, can be hard. You know, you're trying to build a relationship with them at the end of the day. So it's a good starting place, especially if you have one. Um, but you can be a lot more scrappy than that. I think, you know, we'll do like a casting call on Twitter, like the UGC community, if you do a post around some hashtags, like you can have people almost do a casting call and have people opt in and have a wide base to sort of audit and select from. You can even push them to more of a funnel where they are self-selecting and giving you some information to choose from. So we'll do that. Um, search for hashtags, particularly if it's a like a really niche brand, um, that may be appropriate. Um, you can do that as well through just like DM and and cold outbound email. Um, to do that well, it needs to be conversation-based. So avoid like giving them the whole nut up front, just like, you know, start a conversation, give them a personal compliment, build that relationship and then work with them over time. I think the goal with any creator, we've found success in building longer-term relationships, um, as opposed to kind of starting fresh new list every time. Like you want to over time, figure out which creator is going to work with you and refine that process with them and they'll get better at delivering new content. Um, they'll understand the brand, they'll develop a brand love. And so you can kind of even start to give them a little bit more creative liberty as that relationship progresses. So that's always our North star. Um, always trying to find really level 10 creators that we can work with again and again and again. Um, we love, we've got our own creator community that we've built, um, and have given them a path to becoming a per preferred creator. So if you opt into our network and become a preferred creator, there's a little bit of training that's involved and then they get access to like top top deals with brands they want to work with. And then from our perspective of being creative strategists and growth marketers, helping them refine what they do. Um, and then making that process really simple and easy to work with and streamlined. And so they they get a lot of value out of working with us as well as connections to new opportunities. Um, and then the community being connected to the community of other like-minded creators. So that's a different approach. Um, we sort of own and nurture that community. But on the other side for the brands, um, you're you're trying to build a, almost like a brand army, a community of advocates, um, that love your brand. So I think a good start with a lot of times I've seen success with just seating product without like a a deliverable so to speak. Like if you're leading with the deliverable and the request, then that just kind of starts a relationship in a certain way. So if you want to start kind of wide and get your product out as as like a adding value to them first, the data shows that most of those creators will post organically and then from there you can identify, okay, this one was great. They really love the brand. I can tell they can make good video content. And that's a good jumping off point for a conversation. You can ask to license the content they posted organically or engage them for a more formal, um, campaign. So that's one way to go about it. But, um, working with them to make sure that process is easy, celebrating the wins. If you get like a campaign that does really well, let them know, kind of let them into the metrics, give them a case study, um, and then use that to continually go back to them and just keep them a part of that community, keep them fed with new opportunities. Um, that's the best way to go about that.

Evan Lee: Fantastic. Fantastic. And I think like just for my own curiosity here, like you've mentioned actors and with actors, it's like, give me those raw videos, we can edit it, we can stitch them together the way that they're required. And on the other side with the creators that you work with, do you have that same um, like expectation where it's just like raw files, cool, we'll do what we need.

Micah Whitehead: We do. Yeah. Typically, and I mean there's there's exceptions to that. Um, that's an important piece of our process because we've got more an iterative approach where like we don't think a video should be made once, for example. Like a simple change on the first three seconds can 10x the result. And so you need that ability to create iterations from the content. So if you're leaning into a creator to produce that, then you're getting into deliverables and price per deliverable and it's more difficult and you're you're more limited. So getting that library of assets, you have to put the kind of the the planning and the creative strategy into that process to know what you need. But often times we'll get enough content to develop multiple concepts out of that library and we have that knowledge going into what the ask is. And then on the back end, we can do, um, you know, five different concepts from a library they deliver, but also we're we're pre-recording like multiple options of the hook. And so we may test, you know, a couple versions of the hook, but we've got a bank to go back to. So if we hit a winning concept that scales really well or a creator that has a winning concept that scales really well, we can go backwards and swap that first three seconds, maybe change the structure and we can double down on the success of that ad because we're able to scale it because we've got the ammunition to be able to do that from the beginning.

Evan Lee: Love it. Love it. Okay, well, welcome to the party, Micah. Can we get some love in the chat? Just some fire emojis, all the good emojis that we can send some love so we can make sure that everyone's feeling welcome. So amazing. Um, without further ado, what I really want to start diving into is like, again, UGC is the main topic of conversation, but there's so many parts of this flywheel that ultimately let you get to the ideal UGC pieces. And I think before we dive into to parts of these flywheel, I just wanted to like get your thoughts on a high-level topic and it might seem basic, but I'm just curious, like why is UGC so important in today's landscape?

Micah Whitehead: Well, I was starting to touch on it in that super long intro, um, that I was giving on the how was how was Q1 treating you, but, you know, especially right now, um, when teams are trying to do more with less, uh, we Zero to one started as more of a traditional production uh approach to to creative, which is more expensive, longer timelines and that model isn't really set for success in the paid media landscape. So especially today, we're just trying to do more with less. UGC is the most cost-effective uh and affordable way to produce creative that also you can scale uh with short sort of sprints. Um, and it just happens to be a top performing format, um, kind of regardless of the platform. So if you're not utilizing UGC, um, you need to be as soon as possible.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Most definitely. Okay. So I know a lot of people are going to want to dive into like, well, how do we actually source creators? How are we creating the right pieces? But something that I'm always curious about is this initial bucket of like our audits and our researching before anything. So what that means is like you're introduced to a brand, you're having that dialogue of even trying to figure out what to do. And this is applicable again on the agency side, for someone working in house, everyone involved. On your end, where are you typically conducting research to start informing the strategy that you're going to build?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean there's a few different pieces to that equation. I mean, I certainly motion, I'll I'll plug motion right now. Um, we introduce motion in a couple different, um, parts of the process. Initially, before you get into name conventions and structures and reporting build outs, you're going to get like a high-level look. So we like to connect up the ad account, look at longer time frames, really to identify top performing, worst performing creatives, any sort of like initial trends that sort of stand out that you can pull insights from and build on top of. Um, so we'll do that. We have a creative strategy, um, framework that's got like common sort of baseline building information where you're going to want to audit past past campaigns, um, key messages, um, figure out like what your ideal hooks are. You're going to look at reviews, um, testimonials, um, press, like you kind of start with a wide canvas, competitor research is super important too. Um, because often times you can see, you know, low hanging fruit and opportunity area. If you there's a certain concept or style that you're not testing and you see that happen across a couple different competitors, it's an indicator that you probably should should at least test that and try that. So we'll do all those things. Um, we spend two weeks to 30 days at sort of analyzing and and building out like an MVP of a creative strategy, um, initial concepts that we want to test, uh, and then a like a testing framework and that also applies to the account structure. So there's a lot that goes into it. Um, but it's definitely the secret sauce. Um, it's how you get started. Uh, you're going to want to cast a wide net towards the beginning and and test a wide variety of concepts. Um, usually we're starting with like three to five creators and each are doing three to five concepts with the goal of identifying a formula that's going to work, um, identifying a creator that's going to resonate with your brand that you can build on top of month over month and then concepts that are going to deliver results that you can iterate on. Um, and then you have kind of a jumping off point after that like a 30 to 60-day testing period. But definitely want to start with a pretty robust analysis across the board of what you're working with.

Evan Lee: Love it. And I love that you cast a wide net. I think everybody should. There's so many places you can go like Micah had mentioned directly in the ad accounts, just like overall reviews, YouTube pages, Reddit, whatever it might be to get your information. And I think one of the pieces that's interesting is like we can have all this information, but we have to look at it and say like, okay, what are we actually pulling from? And something that you had talked about was, I think it was your recipe builder or your um, like just creative strategy template that you're thinking about. So I'm wondering, like after you have that wide net cast and you are starting to look for those trends, how are you starting to document that out so you're able to start informing the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I'm going to I can actually probably pull up a screen share on this.

Evan Lee: Perfecto. Okay, let me cancel mine out.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, this is an example. I this is a template too. Like I'm also game to share out this recipe builder template, um, as like a follow up.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Let me share my screen.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, you see see this?

Evan Lee: Yep, we got you.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, so what we do, um, we obviously we're pretty plugged in by running lots of different creatives with creators, you know, thousands over the years. We've got a pretty good sense of like what formulas work. We call it a recipe. Um, lots of ingredients. We treat sort of a concept as a collection of ingredients that you can sort of play with and dial up and dial back. But there are concepts that work that are tried and true, um, that we sort of collect over time, stuff that bubbles to the surface as like cross category, um, formats that, you know, we can utilize regardless of client. Um, and so over time as things perform, we'll test new things, but we'll collect those. And this is the recipe builder sort of template. We'll start to like house them. So like, you know, problem solution or before after, this is a recipe. So we'll we'll get an example of this. We know this works across clients and so we'll, um, have this as almost like a base. And so when we're onboarding with a new client, we have a set of these, probably like 10 to 15 like tried and true. If you do not have these in your account and you've not tested these, this is probably a good place to start. You pair that with your creative strategy and your key messaging, you can kind of tailor it a bit to the brand. Um, but certainly want to collect these over time. We do this through client work, but also just through, um, making sure we're plugged into the industry. It's a daily, it's called a must conquer daily for our team, but every day they're going into the TikTok, um, top ads, uh, where you can discover and filter by, you know, performance. We're looking at competitors, other agencies in the space. There's a couple of key voices that are active on Twitter that will talk about this stuff. And every day we'll go in and sort of canvas the landscape and if we see a concept that, um, kind of checks all the boxes that we want to test, we'll we'll go ahead and implement that with a client and then if it resonates, we'll add that to our recipe builder. So this is a collection that is built over time that we use for all of our clients, but you could certainly do this in house as as well. But this, we've also, you know, we'll collect visual hooks. Um, you know, as we're researching every day, something will pop up, we will record that, drop it here, um, can even categorize this by category, but this gives you a reference point as you're looking to iterate into the future and build new concepts.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. So basically, just to give everyone a high level, like these are not only research based related to like the brands that you might be working with. Of course that exists in this equation, but what you're also doing is just making sure that you have a finger on the pulse. So it's TikTok top ads, like all over the place. You would to say, what are these trends and how should we test them?

Micah Whitehead: Yep.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. Perfect. So once you have your research, that brings you to a place of like having an idea of what you want to do. Um, I think one of the big things that I think about next is when we talk about like UGC itself, the very first thing is just starting to think about the creators that you're working with. Now, there's a million different ways that we can take this. If I'm not starting in the right place, if there's more context that you can't share, please, please, please let me know. But I think the first question that I have for you is related to sourcing on that end. So on your end, um, how many creators are ideal and then how are you finding those creators to put together and match the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, how many is ideal, um, is really an answer to a question that is answered after you have benchmarks. Um, you know, you can calculate there there's some ways you can look at like average spend per creator and a target spend in the account. We do that with motion, um, where we'll look at if they have like sort of a baseline, we'll look at say the average is $1,000 spent per ad and they're looking to spend 10k or 50k or 100k, you can sort of extrapolate a number of creatives you need to test. Um, and then back out a number of creators from there. Most typically, it's like three to five creators per month in a sprint and each of those creators developing three to five concepts, which especially early on when you're kind of trying to build that baseline where you're testing a little bit wider, um, you're going to want to do that, um, to figure out, okay, of the three to five creators, here are the two that really resonate with the brand that are going to perform well that we can build on over time. Um, maybe you cut the losers and and add a net new as part of like an iterative process going on going forward. Um, and then same thing with the concepts. You're going to identify winning concepts that you can match with future net new creators that that are resonating with the brand and kind of vice versa. In terms of, uh, where you source them. So it kind of depends on the goal of the campaign, the brand, the product. There's, but there's different buckets. There's the influencers or micro-influencers, which is, you know, they're going to be a benefit if you're looking to borrow their level of expertise, um, their credibility, if you're trying to white list or run spark ads, like that's all kind of a a realm that you could play in there. There's also the UGC creators. We're often, most often playing with UGC creators who are going to be great at executing a brief. They understand sort of the mechanics of performance, um, and how to translate that to their creative. Um, and then actors is another that we've been playing with a lot, um, more and more, the actor community is getting involved with content creation and UGC. They're going to be really good at executing a a script and delivering it in an authentic and relatable way and being a little bit more diverse, but not so good on the content side. So depending on what bucket you need to focus on, will also determine the level of, um, hand holding and relationship and the briefing process required for those. But in terms of identifying them, finding them, you've got, you know, of course you've got the platforms like, you know, Grin, um, Creator IQ, etc. I don't like those as much. I mean, they're good for the discovery. Um, but often times you're kind of working through their CRM to and so getting responses, um, can be hard. You know, you're trying to build a relationship with them at the end of the day. So it's a good starting place, especially if you have one. Um, but you can be a lot more scrappy than that. I think, you know, we'll do like a casting call on Twitter, like the UGC community, if you do a post around some hashtags, like you can have people almost do a casting call and have people opt in and have a wide base to sort of audit and select from. You can even push them to more of a funnel where they are self-selecting and giving you some information to choose from. So we'll do that. Um, search for hashtags, particularly if it's a like a really niche brand, um, that may be appropriate. Um, you can do that as well through just like DM and and cold outbound email. Um, to do that well, it needs to be conversation-based. So avoid like giving them the whole nut up front, just like, you know, start a conversation, give them a personal compliment, build that relationship and then work with them over time. I think the goal with any creator, we've found success in building longer-term relationships, um, as opposed to kind of starting fresh new list every time. Like you want to over time, figure out which creator is going to work with you and refine that process with them and they'll get better at delivering new content. Um, they'll understand the brand, they'll develop a brand love. And so you can kind of even start to give them a little bit more creative liberty as that relationship progresses. So that's always our North star. Um, always trying to find really level 10 creators that we can work with again and again and again. Um, we love, we've got our own creator community that we've built, um, and have given them a path to becoming a per preferred creator. So if you opt into our network and become a preferred creator, there's a little bit of training that's involved and then they get access to like top top deals with brands they want to work with. And then from our perspective of being creative strategists and growth marketers, helping them refine what they do. Um, and then making that process really simple and easy to work with and streamlined. And so they they get a lot of value out of working with us as well as connections to new opportunities. Um, and then the community being connected to the community of other like-minded creators. So that's a different approach. Um, we sort of own and nurture that community. But on the other side for the brands, um, you're you're trying to build a, almost like a brand army, a community of advocates, um, that love your brand. So I think a good start with a lot of times I've seen success with just seating product without like a a deliverable so to speak. Like if you're leading with the deliverable and the request, then that just kind of starts a relationship in a certain way. So if you want to start kind of wide and get your product out as as like a adding value to them first, the data shows that most of those creators will post organically and then from there you can identify, okay, this one was great. They really love the brand. I can tell they can make good video content. And that's a good jumping off point for a conversation. You can ask to license the content they posted organically or engage them for a more formal, um, campaign. So that's one way to go about it. But, um, working with them to make sure that process is easy, celebrating the wins. If you get like a campaign that does really well, let them know, kind of let them into the metrics, give them a case study, um, and then use that to continually go back to them and just keep them a part of that community, keep them fed with new opportunities. Um, that's the best way to go about that.

Evan Lee: Fantastic. Fantastic. And I think like just for my own curiosity here, like you've mentioned actors and with actors, it's like, give me those raw videos, we can edit it, we can stitch them together the way that they're required. And on the other side with the creators that you work with, do you have that same um, like expectation where it's just like raw files, cool, we'll do what we need.

Micah Whitehead: We do. Yeah. Typically, and I mean there's there's exceptions to that. Um, that's an important piece of our process because we've got more an iterative approach where like we don't think a video should be made once, for example. Like a simple change on the first three seconds can 10x the result. And so you need that ability to create iterations from the content. So if you're leaning into a creator to produce that, then you're getting into deliverables and price per deliverable and it's more difficult and you're you're more limited. So getting that library of assets, you have to put the kind of the the planning and the creative strategy into that process to know what you need. But often times we'll get enough content to develop multiple concepts out of that library and we have that knowledge going into what the ask is. And then on the back end, we can do, um, you know, five different concepts from a library they deliver, but also we're we're pre-recording like multiple options of the hook. And so we may test, you know, a couple versions of the hook, but we've got a bank to go back to. So if we hit a winning concept that scales really well or a creator that has a winning concept that scales really well, we can go backwards and swap that first three seconds, maybe change the structure and we can double down on the success of that ad because we're able to scale it because we've got the ammunition to be able to do that from the beginning.

Evan Lee: Love it. Love it. Okay, well, welcome to the party, Micah. Can we get some love in the chat? Just some fire emojis, all the good emojis that we can send some love so we can make sure that everyone's feeling welcome. So amazing. Um, without further ado, what I really want to start diving into is like, again, UGC is the main topic of conversation, but there's so many parts of this flywheel that ultimately let you get to the ideal UGC pieces. And I think before we dive into to parts of these flywheel, I just wanted to like get your thoughts on a high-level topic and it might seem basic, but I'm just curious, like why is UGC so important in today's landscape?

Micah Whitehead: Well, I was starting to touch on it in that super long intro, um, that I was giving on the how was how was Q1 treating you, but, you know, especially right now, um, when teams are trying to do more with less, uh, we Zero to one started as more of a traditional production uh approach to to creative, which is more expensive, longer timelines and that model isn't really set for success in the paid media landscape. So especially today, we're just trying to do more with less. UGC is the most cost-effective uh and affordable way to produce creative that also you can scale uh with short sort of sprints. Um, and it just happens to be a top performing format, um, kind of regardless of the platform. So if you're not utilizing UGC, um, you need to be as soon as possible.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Most definitely. Okay. So I know a lot of people are going to want to dive into like, well, how do we actually source creators? How are we creating the right pieces? But something that I'm always curious about is this initial bucket of like our audits and our researching before anything. So what that means is like you're introduced to a brand, you're having that dialogue of even trying to figure out what to do. And this is applicable again on the agency side, for someone working in house, everyone involved. On your end, where are you typically conducting research to start informing the strategy that you're going to build?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean there's a few different pieces to that equation. I mean, I certainly motion, I'll I'll plug motion right now. Um, we introduce motion in a couple different, um, parts of the process. Initially, before you get into name conventions and structures and reporting build outs, you're going to get like a high-level look. So we like to connect up the ad account, look at longer time frames, really to identify top performing, worst performing creatives, any sort of like initial trends that sort of stand out that you can pull insights from and build on top of. Um, so we'll do that. We have a creative strategy, um, framework that's got like common sort of baseline building information where you're going to want to audit past past campaigns, um, key messages, um, figure out like what your ideal hooks are. You're going to look at reviews, um, testimonials, um, press, like you kind of start with a wide canvas, competitor research is super important too. Um, because often times you can see, you know, low hanging fruit and opportunity area. If you there's a certain concept or style that you're not testing and you see that happen across a couple different competitors, it's an indicator that you probably should should at least test that and try that. So we'll do all those things. Um, we spend two weeks to 30 days at sort of analyzing and and building out like an MVP of a creative strategy, um, initial concepts that we want to test, uh, and then a like a testing framework and that also applies to the account structure. So there's a lot that goes into it. Um, but it's definitely the secret sauce. Um, it's how you get started. Uh, you're going to want to cast a wide net towards the beginning and and test a wide variety of concepts. Um, usually we're starting with like three to five creators and each are doing three to five concepts with the goal of identifying a formula that's going to work, um, identifying a creator that's going to resonate with your brand that you can build on top of month over month and then concepts that are going to deliver results that you can iterate on. Um, and then you have kind of a jumping off point after that like a 30 to 60-day testing period. But definitely want to start with a pretty robust analysis across the board of what you're working with.

Evan Lee: Love it. And I love that you cast a wide net. I think everybody should. There's so many places you can go like Micah had mentioned directly in the ad accounts, just like overall reviews, YouTube pages, Reddit, whatever it might be to get your information. And I think one of the pieces that's interesting is like we can have all this information, but we have to look at it and say like, okay, what are we actually pulling from? And something that you had talked about was, I think it was your recipe builder or your um, like just creative strategy template that you're thinking about. So I'm wondering, like after you have that wide net cast and you are starting to look for those trends, how are you starting to document that out so you're able to start informing the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I'm going to I can actually probably pull up a screen share on this.

Evan Lee: Perfecto. Okay, let me cancel mine out.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, this is an example. I this is a template too. Like I'm also game to share out this recipe builder template, um, as like a follow up.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Let me share my screen.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, you see see this?

Evan Lee: Yep, we got you.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, so what we do, um, we obviously we're pretty plugged in by running lots of different creatives with creators, you know, thousands over the years. We've got a pretty good sense of like what formulas work. We call it a recipe. Um, lots of ingredients. We treat sort of a concept as a collection of ingredients that you can sort of play with and dial up and dial back. But there are concepts that work that are tried and true, um, that we sort of collect over time, stuff that bubbles to the surface as like cross category, um, formats that, you know, we can utilize regardless of client. Um, and so over time as things perform, we'll test new things, but we'll collect those. And this is the recipe builder sort of template. We'll start to like house them. So like, you know, problem solution or before after, this is a recipe. So we'll we'll get an example of this. We know this works across clients and so we'll, um, have this as almost like a base. And so when we're onboarding with a new client, we have a set of these, probably like 10 to 15 like tried and true. If you do not have these in your account and you've not tested these, this is probably a good place to start. You pair that with your creative strategy and your key messaging, you can kind of tailor it a bit to the brand. Um, but certainly want to collect these over time. We do this through client work, but also just through, um, making sure we're plugged into the industry. It's a daily, it's called a must conquer daily for our team, but every day they're going into the TikTok, um, top ads, uh, where you can discover and filter by, you know, performance. We're looking at competitors, other agencies in the space. There's a couple of key voices that are active on Twitter that will talk about this stuff. And every day we'll go in and sort of canvas the landscape and if we see a concept that, um, kind of checks all the boxes that we want to test, we'll we'll go ahead and implement that with a client and then if it resonates, we'll add that to our recipe builder. So this is a collection that is built over time that we use for all of our clients, but you could certainly do this in house as as well. But this, we've also, you know, we'll collect visual hooks. Um, you know, as we're researching every day, something will pop up, we will record that, drop it here, um, can even categorize this by category, but this gives you a reference point as you're looking to iterate into the future and build new concepts.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. So basically, just to give everyone a high level, like these are not only research based related to like the brands that you might be working with. Of course that exists in this equation, but what you're also doing is just making sure that you have a finger on the pulse. So it's TikTok top ads, like all over the place. You would to say, what are these trends and how should we test them?

Micah Whitehead: Yep.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. Perfect. So once you have your research, that brings you to a place of like having an idea of what you want to do. Um, I think one of the big things that I think about next is when we talk about like UGC itself, the very first thing is just starting to think about the creators that you're working with. Now, there's a million different ways that we can take this. If I'm not starting in the right place, if there's more context that you can't share, please, please, please let me know. But I think the first question that I have for you is related to sourcing on that end. So on your end, um, how many creators are ideal and then how are you finding those creators to put together and match the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, how many is ideal, um, is really an answer to a question that is answered after you have benchmarks. Um, you know, you can calculate there there's some ways you can look at like average spend per creator and a target spend in the account. We do that with motion, um, where we'll look at if they have like sort of a baseline, we'll look at say the average is $1,000 spent per ad and they're looking to spend 10k or 50k or 100k, you can sort of extrapolate a number of creatives you need to test. Um, and then back out a number of creators from there. Most typically, it's like three to five creators per month in a sprint and each of those creators developing three to five concepts, which especially early on when you're kind of trying to build that baseline where you're testing a little bit wider, um, you're going to want to do that, um, to figure out, okay, of the three to five creators, here are the two that really resonate with the brand that are going to perform well that we can build on over time. Um, maybe you cut the losers and and add a net new as part of like an iterative process going on going forward. Um, and then same thing with the concepts. You're going to identify winning concepts that you can match with future net new creators that that are resonating with the brand and kind of vice versa. In terms of, uh, where you source them. So it kind of depends on the goal of the campaign, the brand, the product. There's, but there's different buckets. There's the influencers or micro-influencers, which is, you know, they're going to be a benefit if you're looking to borrow their level of expertise, um, their credibility, if you're trying to white list or run spark ads, like that's all kind of a a realm that you could play in there. There's also the UGC creators. We're often, most often playing with UGC creators who are going to be great at executing a brief. They understand sort of the mechanics of performance, um, and how to translate that to their creative. Um, and then actors is another that we've been playing with a lot, um, more and more, the actor community is getting involved with content creation and UGC. They're going to be really good at executing a a script and delivering it in an authentic and relatable way and being a little bit more diverse, but not so good on the content side. So depending on what bucket you need to focus on, will also determine the level of, um, hand holding and relationship and the briefing process required for those. But in terms of identifying them, finding them, you've got, you know, of course you've got the platforms like, you know, Grin, um, Creator IQ, etc. I don't like those as much. I mean, they're good for the discovery. Um, but often times you're kind of working through their CRM to and so getting responses, um, can be hard. You know, you're trying to build a relationship with them at the end of the day. So it's a good starting place, especially if you have one. Um, but you can be a lot more scrappy than that. I think, you know, we'll do like a casting call on Twitter, like the UGC community, if you do a post around some hashtags, like you can have people almost do a casting call and have people opt in and have a wide base to sort of audit and select from. You can even push them to more of a funnel where they are self-selecting and giving you some information to choose from. So we'll do that. Um, search for hashtags, particularly if it's a like a really niche brand, um, that may be appropriate. Um, you can do that as well through just like DM and and cold outbound email. Um, to do that well, it needs to be conversation-based. So avoid like giving them the whole nut up front, just like, you know, start a conversation, give them a personal compliment, build that relationship and then work with them over time. I think the goal with any creator, we've found success in building longer-term relationships, um, as opposed to kind of starting fresh new list every time. Like you want to over time, figure out which creator is going to work with you and refine that process with them and they'll get better at delivering new content. Um, they'll understand the brand, they'll develop a brand love. And so you can kind of even start to give them a little bit more creative liberty as that relationship progresses. So that's always our North star. Um, always trying to find really level 10 creators that we can work with again and again and again. Um, we love, we've got our own creator community that we've built, um, and have given them a path to becoming a per preferred creator. So if you opt into our network and become a preferred creator, there's a little bit of training that's involved and then they get access to like top top deals with brands they want to work with. And then from our perspective of being creative strategists and growth marketers, helping them refine what they do. Um, and then making that process really simple and easy to work with and streamlined. And so they they get a lot of value out of working with us as well as connections to new opportunities. Um, and then the community being connected to the community of other like-minded creators. So that's a different approach. Um, we sort of own and nurture that community. But on the other side for the brands, um, you're you're trying to build a, almost like a brand army, a community of advocates, um, that love your brand. So I think a good start with a lot of times I've seen success with just seating product without like a a deliverable so to speak. Like if you're leading with the deliverable and the request, then that just kind of starts a relationship in a certain way. So if you want to start kind of wide and get your product out as as like a adding value to them first, the data shows that most of those creators will post organically and then from there you can identify, okay, this one was great. They really love the brand. I can tell they can make good video content. And that's a good jumping off point for a conversation. You can ask to license the content they posted organically or engage them for a more formal, um, campaign. So that's one way to go about it. But, um, working with them to make sure that process is easy, celebrating the wins. If you get like a campaign that does really well, let them know, kind of let them into the metrics, give them a case study, um, and then use that to continually go back to them and just keep them a part of that community, keep them fed with new opportunities. Um, that's the best way to go about that.

Evan Lee: Fantastic. Fantastic. And I think like just for my own curiosity here, like you've mentioned actors and with actors, it's like, give me those raw videos, we can edit it, we can stitch them together the way that they're required. And on the other side with the creators that you work with, do you have that same um, like expectation where it's just like raw files, cool, we'll do what we need.

Micah Whitehead: We do. Yeah. Typically, and I mean there's there's exceptions to that. Um, that's an important piece of our process because we've got more an iterative approach where like we don't think a video should be made once, for example. Like a simple change on the first three seconds can 10x the result. And so you need that ability to create iterations from the content. So if you're leaning into a creator to produce that, then you're getting into deliverables and price per deliverable and it's more difficult and you're you're more limited. So getting that library of assets, you have to put the kind of the the planning and the creative strategy into that process to know what you need. But often times we'll get enough content to develop multiple concepts out of that library and we have that knowledge going into what the ask is. And then on the back end, we can do, um, you know, five different concepts from a library they deliver, but also we're we're pre-recording like multiple options of the hook. And so we may test, you know, a couple versions of the hook, but we've got a bank to go back to. So if we hit a winning concept that scales really well or a creator that has a winning concept that scales really well, we can go backwards and swap that first three seconds, maybe change the structure and we can double down on the success of that ad because we're able to scale it because we've got the ammunition to be able to do that from the beginning.

Evan Lee: Love it. Love it. Okay, well, welcome to the party, Micah. Can we get some love in the chat? Just some fire emojis, all the good emojis that we can send some love so we can make sure that everyone's feeling welcome. So amazing. Um, without further ado, what I really want to start diving into is like, again, UGC is the main topic of conversation, but there's so many parts of this flywheel that ultimately let you get to the ideal UGC pieces. And I think before we dive into to parts of these flywheel, I just wanted to like get your thoughts on a high-level topic and it might seem basic, but I'm just curious, like why is UGC so important in today's landscape?

Micah Whitehead: Well, I was starting to touch on it in that super long intro, um, that I was giving on the how was how was Q1 treating you, but, you know, especially right now, um, when teams are trying to do more with less, uh, we Zero to one started as more of a traditional production uh approach to to creative, which is more expensive, longer timelines and that model isn't really set for success in the paid media landscape. So especially today, we're just trying to do more with less. UGC is the most cost-effective uh and affordable way to produce creative that also you can scale uh with short sort of sprints. Um, and it just happens to be a top performing format, um, kind of regardless of the platform. So if you're not utilizing UGC, um, you need to be as soon as possible.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Most definitely. Okay. So I know a lot of people are going to want to dive into like, well, how do we actually source creators? How are we creating the right pieces? But something that I'm always curious about is this initial bucket of like our audits and our researching before anything. So what that means is like you're introduced to a brand, you're having that dialogue of even trying to figure out what to do. And this is applicable again on the agency side, for someone working in house, everyone involved. On your end, where are you typically conducting research to start informing the strategy that you're going to build?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean there's a few different pieces to that equation. I mean, I certainly motion, I'll I'll plug motion right now. Um, we introduce motion in a couple different, um, parts of the process. Initially, before you get into name conventions and structures and reporting build outs, you're going to get like a high-level look. So we like to connect up the ad account, look at longer time frames, really to identify top performing, worst performing creatives, any sort of like initial trends that sort of stand out that you can pull insights from and build on top of. Um, so we'll do that. We have a creative strategy, um, framework that's got like common sort of baseline building information where you're going to want to audit past past campaigns, um, key messages, um, figure out like what your ideal hooks are. You're going to look at reviews, um, testimonials, um, press, like you kind of start with a wide canvas, competitor research is super important too. Um, because often times you can see, you know, low hanging fruit and opportunity area. If you there's a certain concept or style that you're not testing and you see that happen across a couple different competitors, it's an indicator that you probably should should at least test that and try that. So we'll do all those things. Um, we spend two weeks to 30 days at sort of analyzing and and building out like an MVP of a creative strategy, um, initial concepts that we want to test, uh, and then a like a testing framework and that also applies to the account structure. So there's a lot that goes into it. Um, but it's definitely the secret sauce. Um, it's how you get started. Uh, you're going to want to cast a wide net towards the beginning and and test a wide variety of concepts. Um, usually we're starting with like three to five creators and each are doing three to five concepts with the goal of identifying a formula that's going to work, um, identifying a creator that's going to resonate with your brand that you can build on top of month over month and then concepts that are going to deliver results that you can iterate on. Um, and then you have kind of a jumping off point after that like a 30 to 60-day testing period. But definitely want to start with a pretty robust analysis across the board of what you're working with.

Evan Lee: Love it. And I love that you cast a wide net. I think everybody should. There's so many places you can go like Micah had mentioned directly in the ad accounts, just like overall reviews, YouTube pages, Reddit, whatever it might be to get your information. And I think one of the pieces that's interesting is like we can have all this information, but we have to look at it and say like, okay, what are we actually pulling from? And something that you had talked about was, I think it was your recipe builder or your um, like just creative strategy template that you're thinking about. So I'm wondering, like after you have that wide net cast and you are starting to look for those trends, how are you starting to document that out so you're able to start informing the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I'm going to I can actually probably pull up a screen share on this.

Evan Lee: Perfecto. Okay, let me cancel mine out.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, this is an example. I this is a template too. Like I'm also game to share out this recipe builder template, um, as like a follow up.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Let me share my screen.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, you see see this?

Evan Lee: Yep, we got you.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, so what we do, um, we obviously we're pretty plugged in by running lots of different creatives with creators, you know, thousands over the years. We've got a pretty good sense of like what formulas work. We call it a recipe. Um, lots of ingredients. We treat sort of a concept as a collection of ingredients that you can sort of play with and dial up and dial back. But there are concepts that work that are tried and true, um, that we sort of collect over time, stuff that bubbles to the surface as like cross category, um, formats that, you know, we can utilize regardless of client. Um, and so over time as things perform, we'll test new things, but we'll collect those. And this is the recipe builder sort of template. We'll start to like house them. So like, you know, problem solution or before after, this is a recipe. So we'll we'll get an example of this. We know this works across clients and so we'll, um, have this as almost like a base. And so when we're onboarding with a new client, we have a set of these, probably like 10 to 15 like tried and true. If you do not have these in your account and you've not tested these, this is probably a good place to start. You pair that with your creative strategy and your key messaging, you can kind of tailor it a bit to the brand. Um, but certainly want to collect these over time. We do this through client work, but also just through, um, making sure we're plugged into the industry. It's a daily, it's called a must conquer daily for our team, but every day they're going into the TikTok, um, top ads, uh, where you can discover and filter by, you know, performance. We're looking at competitors, other agencies in the space. There's a couple of key voices that are active on Twitter that will talk about this stuff. And every day we'll go in and sort of canvas the landscape and if we see a concept that, um, kind of checks all the boxes that we want to test, we'll we'll go ahead and implement that with a client and then if it resonates, we'll add that to our recipe builder. So this is a collection that is built over time that we use for all of our clients, but you could certainly do this in house as as well. But this, we've also, you know, we'll collect visual hooks. Um, you know, as we're researching every day, something will pop up, we will record that, drop it here, um, can even categorize this by category, but this gives you a reference point as you're looking to iterate into the future and build new concepts.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. So basically, just to give everyone a high level, like these are not only research based related to like the brands that you might be working with. Of course that exists in this equation, but what you're also doing is just making sure that you have a finger on the pulse. So it's TikTok top ads, like all over the place. You would to say, what are these trends and how should we test them?

Micah Whitehead: Yep.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. Perfect. So once you have your research, that brings you to a place of like having an idea of what you want to do. Um, I think one of the big things that I think about next is when we talk about like UGC itself, the very first thing is just starting to think about the creators that you're working with. Now, there's a million different ways that we can take this. If I'm not starting in the right place, if there's more context that you can't share, please, please, please let me know. But I think the first question that I have for you is related to sourcing on that end. So on your end, um, how many creators are ideal and then how are you finding those creators to put together and match the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, how many is ideal, um, is really an answer to a question that is answered after you have benchmarks. Um, you know, you can calculate there there's some ways you can look at like average spend per creator and a target spend in the account. We do that with motion, um, where we'll look at if they have like sort of a baseline, we'll look at say the average is $1,000 spent per ad and they're looking to spend 10k or 50k or 100k, you can sort of extrapolate a number of creatives you need to test. Um, and then back out a number of creators from there. Most typically, it's like three to five creators per month in a sprint and each of those creators developing three to five concepts, which especially early on when you're kind of trying to build that baseline where you're testing a little bit wider, um, you're going to want to do that, um, to figure out, okay, of the three to five creators, here are the two that really resonate with the brand that are going to perform well that we can build on over time. Um, maybe you cut the losers and and add a net new as part of like an iterative process going on going forward. Um, and then same thing with the concepts. You're going to identify winning concepts that you can match with future net new creators that that are resonating with the brand and kind of vice versa. In terms of, uh, where you source them. So it kind of depends on the goal of the campaign, the brand, the product. There's, but there's different buckets. There's the influencers or micro-influencers, which is, you know, they're going to be a benefit if you're looking to borrow their level of expertise, um, their credibility, if you're trying to white list or run spark ads, like that's all kind of a a realm that you could play in there. There's also the UGC creators. We're often, most often playing with UGC creators who are going to be great at executing a brief. They understand sort of the mechanics of performance, um, and how to translate that to their creative. Um, and then actors is another that we've been playing with a lot, um, more and more, the actor community is getting involved with content creation and UGC. They're going to be really good at executing a a script and delivering it in an authentic and relatable way and being a little bit more diverse, but not so good on the content side. So depending on what bucket you need to focus on, will also determine the level of, um, hand holding and relationship and the briefing process required for those. But in terms of identifying them, finding them, you've got, you know, of course you've got the platforms like, you know, Grin, um, Creator IQ, etc. I don't like those as much. I mean, they're good for the discovery. Um, but often times you're kind of working through their CRM to and so getting responses, um, can be hard. You know, you're trying to build a relationship with them at the end of the day. So it's a good starting place, especially if you have one. Um, but you can be a lot more scrappy than that. I think, you know, we'll do like a casting call on Twitter, like the UGC community, if you do a post around some hashtags, like you can have people almost do a casting call and have people opt in and have a wide base to sort of audit and select from. You can even push them to more of a funnel where they are self-selecting and giving you some information to choose from. So we'll do that. Um, search for hashtags, particularly if it's a like a really niche brand, um, that may be appropriate. Um, you can do that as well through just like DM and and cold outbound email. Um, to do that well, it needs to be conversation-based. So avoid like giving them the whole nut up front, just like, you know, start a conversation, give them a personal compliment, build that relationship and then work with them over time. I think the goal with any creator, we've found success in building longer-term relationships, um, as opposed to kind of starting fresh new list every time. Like you want to over time, figure out which creator is going to work with you and refine that process with them and they'll get better at delivering new content. Um, they'll understand the brand, they'll develop a brand love. And so you can kind of even start to give them a little bit more creative liberty as that relationship progresses. So that's always our North star. Um, always trying to find really level 10 creators that we can work with again and again and again. Um, we love, we've got our own creator community that we've built, um, and have given them a path to becoming a per preferred creator. So if you opt into our network and become a preferred creator, there's a little bit of training that's involved and then they get access to like top top deals with brands they want to work with. And then from our perspective of being creative strategists and growth marketers, helping them refine what they do. Um, and then making that process really simple and easy to work with and streamlined. And so they they get a lot of value out of working with us as well as connections to new opportunities. Um, and then the community being connected to the community of other like-minded creators. So that's a different approach. Um, we sort of own and nurture that community. But on the other side for the brands, um, you're you're trying to build a, almost like a brand army, a community of advocates, um, that love your brand. So I think a good start with a lot of times I've seen success with just seating product without like a a deliverable so to speak. Like if you're leading with the deliverable and the request, then that just kind of starts a relationship in a certain way. So if you want to start kind of wide and get your product out as as like a adding value to them first, the data shows that most of those creators will post organically and then from there you can identify, okay, this one was great. They really love the brand. I can tell they can make good video content. And that's a good jumping off point for a conversation. You can ask to license the content they posted organically or engage them for a more formal, um, campaign. So that's one way to go about it. But, um, working with them to make sure that process is easy, celebrating the wins. If you get like a campaign that does really well, let them know, kind of let them into the metrics, give them a case study, um, and then use that to continually go back to them and just keep them a part of that community, keep them fed with new opportunities. Um, that's the best way to go about that.

Evan Lee: Fantastic. Fantastic. And I think like just for my own curiosity here, like you've mentioned actors and with actors, it's like, give me those raw videos, we can edit it, we can stitch them together the way that they're required. And on the other side with the creators that you work with, do you have that same um, like expectation where it's just like raw files, cool, we'll do what we need.

Micah Whitehead: We do. Yeah. Typically, and I mean there's there's exceptions to that. Um, that's an important piece of our process because we've got more an iterative approach where like we don't think a video should be made once, for example. Like a simple change on the first three seconds can 10x the result. And so you need that ability to create iterations from the content. So if you're leaning into a creator to produce that, then you're getting into deliverables and price per deliverable and it's more difficult and you're you're more limited. So getting that library of assets, you have to put the kind of the the planning and the creative strategy into that process to know what you need. But often times we'll get enough content to develop multiple concepts out of that library and we have that knowledge going into what the ask is. And then on the back end, we can do, um, you know, five different concepts from a library they deliver, but also we're we're pre-recording like multiple options of the hook. And so we may test, you know, a couple versions of the hook, but we've got a bank to go back to. So if we hit a winning concept that scales really well or a creator that has a winning concept that scales really well, we can go backwards and swap that first three seconds, maybe change the structure and we can double down on the success of that ad because we're able to scale it because we've got the ammunition to be able to do that from the beginning.

Evan Lee: Love it. Love it. Okay, well, welcome to the party, Micah. Can we get some love in the chat? Just some fire emojis, all the good emojis that we can send some love so we can make sure that everyone's feeling welcome. So amazing. Um, without further ado, what I really want to start diving into is like, again, UGC is the main topic of conversation, but there's so many parts of this flywheel that ultimately let you get to the ideal UGC pieces. And I think before we dive into to parts of these flywheel, I just wanted to like get your thoughts on a high-level topic and it might seem basic, but I'm just curious, like why is UGC so important in today's landscape?

Micah Whitehead: Well, I was starting to touch on it in that super long intro, um, that I was giving on the how was how was Q1 treating you, but, you know, especially right now, um, when teams are trying to do more with less, uh, we Zero to one started as more of a traditional production uh approach to to creative, which is more expensive, longer timelines and that model isn't really set for success in the paid media landscape. So especially today, we're just trying to do more with less. UGC is the most cost-effective uh and affordable way to produce creative that also you can scale uh with short sort of sprints. Um, and it just happens to be a top performing format, um, kind of regardless of the platform. So if you're not utilizing UGC, um, you need to be as soon as possible.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Most definitely. Okay. So I know a lot of people are going to want to dive into like, well, how do we actually source creators? How are we creating the right pieces? But something that I'm always curious about is this initial bucket of like our audits and our researching before anything. So what that means is like you're introduced to a brand, you're having that dialogue of even trying to figure out what to do. And this is applicable again on the agency side, for someone working in house, everyone involved. On your end, where are you typically conducting research to start informing the strategy that you're going to build?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean there's a few different pieces to that equation. I mean, I certainly motion, I'll I'll plug motion right now. Um, we introduce motion in a couple different, um, parts of the process. Initially, before you get into name conventions and structures and reporting build outs, you're going to get like a high-level look. So we like to connect up the ad account, look at longer time frames, really to identify top performing, worst performing creatives, any sort of like initial trends that sort of stand out that you can pull insights from and build on top of. Um, so we'll do that. We have a creative strategy, um, framework that's got like common sort of baseline building information where you're going to want to audit past past campaigns, um, key messages, um, figure out like what your ideal hooks are. You're going to look at reviews, um, testimonials, um, press, like you kind of start with a wide canvas, competitor research is super important too. Um, because often times you can see, you know, low hanging fruit and opportunity area. If you there's a certain concept or style that you're not testing and you see that happen across a couple different competitors, it's an indicator that you probably should should at least test that and try that. So we'll do all those things. Um, we spend two weeks to 30 days at sort of analyzing and and building out like an MVP of a creative strategy, um, initial concepts that we want to test, uh, and then a like a testing framework and that also applies to the account structure. So there's a lot that goes into it. Um, but it's definitely the secret sauce. Um, it's how you get started. Uh, you're going to want to cast a wide net towards the beginning and and test a wide variety of concepts. Um, usually we're starting with like three to five creators and each are doing three to five concepts with the goal of identifying a formula that's going to work, um, identifying a creator that's going to resonate with your brand that you can build on top of month over month and then concepts that are going to deliver results that you can iterate on. Um, and then you have kind of a jumping off point after that like a 30 to 60-day testing period. But definitely want to start with a pretty robust analysis across the board of what you're working with.

Evan Lee: Love it. And I love that you cast a wide net. I think everybody should. There's so many places you can go like Micah had mentioned directly in the ad accounts, just like overall reviews, YouTube pages, Reddit, whatever it might be to get your information. And I think one of the pieces that's interesting is like we can have all this information, but we have to look at it and say like, okay, what are we actually pulling from? And something that you had talked about was, I think it was your recipe builder or your um, like just creative strategy template that you're thinking about. So I'm wondering, like after you have that wide net cast and you are starting to look for those trends, how are you starting to document that out so you're able to start informing the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I'm going to I can actually probably pull up a screen share on this.

Evan Lee: Perfecto. Okay, let me cancel mine out.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, this is an example. I this is a template too. Like I'm also game to share out this recipe builder template, um, as like a follow up.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Let me share my screen.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, you see see this?

Evan Lee: Yep, we got you.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, so what we do, um, we obviously we're pretty plugged in by running lots of different creatives with creators, you know, thousands over the years. We've got a pretty good sense of like what formulas work. We call it a recipe. Um, lots of ingredients. We treat sort of a concept as a collection of ingredients that you can sort of play with and dial up and dial back. But there are concepts that work that are tried and true, um, that we sort of collect over time, stuff that bubbles to the surface as like cross category, um, formats that, you know, we can utilize regardless of client. Um, and so over time as things perform, we'll test new things, but we'll collect those. And this is the recipe builder sort of template. We'll start to like house them. So like, you know, problem solution or before after, this is a recipe. So we'll we'll get an example of this. We know this works across clients and so we'll, um, have this as almost like a base. And so when we're onboarding with a new client, we have a set of these, probably like 10 to 15 like tried and true. If you do not have these in your account and you've not tested these, this is probably a good place to start. You pair that with your creative strategy and your key messaging, you can kind of tailor it a bit to the brand. Um, but certainly want to collect these over time. We do this through client work, but also just through, um, making sure we're plugged into the industry. It's a daily, it's called a must conquer daily for our team, but every day they're going into the TikTok, um, top ads, uh, where you can discover and filter by, you know, performance. We're looking at competitors, other agencies in the space. There's a couple of key voices that are active on Twitter that will talk about this stuff. And every day we'll go in and sort of canvas the landscape and if we see a concept that, um, kind of checks all the boxes that we want to test, we'll we'll go ahead and implement that with a client and then if it resonates, we'll add that to our recipe builder. So this is a collection that is built over time that we use for all of our clients, but you could certainly do this in house as as well. But this, we've also, you know, we'll collect visual hooks. Um, you know, as we're researching every day, something will pop up, we will record that, drop it here, um, can even categorize this by category, but this gives you a reference point as you're looking to iterate into the future and build new concepts.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. So basically, just to give everyone a high level, like these are not only research based related to like the brands that you might be working with. Of course that exists in this equation, but what you're also doing is just making sure that you have a finger on the pulse. So it's TikTok top ads, like all over the place. You would to say, what are these trends and how should we test them?

Micah Whitehead: Yep.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. Perfect. So once you have your research, that brings you to a place of like having an idea of what you want to do. Um, I think one of the big things that I think about next is when we talk about like UGC itself, the very first thing is just starting to think about the creators that you're working with. Now, there's a million different ways that we can take this. If I'm not starting in the right place, if there's more context that you can't share, please, please, please let me know. But I think the first question that I have for you is related to sourcing on that end. So on your end, um, how many creators are ideal and then how are you finding those creators to put together and match the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, how many is ideal, um, is really an answer to a question that is answered after you have benchmarks. Um, you know, you can calculate there there's some ways you can look at like average spend per creator and a target spend in the account. We do that with motion, um, where we'll look at if they have like sort of a baseline, we'll look at say the average is $1,000 spent per ad and they're looking to spend 10k or 50k or 100k, you can sort of extrapolate a number of creatives you need to test. Um, and then back out a number of creators from there. Most typically, it's like three to five creators per month in a sprint and each of those creators developing three to five concepts, which especially early on when you're kind of trying to build that baseline where you're testing a little bit wider, um, you're going to want to do that, um, to figure out, okay, of the three to five creators, here are the two that really resonate with the brand that are going to perform well that we can build on over time. Um, maybe you cut the losers and and add a net new as part of like an iterative process going on going forward. Um, and then same thing with the concepts. You're going to identify winning concepts that you can match with future net new creators that that are resonating with the brand and kind of vice versa. In terms of, uh, where you source them. So it kind of depends on the goal of the campaign, the brand, the product. There's, but there's different buckets. There's the influencers or micro-influencers, which is, you know, they're going to be a benefit if you're looking to borrow their level of expertise, um, their credibility, if you're trying to white list or run spark ads, like that's all kind of a a realm that you could play in there. There's also the UGC creators. We're often, most often playing with UGC creators who are going to be great at executing a brief. They understand sort of the mechanics of performance, um, and how to translate that to their creative. Um, and then actors is another that we've been playing with a lot, um, more and more, the actor community is getting involved with content creation and UGC. They're going to be really good at executing a a script and delivering it in an authentic and relatable way and being a little bit more diverse, but not so good on the content side. So depending on what bucket you need to focus on, will also determine the level of, um, hand holding and relationship and the briefing process required for those. But in terms of identifying them, finding them, you've got, you know, of course you've got the platforms like, you know, Grin, um, Creator IQ, etc. I don't like those as much. I mean, they're good for the discovery. Um, but often times you're kind of working through their CRM to and so getting responses, um, can be hard. You know, you're trying to build a relationship with them at the end of the day. So it's a good starting place, especially if you have one. Um, but you can be a lot more scrappy than that. I think, you know, we'll do like a casting call on Twitter, like the UGC community, if you do a post around some hashtags, like you can have people almost do a casting call and have people opt in and have a wide base to sort of audit and select from. You can even push them to more of a funnel where they are self-selecting and giving you some information to choose from. So we'll do that. Um, search for hashtags, particularly if it's a like a really niche brand, um, that may be appropriate. Um, you can do that as well through just like DM and and cold outbound email. Um, to do that well, it needs to be conversation-based. So avoid like giving them the whole nut up front, just like, you know, start a conversation, give them a personal compliment, build that relationship and then work with them over time. I think the goal with any creator, we've found success in building longer-term relationships, um, as opposed to kind of starting fresh new list every time. Like you want to over time, figure out which creator is going to work with you and refine that process with them and they'll get better at delivering new content. Um, they'll understand the brand, they'll develop a brand love. And so you can kind of even start to give them a little bit more creative liberty as that relationship progresses. So that's always our North star. Um, always trying to find really level 10 creators that we can work with again and again and again. Um, we love, we've got our own creator community that we've built, um, and have given them a path to becoming a per preferred creator. So if you opt into our network and become a preferred creator, there's a little bit of training that's involved and then they get access to like top top deals with brands they want to work with. And then from our perspective of being creative strategists and growth marketers, helping them refine what they do. Um, and then making that process really simple and easy to work with and streamlined. And so they they get a lot of value out of working with us as well as connections to new opportunities. Um, and then the community being connected to the community of other like-minded creators. So that's a different approach. Um, we sort of own and nurture that community. But on the other side for the brands, um, you're you're trying to build a, almost like a brand army, a community of advocates, um, that love your brand. So I think a good start with a lot of times I've seen success with just seating product without like a a deliverable so to speak. Like if you're leading with the deliverable and the request, then that just kind of starts a relationship in a certain way. So if you want to start kind of wide and get your product out as as like a adding value to them first, the data shows that most of those creators will post organically and then from there you can identify, okay, this one was great. They really love the brand. I can tell they can make good video content. And that's a good jumping off point for a conversation. You can ask to license the content they posted organically or engage them for a more formal, um, campaign. So that's one way to go about it. But, um, working with them to make sure that process is easy, celebrating the wins. If you get like a campaign that does really well, let them know, kind of let them into the metrics, give them a case study, um, and then use that to continually go back to them and just keep them a part of that community, keep them fed with new opportunities. Um, that's the best way to go about that.

Evan Lee: Fantastic. Fantastic. And I think like just for my own curiosity here, like you've mentioned actors and with actors, it's like, give me those raw videos, we can edit it, we can stitch them together the way that they're required. And on the other side with the creators that you work with, do you have that same um, like expectation where it's just like raw files, cool, we'll do what we need.

Micah Whitehead: We do. Yeah. Typically, and I mean there's there's exceptions to that. Um, that's an important piece of our process because we've got more an iterative approach where like we don't think a video should be made once, for example. Like a simple change on the first three seconds can 10x the result. And so you need that ability to create iterations from the content. So if you're leaning into a creator to produce that, then you're getting into deliverables and price per deliverable and it's more difficult and you're you're more limited. So getting that library of assets, you have to put the kind of the the planning and the creative strategy into that process to know what you need. But often times we'll get enough content to develop multiple concepts out of that library and we have that knowledge going into what the ask is. And then on the back end, we can do, um, you know, five different concepts from a library they deliver, but also we're we're pre-recording like multiple options of the hook. And so we may test, you know, a couple versions of the hook, but we've got a bank to go back to. So if we hit a winning concept that scales really well or a creator that has a winning concept that scales really well, we can go backwards and swap that first three seconds, maybe change the structure and we can double down on the success of that ad because we're able to scale it because we've got the ammunition to be able to do that from the beginning.

Evan Lee: Love it. Love it. Okay, well, welcome to the party, Micah. Can we get some love in the chat? Just some fire emojis, all the good emojis that we can send some love so we can make sure that everyone's feeling welcome. So amazing. Um, without further ado, what I really want to start diving into is like, again, UGC is the main topic of conversation, but there's so many parts of this flywheel that ultimately let you get to the ideal UGC pieces. And I think before we dive into to parts of these flywheel, I just wanted to like get your thoughts on a high-level topic and it might seem basic, but I'm just curious, like why is UGC so important in today's landscape?

Micah Whitehead: Well, I was starting to touch on it in that super long intro, um, that I was giving on the how was how was Q1 treating you, but, you know, especially right now, um, when teams are trying to do more with less, uh, we Zero to one started as more of a traditional production uh approach to to creative, which is more expensive, longer timelines and that model isn't really set for success in the paid media landscape. So especially today, we're just trying to do more with less. UGC is the most cost-effective uh and affordable way to produce creative that also you can scale uh with short sort of sprints. Um, and it just happens to be a top performing format, um, kind of regardless of the platform. So if you're not utilizing UGC, um, you need to be as soon as possible.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Most definitely. Okay. So I know a lot of people are going to want to dive into like, well, how do we actually source creators? How are we creating the right pieces? But something that I'm always curious about is this initial bucket of like our audits and our researching before anything. So what that means is like you're introduced to a brand, you're having that dialogue of even trying to figure out what to do. And this is applicable again on the agency side, for someone working in house, everyone involved. On your end, where are you typically conducting research to start informing the strategy that you're going to build?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean there's a few different pieces to that equation. I mean, I certainly motion, I'll I'll plug motion right now. Um, we introduce motion in a couple different, um, parts of the process. Initially, before you get into name conventions and structures and reporting build outs, you're going to get like a high-level look. So we like to connect up the ad account, look at longer time frames, really to identify top performing, worst performing creatives, any sort of like initial trends that sort of stand out that you can pull insights from and build on top of. Um, so we'll do that. We have a creative strategy, um, framework that's got like common sort of baseline building information where you're going to want to audit past past campaigns, um, key messages, um, figure out like what your ideal hooks are. You're going to look at reviews, um, testimonials, um, press, like you kind of start with a wide canvas, competitor research is super important too. Um, because often times you can see, you know, low hanging fruit and opportunity area. If you there's a certain concept or style that you're not testing and you see that happen across a couple different competitors, it's an indicator that you probably should should at least test that and try that. So we'll do all those things. Um, we spend two weeks to 30 days at sort of analyzing and and building out like an MVP of a creative strategy, um, initial concepts that we want to test, uh, and then a like a testing framework and that also applies to the account structure. So there's a lot that goes into it. Um, but it's definitely the secret sauce. Um, it's how you get started. Uh, you're going to want to cast a wide net towards the beginning and and test a wide variety of concepts. Um, usually we're starting with like three to five creators and each are doing three to five concepts with the goal of identifying a formula that's going to work, um, identifying a creator that's going to resonate with your brand that you can build on top of month over month and then concepts that are going to deliver results that you can iterate on. Um, and then you have kind of a jumping off point after that like a 30 to 60-day testing period. But definitely want to start with a pretty robust analysis across the board of what you're working with.

Evan Lee: Love it. And I love that you cast a wide net. I think everybody should. There's so many places you can go like Micah had mentioned directly in the ad accounts, just like overall reviews, YouTube pages, Reddit, whatever it might be to get your information. And I think one of the pieces that's interesting is like we can have all this information, but we have to look at it and say like, okay, what are we actually pulling from? And something that you had talked about was, I think it was your recipe builder or your um, like just creative strategy template that you're thinking about. So I'm wondering, like after you have that wide net cast and you are starting to look for those trends, how are you starting to document that out so you're able to start informing the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I'm going to I can actually probably pull up a screen share on this.

Evan Lee: Perfecto. Okay, let me cancel mine out.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, this is an example. I this is a template too. Like I'm also game to share out this recipe builder template, um, as like a follow up.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Let me share my screen.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, you see see this?

Evan Lee: Yep, we got you.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, so what we do, um, we obviously we're pretty plugged in by running lots of different creatives with creators, you know, thousands over the years. We've got a pretty good sense of like what formulas work. We call it a recipe. Um, lots of ingredients. We treat sort of a concept as a collection of ingredients that you can sort of play with and dial up and dial back. But there are concepts that work that are tried and true, um, that we sort of collect over time, stuff that bubbles to the surface as like cross category, um, formats that, you know, we can utilize regardless of client. Um, and so over time as things perform, we'll test new things, but we'll collect those. And this is the recipe builder sort of template. We'll start to like house them. So like, you know, problem solution or before after, this is a recipe. So we'll we'll get an example of this. We know this works across clients and so we'll, um, have this as almost like a base. And so when we're onboarding with a new client, we have a set of these, probably like 10 to 15 like tried and true. If you do not have these in your account and you've not tested these, this is probably a good place to start. You pair that with your creative strategy and your key messaging, you can kind of tailor it a bit to the brand. Um, but certainly want to collect these over time. We do this through client work, but also just through, um, making sure we're plugged into the industry. It's a daily, it's called a must conquer daily for our team, but every day they're going into the TikTok, um, top ads, uh, where you can discover and filter by, you know, performance. We're looking at competitors, other agencies in the space. There's a couple of key voices that are active on Twitter that will talk about this stuff. And every day we'll go in and sort of canvas the landscape and if we see a concept that, um, kind of checks all the boxes that we want to test, we'll we'll go ahead and implement that with a client and then if it resonates, we'll add that to our recipe builder. So this is a collection that is built over time that we use for all of our clients, but you could certainly do this in house as as well. But this, we've also, you know, we'll collect visual hooks. Um, you know, as we're researching every day, something will pop up, we will record that, drop it here, um, can even categorize this by category, but this gives you a reference point as you're looking to iterate into the future and build new concepts.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. So basically, just to give everyone a high level, like these are not only research based related to like the brands that you might be working with. Of course that exists in this equation, but what you're also doing is just making sure that you have a finger on the pulse. So it's TikTok top ads, like all over the place. You would to say, what are these trends and how should we test them?

Micah Whitehead: Yep.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. Perfect. So once you have your research, that brings you to a place of like having an idea of what you want to do. Um, I think one of the big things that I think about next is when we talk about like UGC itself, the very first thing is just starting to think about the creators that you're working with. Now, there's a million different ways that we can take this. If I'm not starting in the right place, if there's more context that you can't share, please, please, please let me know. But I think the first question that I have for you is related to sourcing on that end. So on your end, um, how many creators are ideal and then how are you finding those creators to put together and match the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, how many is ideal, um, is really an answer to a question that is answered after you have benchmarks. Um, you know, you can calculate there there's some ways you can look at like average spend per creator and a target spend in the account. We do that with motion, um, where we'll look at if they have like sort of a baseline, we'll look at say the average is $1,000 spent per ad and they're looking to spend 10k or 50k or 100k, you can sort of extrapolate a number of creatives you need to test. Um, and then back out a number of creators from there. Most typically, it's like three to five creators per month in a sprint and each of those creators developing three to five concepts, which especially early on when you're kind of trying to build that baseline where you're testing a little bit wider, um, you're going to want to do that, um, to figure out, okay, of the three to five creators, here are the two that really resonate with the brand that are going to perform well that we can build on over time. Um, maybe you cut the losers and and add a net new as part of like an iterative process going on going forward. Um, and then same thing with the concepts. You're going to identify winning concepts that you can match with future net new creators that that are resonating with the brand and kind of vice versa. In terms of, uh, where you source them. So it kind of depends on the goal of the campaign, the brand, the product. There's, but there's different buckets. There's the influencers or micro-influencers, which is, you know, they're going to be a benefit if you're looking to borrow their level of expertise, um, their credibility, if you're trying to white list or run spark ads, like that's all kind of a a realm that you could play in there. There's also the UGC creators. We're often, most often playing with UGC creators who are going to be great at executing a brief. They understand sort of the mechanics of performance, um, and how to translate that to their creative. Um, and then actors is another that we've been playing with a lot, um, more and more, the actor community is getting involved with content creation and UGC. They're going to be really good at executing a a script and delivering it in an authentic and relatable way and being a little bit more diverse, but not so good on the content side. So depending on what bucket you need to focus on, will also determine the level of, um, hand holding and relationship and the briefing process required for those. But in terms of identifying them, finding them, you've got, you know, of course you've got the platforms like, you know, Grin, um, Creator IQ, etc. I don't like those as much. I mean, they're good for the discovery. Um, but often times you're kind of working through their CRM to and so getting responses, um, can be hard. You know, you're trying to build a relationship with them at the end of the day. So it's a good starting place, especially if you have one. Um, but you can be a lot more scrappy than that. I think, you know, we'll do like a casting call on Twitter, like the UGC community, if you do a post around some hashtags, like you can have people almost do a casting call and have people opt in and have a wide base to sort of audit and select from. You can even push them to more of a funnel where they are self-selecting and giving you some information to choose from. So we'll do that. Um, search for hashtags, particularly if it's a like a really niche brand, um, that may be appropriate. Um, you can do that as well through just like DM and and cold outbound email. Um, to do that well, it needs to be conversation-based. So avoid like giving them the whole nut up front, just like, you know, start a conversation, give them a personal compliment, build that relationship and then work with them over time. I think the goal with any creator, we've found success in building longer-term relationships, um, as opposed to kind of starting fresh new list every time. Like you want to over time, figure out which creator is going to work with you and refine that process with them and they'll get better at delivering new content. Um, they'll understand the brand, they'll develop a brand love. And so you can kind of even start to give them a little bit more creative liberty as that relationship progresses. So that's always our North star. Um, always trying to find really level 10 creators that we can work with again and again and again. Um, we love, we've got our own creator community that we've built, um, and have given them a path to becoming a per preferred creator. So if you opt into our network and become a preferred creator, there's a little bit of training that's involved and then they get access to like top top deals with brands they want to work with. And then from our perspective of being creative strategists and growth marketers, helping them refine what they do. Um, and then making that process really simple and easy to work with and streamlined. And so they they get a lot of value out of working with us as well as connections to new opportunities. Um, and then the community being connected to the community of other like-minded creators. So that's a different approach. Um, we sort of own and nurture that community. But on the other side for the brands, um, you're you're trying to build a, almost like a brand army, a community of advocates, um, that love your brand. So I think a good start with a lot of times I've seen success with just seating product without like a a deliverable so to speak. Like if you're leading with the deliverable and the request, then that just kind of starts a relationship in a certain way. So if you want to start kind of wide and get your product out as as like a adding value to them first, the data shows that most of those creators will post organically and then from there you can identify, okay, this one was great. They really love the brand. I can tell they can make good video content. And that's a good jumping off point for a conversation. You can ask to license the content they posted organically or engage them for a more formal, um, campaign. So that's one way to go about it. But, um, working with them to make sure that process is easy, celebrating the wins. If you get like a campaign that does really well, let them know, kind of let them into the metrics, give them a case study, um, and then use that to continually go back to them and just keep them a part of that community, keep them fed with new opportunities. Um, that's the best way to go about that.

Evan Lee: Fantastic. Fantastic. And I think like just for my own curiosity here, like you've mentioned actors and with actors, it's like, give me those raw videos, we can edit it, we can stitch them together the way that they're required. And on the other side with the creators that you work with, do you have that same um, like expectation where it's just like raw files, cool, we'll do what we need.

Micah Whitehead: We do. Yeah. Typically, and I mean there's there's exceptions to that. Um, that's an important piece of our process because we've got more an iterative approach where like we don't think a video should be made once, for example. Like a simple change on the first three seconds can 10x the result. And so you need that ability to create iterations from the content. So if you're leaning into a creator to produce that, then you're getting into deliverables and price per deliverable and it's more difficult and you're you're more limited. So getting that library of assets, you have to put the kind of the the planning and the creative strategy into that process to know what you need. But often times we'll get enough content to develop multiple concepts out of that library and we have that knowledge going into what the ask is. And then on the back end, we can do, um, you know, five different concepts from a library they deliver, but also we're we're pre-recording like multiple options of the hook. And so we may test, you know, a couple versions of the hook, but we've got a bank to go back to. So if we hit a winning concept that scales really well or a creator that has a winning concept that scales really well, we can go backwards and swap that first three seconds, maybe change the structure and we can double down on the success of that ad because we're able to scale it because we've got the ammunition to be able to do that from the beginning.

Evan Lee: Love it. Love it. Okay, well, welcome to the party, Micah. Can we get some love in the chat? Just some fire emojis, all the good emojis that we can send some love so we can make sure that everyone's feeling welcome. So amazing. Um, without further ado, what I really want to start diving into is like, again, UGC is the main topic of conversation, but there's so many parts of this flywheel that ultimately let you get to the ideal UGC pieces. And I think before we dive into to parts of these flywheel, I just wanted to like get your thoughts on a high-level topic and it might seem basic, but I'm just curious, like why is UGC so important in today's landscape?

Micah Whitehead: Well, I was starting to touch on it in that super long intro, um, that I was giving on the how was how was Q1 treating you, but, you know, especially right now, um, when teams are trying to do more with less, uh, we Zero to one started as more of a traditional production uh approach to to creative, which is more expensive, longer timelines and that model isn't really set for success in the paid media landscape. So especially today, we're just trying to do more with less. UGC is the most cost-effective uh and affordable way to produce creative that also you can scale uh with short sort of sprints. Um, and it just happens to be a top performing format, um, kind of regardless of the platform. So if you're not utilizing UGC, um, you need to be as soon as possible.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Most definitely. Okay. So I know a lot of people are going to want to dive into like, well, how do we actually source creators? How are we creating the right pieces? But something that I'm always curious about is this initial bucket of like our audits and our researching before anything. So what that means is like you're introduced to a brand, you're having that dialogue of even trying to figure out what to do. And this is applicable again on the agency side, for someone working in house, everyone involved. On your end, where are you typically conducting research to start informing the strategy that you're going to build?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean there's a few different pieces to that equation. I mean, I certainly motion, I'll I'll plug motion right now. Um, we introduce motion in a couple different, um, parts of the process. Initially, before you get into name conventions and structures and reporting build outs, you're going to get like a high-level look. So we like to connect up the ad account, look at longer time frames, really to identify top performing, worst performing creatives, any sort of like initial trends that sort of stand out that you can pull insights from and build on top of. Um, so we'll do that. We have a creative strategy, um, framework that's got like common sort of baseline building information where you're going to want to audit past past campaigns, um, key messages, um, figure out like what your ideal hooks are. You're going to look at reviews, um, testimonials, um, press, like you kind of start with a wide canvas, competitor research is super important too. Um, because often times you can see, you know, low hanging fruit and opportunity area. If you there's a certain concept or style that you're not testing and you see that happen across a couple different competitors, it's an indicator that you probably should should at least test that and try that. So we'll do all those things. Um, we spend two weeks to 30 days at sort of analyzing and and building out like an MVP of a creative strategy, um, initial concepts that we want to test, uh, and then a like a testing framework and that also applies to the account structure. So there's a lot that goes into it. Um, but it's definitely the secret sauce. Um, it's how you get started. Uh, you're going to want to cast a wide net towards the beginning and and test a wide variety of concepts. Um, usually we're starting with like three to five creators and each are doing three to five concepts with the goal of identifying a formula that's going to work, um, identifying a creator that's going to resonate with your brand that you can build on top of month over month and then concepts that are going to deliver results that you can iterate on. Um, and then you have kind of a jumping off point after that like a 30 to 60-day testing period. But definitely want to start with a pretty robust analysis across the board of what you're working with.

Evan Lee: Love it. And I love that you cast a wide net. I think everybody should. There's so many places you can go like Micah had mentioned directly in the ad accounts, just like overall reviews, YouTube pages, Reddit, whatever it might be to get your information. And I think one of the pieces that's interesting is like we can have all this information, but we have to look at it and say like, okay, what are we actually pulling from? And something that you had talked about was, I think it was your recipe builder or your um, like just creative strategy template that you're thinking about. So I'm wondering, like after you have that wide net cast and you are starting to look for those trends, how are you starting to document that out so you're able to start informing the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I'm going to I can actually probably pull up a screen share on this.

Evan Lee: Perfecto. Okay, let me cancel mine out.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, this is an example. I this is a template too. Like I'm also game to share out this recipe builder template, um, as like a follow up.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Let me share my screen.

Evan Lee: I know everyone is going to be happy about that. Takeaways are always fun.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, you see see this?

Evan Lee: Yep, we got you.

Micah Whitehead: Okay, so what we do, um, we obviously we're pretty plugged in by running lots of different creatives with creators, you know, thousands over the years. We've got a pretty good sense of like what formulas work. We call it a recipe. Um, lots of ingredients. We treat sort of a concept as a collection of ingredients that you can sort of play with and dial up and dial back. But there are concepts that work that are tried and true, um, that we sort of collect over time, stuff that bubbles to the surface as like cross category, um, formats that, you know, we can utilize regardless of client. Um, and so over time as things perform, we'll test new things, but we'll collect those. And this is the recipe builder sort of template. We'll start to like house them. So like, you know, problem solution or before after, this is a recipe. So we'll we'll get an example of this. We know this works across clients and so we'll, um, have this as almost like a base. And so when we're onboarding with a new client, we have a set of these, probably like 10 to 15 like tried and true. If you do not have these in your account and you've not tested these, this is probably a good place to start. You pair that with your creative strategy and your key messaging, you can kind of tailor it a bit to the brand. Um, but certainly want to collect these over time. We do this through client work, but also just through, um, making sure we're plugged into the industry. It's a daily, it's called a must conquer daily for our team, but every day they're going into the TikTok, um, top ads, uh, where you can discover and filter by, you know, performance. We're looking at competitors, other agencies in the space. There's a couple of key voices that are active on Twitter that will talk about this stuff. And every day we'll go in and sort of canvas the landscape and if we see a concept that, um, kind of checks all the boxes that we want to test, we'll we'll go ahead and implement that with a client and then if it resonates, we'll add that to our recipe builder. So this is a collection that is built over time that we use for all of our clients, but you could certainly do this in house as as well. But this, we've also, you know, we'll collect visual hooks. Um, you know, as we're researching every day, something will pop up, we will record that, drop it here, um, can even categorize this by category, but this gives you a reference point as you're looking to iterate into the future and build new concepts.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. So basically, just to give everyone a high level, like these are not only research based related to like the brands that you might be working with. Of course that exists in this equation, but what you're also doing is just making sure that you have a finger on the pulse. So it's TikTok top ads, like all over the place. You would to say, what are these trends and how should we test them?

Micah Whitehead: Yep.

Evan Lee: I love it. I love it. Perfect. So once you have your research, that brings you to a place of like having an idea of what you want to do. Um, I think one of the big things that I think about next is when we talk about like UGC itself, the very first thing is just starting to think about the creators that you're working with. Now, there's a million different ways that we can take this. If I'm not starting in the right place, if there's more context that you can't share, please, please, please let me know. But I think the first question that I have for you is related to sourcing on that end. So on your end, um, how many creators are ideal and then how are you finding those creators to put together and match the strategy?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, how many is ideal, um, is really an answer to a question that is answered after you have benchmarks. Um, you know, you can calculate there there's some ways you can look at like average spend per creator and a target spend in the account. We do that with motion, um, where we'll look at if they have like sort of a baseline, we'll look at say the average is $1,000 spent per ad and they're looking to spend 10k or 50k or 100k, you can sort of extrapolate a number of creatives you need to test. Um, and then back out a number of creators from there. Most typically, it's like three to five creators per month in a sprint and each of those creators developing three to five concepts, which especially early on when you're kind of trying to build that baseline where you're testing a little bit wider, um, you're going to want to do that, um, to figure out, okay, of the three to five creators, here are the two that really resonate with the brand that are going to perform well that we can build on over time. Um, maybe you cut the losers and and add a net new as part of like an iterative process going on going forward. Um, and then same thing with the concepts. You're going to identify winning concepts that you can match with future net new creators that that are resonating with the brand and kind of vice versa. In terms of, uh, where you source them. So it kind of depends on the goal of the campaign, the brand, the product. There's, but there's different buckets. There's the influencers or micro-influencers, which is, you know, they're going to be a benefit if you're looking to borrow their level of expertise, um, their credibility, if you're trying to white list or run spark ads, like that's all kind of a a realm that you could play in there. There's also the UGC creators. We're often, most often playing with UGC creators who are going to be great at executing a brief. They understand sort of the mechanics of performance, um, and how to translate that to their creative. Um, and then actors is another that we've been playing with a lot, um, more and more, the actor community is getting involved with content creation and UGC. They're going to be really good at executing a a script and delivering it in an authentic and relatable way and being a little bit more diverse, but not so good on the content side. So depending on what bucket you need to focus on, will also determine the level of, um, hand holding and relationship and the briefing process required for those. But in terms of identifying them, finding them, you've got, you know, of course you've got the platforms like, you know, Grin, um, Creator IQ, etc. I don't like those as much. I mean, they're good for the discovery. Um, but often times you're kind of working through their CRM to and so getting responses, um, can be hard. You know, you're trying to build a relationship with them at the end of the day. So it's a good starting place, especially if you have one. Um, but you can be a lot more scrappy than that. I think, you know, we'll do like a casting call on Twitter, like the UGC community, if you do a post around some hashtags, like you can have people almost do a casting call and have people opt in and have a wide base to sort of audit and select from. You can even push them to more of a funnel where they are self-selecting and giving you some information to choose from. So we'll do that. Um, search for hashtags, particularly if it's a like a really niche brand, um, that may be appropriate. Um, you can do that as well through just like DM and and cold outbound email. Um, to do that well, it needs to be conversation-based. So avoid like giving them the whole nut up front, just like, you know, start a conversation, give them a personal compliment, build that relationship and then work with them over time. I think the goal with any creator, we've found success in building longer-term relationships, um, as opposed to kind of starting fresh new list every time. Like you want to over time, figure out which creator is going to work with you and refine that process with them and they'll get better at delivering new content. Um, they'll understand the brand, they'll develop a brand love. And so you can kind of even start to give them a little bit more creative liberty as that relationship progresses. So that's always our North star. Um, always trying to find really level 10 creators that we can work with again and again and again. Um, we love, we've got our own creator community that we've built, um, and have given them a path to becoming a per preferred creator. So if you opt into our network and become a preferred creator, there's a little bit of training that's involved and then they get access to like top top deals with brands they want to work with. And then from our perspective of being creative strategists and growth marketers, helping them refine what they do. Um, and then making that process really simple and easy to work with and streamlined. And so they they get a lot of value out of working with us as well as connections to new opportunities. Um, and then the community being connected to the community of other like-minded creators. So that's a different approach. Um, we sort of own and nurture that community. But on the other side for the brands, um, you're you're trying to build a, almost like a brand army, a community of advocates, um, that love your brand. So I think a good start with a lot of times I've seen success with just seating product without like a a deliverable so to speak. Like if you're leading with the deliverable and the request, then that just kind of starts a relationship in a certain way. So if you want to start kind of wide and get your product out as as like a adding value to them first, the data shows that most of those creators will post organically and then from there you can identify, okay, this one was great. They really love the brand. I can tell they can make good video content. And that's a good jumping off point for a conversation. You can ask to license the content they posted organically or engage them for a more formal, um, campaign. So that's one way to go about it. But, um, working with them to make sure that process is easy, celebrating the wins. If you get like a campaign that does really well, let them know, kind of let them into the metrics, give them a case study, um, and then use that to continually go back to them and just keep them a part of that community, keep them fed with new opportunities. Um, that's the best way to go about that.

Evan Lee: Fantastic. Fantastic. And I think like just for my own curiosity here, like you've mentioned actors and with actors, it's like, give me those raw videos, we can edit it, we can stitch them together the way that they're required. And on the other side with the creators that you work with, do you have that same um, like expectation where it's just like raw files, cool, we'll do what we need.

Micah Whitehead: We do. Yeah. Typically, and I mean there's there's exceptions to that. Um, that's an important piece of our process because we've got more an iterative approach where like we don't think a video should be made once, for example. Like a simple change on the first three seconds can 10x the result. And so you need that ability to create iterations from the content. So if you're leaning into a creator to produce that, then you're getting into deliverables and price per deliverable and it's more difficult and you're you're more limited. So getting that library of assets, you have to put the kind of the the planning and the creative strategy into that process to know what you need. But often times we'll get enough content to develop multiple concepts out of that library and we have that knowledge going into what the ask is. And then on the back end, we can do, um, you know, five different concepts from a library they deliver, but also we're we're pre-recording like multiple options of the hook. And so we may test, you know, a couple versions of the hook, but we've got a bank to go back to. So if we hit a winning concept that scales really well or a creator that has a winning concept that scales really well, we can go backwards and swap that first three seconds, maybe change the structure and we can double down on the success of that ad because we're able to scale it because we've got the ammunition to be able to do that from the beginning.

Evan Lee: Love it. Love it. Okay, well, welcome to the party, Micah. Can we get some love in the chat? Just some fire emojis, all the good emojis that we can send some love so we can make sure that everyone's feeling welcome. So amazing. Um, without further ado, what I really want to start diving into is like, again, UGC is the main topic of conversation, but there's so many parts of this flywheel that ultimately let you get to the ideal UGC pieces. And I think before we dive into to parts of these flywheel, I just wanted to like get your thoughts on a high-level topic and it might seem basic, but I'm just curious, like why is UGC so important in today's landscape?

Micah Whitehead: Well, I was starting to touch on it in that super long intro, um, that I was giving on the how was how was Q1 treating you, but, you know, especially right now, um, when teams are trying to do more with less, uh, we Zero to one started as more of a traditional production uh approach to to creative, which is more expensive, longer timelines and that model isn't really set for success in the paid media landscape. So especially today, we're just trying to do more with less. UGC is the most cost-effective uh and affordable way to produce creative that also you can scale uh with short sort of sprints. Um, and it just happens to be a top performing format, um, kind of regardless of the platform. So if you're not utilizing UGC, um, you need to be as soon as possible.

Evan Lee: Most definitely. Most definitely. Okay. So I know a lot of people are going to want to dive into like, well, how do we actually source creators? How are we creating the right pieces? But something that I'm always curious about is this initial bucket of like our audits and our researching before anything. So what that means is like you're introduced to a brand, you're having that dialogue of even trying to figure out what to do. And this is applicable again on the agency side, for someone working in house, everyone involved. On your end, where are you typically conducting research to start informing the strategy that you're going to build?

Micah Whitehead: Yeah, I mean there's a few different pieces to that equation. I mean, I certainly motion, I'll I'll plug motion right now. Um, we introduce motion in a couple different, um, parts of the process. Initially, before you get into name conventions and structures and reporting build outs, you're going to get like a high-level look. So we like to connect up the ad account, look at longer time frames, really to identify top performing, worst performing creatives, any sort of like initial trends that sort of stand out that you can pull insights from and build on top of. Um, so we'll do that. We have a creative strategy, um, framework that's got like common sort of baseline building information where you're going to want to audit past past campaigns, um, key messages, um, figure out like what your ideal hooks are. You're going to look at reviews, um, testimonials, um, press, like you kind of start with a wide canvas, competitor research is super important too. Um, because often times you can see, you know, low hanging fruit and opportunity area. If you there's a certain concept or style that you're not testing and you see that happen across a