The Ultimate Black Friday & Cyber Monday Ad Strategy (for 2024)

Connor MacDonald: Cool. We're going to do, we're going to cover two things today. We're going to cover Black Friday, Cyber Monday execution. We're going to talk about 2025 big bets. We're going to do a Q&A at the end. So if any comments or questions come up, drop those in the Q&A chat and I I'll moderate that towards the end.

Um, so as it relates to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, what are we? It's at the end of November. We're like, it's fast approaching. Um, we did a podcast about it a couple weeks ago, so we've been in the mindset of how to best take advantage of this holiday season. So we're going to get right into it. Where I think we'll start is Connor's got some slides prepared on how he did 2023 analysis and then we're going to parlay that into what went into planning for this year.

Connor Rolain: Yeah, let's do it. So, all right, I think the the first thing I want to call out here is I love going into research with questions that you're trying to answer. I think often if you don't have like a a list of questions you're trying to answer, you end up with just like this this like brain splat of of research and data and you're like, well now what do I do with this? So, so for for me and my team, when we're going into thinking about our creative strategy for BFCM and and holiday, we're really asking ourselves, and it's a pretty obvious question, but again, I think the framing is everything here is, what should we be producing to maximize our ad performance during BFCM? Like very simple, but then then that guides all of our research and then all of the reports that we're pulling that we're using Motion for, um are answering this question. So, we start there. That's the main question we're trying to answer here. And then we also like to take a high to low level approach. So what do I mean by that?

We start with the big picture trends and then we work down all the way to the specific ad concept, right? So number one, what I'm trying to figure out is like generally, what are the categories that we should be attacking? Is it is it offer ads? Is it evergreen ads? Is it whitelisted ads from Gordon? Is it gifts? Is it static ads with offer, right? There's all these different ways that that you can categorize an ad. And and that's what we're ultimately working towards here, right? So we're trying to figure out generally first what worked well and we use the comparative analytics reports for that. And then we'll go deeper once we uncover insights there and we'll use the top ads...

Connor MacDonald: Connor, uh, do you want to be sharing your screen right now?

Connor Rolain: Uh, not yet. I'm about to though. Now I'm now I'm ready to. Now I'm ready to. So, um, report number one that I'm going to share here and and there's kind of two big picture reports that we like to look at. One is first off like what happened last year during BFCM and then number two, like year to date, what's happened in the ad account. So, starting off with report number one here is...

...what happened last year during BFCM. Can everyone see my screen here? Is it showing? Is it cool. Okay, so...

Cody Plofker: See it, yep.

Connor Rolain: So this is the big picture report that we're looking at. So let me first off just like break down the anatomy of this report a little bit. This is generally what all of our motion reports look like. We're looking at spend, we're looking at percent new visits, we're looking at outbound click through rate, we are looking at uh Northbeam reported one day click ROAS. There's other metrics we track. You just, you know, we're limited to four um in the actual like chart or table or a or um like bar graph part and then we have the table below. Um so there is more data below, but generally speaking like there's a ton of insights to be gleaned out of a report like this. This is the comparative analytics report. So, a few big picture call outs here to talk about. First off, there's always this conversation going on...

...um on Twitter like, do we even need to produce a bunch of BFCM ads? I love operating under the constraint of like if you never produced an offer ad, could you build out your website in a way that still, you know, drives huge performance during an offer period? For us, like it's a pretty clear yes. If you look at our BFCM ads, this is any ad in with like some sort of offer messaging compared to just straight up evergreen ads, we had about the same uh one day click ROAS here, but as you can see here, like four or 5X the spend um on the BFCM ads. So way more scale at the same efficiency, like pretty clear that it's a good strategy for HexClad to go out and actually produce offer ads, right? What are some other insights here? GIFs didn't work that well. If you look at GIFs, it's the lowest performer here um compared to whitelisted evergreen, all these other categories. Now, what I will say and you can't see this here is that GIFs still performed above our our like benchmark for what's a profitable ad inside of Facebook on a one day click basis, but the comparative analytics, it's clear here that like there's other opportunities to go invest more time. So it's not that we won't produce GIFs, that's not necessarily the takeaway, but I'll certainly spend a lot less time producing GIFs than I will video ads, um because video ads had a better one day click ROAS and more top line scale. So obviously it's a better better time spent for my team and me to go invest more on a video ads. Um, what other things are we finding out here? Same with whitelisted, right? Whitelisted didn't perform as well as some of the other ad categories. Gordon ads crushed, right? Gordon ads had the not the most scale, but the best one day click ROAS. So...

...like if I'm I might go to our head of content and say, hey, I want to go shoot a bunch of new ad concepts with Gordon. That costs a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of investment from Gordon's team. We don't ask Gordon of things without them being fully flushed out. So if I can go to him and say, no, here's why, we feel a lot more confident about going to Gordon and and making that ask. So, this is this is that like high level analysis. I think this is really helpful for zeroing in. And then the next question is, okay, like we've decided we want to go produce a bunch of Gordon ads with offer messaging on them this year because of what we're seeing in this report. Now the question is...

...what specifically should we produce? Now we're getting to the fun stuff, right? Like what are the nitty gritty ad concepts that we're going to write briefs on, that we're going to get video editors guidance on, static ad editors guidance on. So that's when we'll go into a report like this one. Um and let me pull this up on my screen.

Okay, so this is the top ads report. We were at the we were at the comparative analytics report. Now we're at the top ads report, right? So, this the example here, right, like I said, we've decided Gordon ads are worthy of investment. Now I want to go and say, hey, what Gordon concepts should we produce? This is where we'll go and see like what actually performed best for us this year? What got us the best top line scale? I've blurred out the ads here, um but usually there is a little thumbnail of the ad creative. And right right from these two reports, I pretty much know exactly what we're going to iterate on within the Gordon ads category. And not only that, but I can also take our top performers and our lowest performers from the top ads, you know, view here and I can then go and use those as like a jumping off point for any net new concepts I want to shoot with Gordon. So we're not starting from ground zero with the net new concepts. I mean, they will be we will do net new stuff. Um but it's like we're we're we're jumping off of level three instead of level zero. So, again, like what's what's some actual like what's actually happening here? Um what's a good example of this? Last year, we decided to produce a seasonal TVC with Gordon. You may have seen it. It was it was Gordon, you know, making food for Santa Claus. That's a really risky thing to do. Why is that risky? First off, there's a there's a time window on how how long we can even run that creative, right? We have basically a month to run it because it was a holiday ad. Um, it was we also can only use it for like two or three years because there's a limit on the on the usage and anything we shoot with Gordon at that level of production is is expensive. So, I need to go to the team and back up my ask with data. You go look at that top ads report from BFCM last year and you see Gordon with the best efficiency out of all the other categories that were in that report. Like it's it's pretty easy to rationalize going and producing a TVC like that and and it it worked really well and I'm not surprised it worked really well because we had data backing that up um going into the holiday season. So, that's just like in in I'd have the same report here. I won't share it now looking at like year to date comparative analytics, really gleaning the same insights that I got from the BFCM comparative analytics report. Um but that's like generally the process that we take from going high level to low level and as you can imagine here, there's a lot of layers in between, right? Like you look at BFCM in that in this comparative analytics report on the far left here, there's a lot to break down there too, right? Was it net new like seasonal statics or videos with like Thanksgiving and holiday like positioning or was it just like top performers with like a, you know, a Black Friday Cyber Monday sticker slapped on top of it, right? There's still a lot more breakdown to do here. But the point is is like you can go layer by layer by layer with all of these different motion reports and like have a really strong data driven creative strategy using these reports. So, um, yeah, I'll stop there. Connor, take it take it back to you.

Connor MacDonald: Dude, awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think this is a great. I I I want to jam on this a little bit. Um, Cody, I'm curious. I think it's a great example of how granular it can get and how it can become actionable from from historical data. Uh, do you guys do something similar and and how did that affect this year's strategy?

Cody Plofker: Yeah, for sure. I don't think we go quite as granular with it just because these guys do a really good job kind of, hey, with probably more creative diversity, different different pillars, different categories. But yeah, very similar. Um, ours, we we don't do like a discount, we do, you know, like different offers, so we don't necessarily have the the opportunity to just like do, um, you know, evergreen ads. So we don't look at that, but we'll look for our Black Friday promo or our holiday kit promo, you know, we'll we'll compare the very same way. First static versus video, how much did we spend on them, what was the performance of each, you know, gifts as well. And we'll just inform, this is now our fourth year doing the same offer for Black Friday or maybe third year. So we'll just that'll just inform, you know, what we want to do going forward. And we've seen...

...some years statics do really well when you have a really strong offer. But for Memorial Day, last time we did this offer, you know, we had an unboxing video that took off and that was cool. Um, and so we'll we'll try we'll do is we'll analyze it the same way, you know, is it is it Bobby content? Is it whitelisted? Um, is it like content creators, UGC, uh, which is a little different than our like influencer stuff. Um, unboxing as well. So anything any way that we can slice the content, we will look at that. And what we'll try to do is number one, like Connor said, just double down on what worked before. What what of our content can we rerun? What can we use the same footage and just edit to be different if we need to. Um, but also try to encourage the team to take 20% of their time just for exploratory stuff. What's something that we haven't really done that either, you know, has worked well but we haven't focused as much or what's something completely net new. Um, but yeah, overall it's such a great starting point, so it's where we start. Like I wrote I wrote some ads and some hooks for our holiday kits coming up, you know, pretty recently. And the first thing I did is I pulled up and I asked the team to make um top ads reports, some comparative analysis for all of our holiday kits last year because some of that stuff, like we're just rewriting the hooks. We we have a different offering, so we have to refilm the ads, but we have the exact same hooks that we just had re-recorded for for this year. So yeah, absolutely where we start, where I recommend everyone should be uh starting their analysis if they've done anything similar that they could, you know, piggy back off of.

Connor MacDonald: Totally. Yeah. So you guys saw unboxing video took off this past Memorial Day. Is that uh that leads you to then creating more content? Is that like how that plan comes together?

Cody Plofker: Yeah, we saw that was our first like unboxing video like that. It's just very simple unboxing video. We do like the, you know, the mini miracle bomb thing. So somebody taking them out. One we got a voiceover on, one didn't, they both did well, but that was something we analyzed. We did try to roll it into evergreen where like, hey, maybe this is working. Didn't work quite as well at evergreen as it is working for, you know, um, for offers, but yeah, that's absolutely something we're going to do and we're going to run with that. We do have to reshoot, but we're going to do that, see how can we improve upon it. But yeah, that'll definitely be, you know, a pillar of our strategy. Um, statics always do well, even statics we break them down. Like some we show one shade, some we show multiple, we've got different headlines, different, you know, different visuals. So at least we can just get a little bit closer and narrow down and just continually kind of iterate on what worked last time, what can we learn from that, what can we do better this time?

Connor MacDonald: Yeah, awesome. Uh, I have two questions. We can't we can't glean over the visualization here, right? Like holy moly, it's so easy to gain glean these insights with Motion. Like I think about three years ago, pre-motion and like having to like export all this data, pull a pivot table, and then like figure out how to make a graph out of it. Like it's kind of like the the realization I had like a month ago, like how do we ever operate without project managers in our org before? Like how do we ever operate without just this like, you know, at a moment's notice being able to visualize this data. Like it's it's incredible how easily and quickly you can get these insights with these like comparative analytics tools and top ads graphs. It's just it's amazing.

Yeah, I totally agree. We joke on the pod about how important naming conventions are, but like this is really in full display here. Uh, we do all all very similar sort of granular reporting across...

...asset type, obviously, channel, obviously. We call it like campaigns. So we have like a bunch of objectives within the company. We talk about like our core audience. It's like our our typical, I work at Ridge, we largely sell minimalist wallets. Um, typical colors, we're selling to men. We have broken out our MKBHD, we have a big partnership with Marquez Brownlee, that's a different campaign. We're working on women's acquisition. We have travel, we have rings. So we name all these things when we do historical analysis, we're looking at, yeah, what was working across what dimensions and and help inform future strategies. I I do want to jump back quickly, Cody. I had two questions for you. One, you can choose to answer them both or or the one that uh you like the answer more of. You mentioned 20% net new concepts. I'd love to know what you guys are thinking about there. And then two, I had a question for you...

...you guys have unlocked a number of new channels this year. So how does that go into how do you better plan Black Friday, Cyber Monday for TV, which I don't think you've ever run during the holidays before?

Cody Plofker: Oh man, really good questions. All right, let me go with the first one. Um, something like 20%, I'm I'm going to say it's like just like a guideline. It's not like I'm going to be evaluating the team on this number of ads. Hey, we made 100 ads, 19 of them were new, like that's not good. It's just it's just a general like direction to say like, hey, like let's also try some new stuff, but we obviously want to go with what's tried and true. Um, you know, where where do we come up with kind of those things? Um, I'm trying to think of of it, uh, what maybe worked last time that we didn't do a lot of. Like right if we do, I'm always big on that like minimum viable product. If you don't do much effort into something and you get a lot of traction, hey, there's clearly something here, let's double down on that. You know, maybe that was, you know, in the past, we would do a lot of video for Black Friday because that's what works evergreen throughout the year. And then we found that when we have these great offers, these statics do so well, just the simplest of statics when you have a great offer. So it's like, why are we killing ourselves on all of these videos? Why are we investing, you know, a ton into it? Um, for evergreen, great, let's do it. But when you have a great offer, let's just run with the statics. And so that's something now where it's like, hey, let's double down on statics. But then this past Memorial Day, we did get these unboxing videos that that worked. So it's a little bit of both. Um, but, you know, like for something like that, yeah, we're going to try just like those very simple statics but in different formats. You know, we'll do like, we'll do some that has normal stuff, has images, has got pictures of the minis. We're going to run some that just has a headline. Just mini miracle bombs are here. Like just with some social proof, just with some, uh, you know, the the dates, some urgency on it. But like maybe some, you know, posted note ads or uh the the plain text, like iPhone notes, like really simple, how can you cut through the noise, be a pattern interrupt that's, you know, what people aren't expecting to get their attention because obviously people are going to be bombarded with everything during that period. But how can you make your offer super clear? So I think that's a big one. Just trying to be creative. Um, I also think probably we've done a little bit of gifting stuff and this is not just a Black Friday, but to me it's the whole season, holiday. We probably can double down more on gifting. I think Ridge does a really good job of this. Um, you know, I know you guys talk a lot about gifting, but like having husbands, having boyfriends talk about gifting. We've had some creatives that did well for that last year. So how can we lean into that, double down on it, you know, gifting for for friends, self-gifting. So it's just something where again, we saw a little traction but we didn't invest that much. So let's go and do a lot more of it this year.

Connor MacDonald: Totally. Yeah. So you guys had that in your in your doc, Connor. Gifting's not big for you guys, right?

Connor Rolain: No, it's pretty big. Um, I mean, especially during that time of year, like it's it's a significant chunk of people that are buying it for for their um friends, family, coworker, whatever it is. It's not it still doesn't overtake self-consumption, but like it's it's enough to the point where we've said it's it's worthwhile to include in our Q3 like creative testing road map.

Connor MacDonald: Yeah, the pan sets are pretty expensive gifts. I know from experience. My parents are all hooked up. You got to you got to really love the person you're...

Connor Rolain: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Connor MacDonald: Yeah, you missed the offer. Yeah, because we are, I mean, our wallet business is like the perfect gifting product. No sizes. Wallets are weird that every guy carries one every single day and like most have carried them for over five years and didn't even pick it out when they got it. It was like gifted to them or given to them at some other point. So it's this very weird product category that lends itself perfectly to gifting. And one reason we've been able to scale the business, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and just holiday in general has always been big for that reason, but like unlocking that messaging around Father's Day has been big. So our uh June is typically as big as our previous November. Um, and that was not the case when I joined, you know, eight years ago. Um, we end up spending over 50% of our budget targeting women for gifting ads. It ends up just being like a massive percentage of our of our total marketing mix.

Uh, funny funny story on that. Hold on real quick. For for gifting, um, Connor, I was in I was in Miami last year for Christmas. My uh brother-in-law lived there. We were at the gym and we see Cole, and I met Cole like one time before. And I had just brought, um, you know, one of HexClad's co-founders, and I just bought uh housewarming/Christmas present for my brother-in-law, but this was like the day after Christmas we saw him or something. And it was still on the way. And so I was like telling him I got it for them, but he was like, dude, like it's too late. Like you should have gotten it way before. Kind of like saying something to my brother-in-law, but...

Connor Rolain: You missed the offer. Yeah.

Cody Plofker: You know what I told him though? They were between that and Caraway, so he should he should be thankful that we uh we went with some HexClad. They they love it. They're happy about it, but it's a good gift if it's somebody who, you know, uh you want to be dropping that for, somebody close to family. But no, they're loving it. It's funny.

Connor MacDonald: Yeah, you go to hexclad.com/cody, get 10% off. We're getting like a solid plug in here. Yeah, good, good. Um, awesome. I think those are good, comprehensive as well. Uh, we're talking about 2025 big bets next and then we'll hit the Q&A. So we got to keep this relatively short. Um, and if you guys have any...

Connor Rolain: I've got an answer, but we're super focused on Black Friday right now. Uh, and if you guys have exciting big bets for 2025...

Oh, well, I think the election not being around will help. I think it'll hopefully A, lower ad costs. I think it'll be hopefully, uh, just like overall increase consumer confidence, which should lead to more spending. So I think that that's a big one. Um, and we obviously haven't seen the full effects of this year's election, but I do think uh in 2025, not having that around will generally be a good thing for e-commerce.

Connor MacDonald: Yeah, totally. Uh, lower interest rates, bigger consumer spending. This is what this is what we all want. Uh, we are so back. Yeah. We're so back. Yeah. Uh, Cody, what are you thinking about?

Cody Plofker: Yeah, um, so I think we've obviously there's always product, there's channels, um, so product is huge. We've got some really big products that I think will be really, really great on the acquisition side. Uh, a lot of stores, a lot of, you know, that's our channel expansion. We just expanded EU and that's doing great. We'll probably go Australia next market. But I think the biggest one, we feel like we do a really good job with a certain demographic, more of like an older, um, I guess Gen X demographic and and yeah, we could still grow there, but I think that'll be harder. I think we have a lot of opportunity more of like a millennial, older millennial demographic. And so I think that'll be a really big focus. Um, taking a little bit of inspiration from maybe maybe Ridge, maybe a little HexClad, like I think we're going to do a lot more. We've really done no paid influencer stuff. So we're really trying to think about who can we partner with, testing out some more macro creators, you know, kind of like how like HexClad's got Gordon, like that's our Bobby, but under it, you guys have partnered with Haley Bieber, you've done the the, you know, the the Benny Blanco thing, like stuff like that. So we will try, I think a lot of the YouTube, we we'll really try to tap into some of those, um, and just try to build some new personas. So I think that's a big one. Just to really help us reach that new audience, get some credibility there.

Connor MacDonald: Yeah, awesome. I think that's awesome. New channels, new demos, those are super key. I've got I've got like a really nerdy one that's like very specific to our business, but we've historically sold one single type of wallet. This minimalist metal wallet expands to hold one to 12 cards. Uh, we are, we just wrapped up our go-to-market review before this event. Um, we're launching our third silhouette next year. We've got a couple planned for the rest of the year. So from a brand perspective, uh, an e-com experience perspective, retention perspective, we have this really cool opportunity to become a multi-silhouette wallet brand. More people search for Ridge wallet every month than men's wallet. Like we we are very, very large in the category. People by definition are coming to our site wanting some sort of new wallet, showing some sort of interest. We obviously convert a couple percentage of those people. Uh, we have the opportunity to like really find what would be best for any given individual. And I think it's a very cool way to just like a rising tide that lifts all boats. We just have something for more people. We've got millions of people on our site. Um, but I think we'll have to do that really thoughtfully to not like cannibalize the business and also not, yeah, not cannibalize key Ridge wallet sales or not like convolute the shopping experience. So that's what I'm excited about doing, which I think will be cool.

Awesome. All right, 2020 2025 big bets, we could we could call it a wrap on that. Um, actually, no, someone just said AI is going to be big next year. The other the only other big bet, which I think is kind of interesting, I was talking with Sean about this recently, maybe you guys have an take. He was like, yeah, look, the best strategy today is like not all that different than the best strategy six years ago. What what's been great for our business is launching more wallets, launching wedding bands, launching travel. Like we're selling more products online. Uh, that strategy hasn't changed. I don't think it'll change over the next couple years. What I said could potentially radically change is the way that we run our business. So like a big bet internally would be like, how are we best utilizing AI, internal processes. We're a remote workforce and I think there's all sorts of further optimizations we can make to just like clear up communication and efficiency. So that's one thing I'm thinking about all the time, which I think could be really cool. We're at this point in time where technology is just awesome. Motion analytics being an example of it, uh, and best utilizing them is like could be a really, really large bet. Connor?

Connor Rolain: That's a that's a good I I agree. Like I think another good example is Prussian, right? Like attribution, that that that being like a good thing to have dialed in for your org to make good decisions. I mean that's been around for years, but now Prussian's using AI to just do it better. We have another tool we've been looking at called Para where it's just it's AI powered audio messages that you can use in your own media channels or specifically SMS, right? SMS marketing, like that's newer, but like generally speaking, own media marketing, that's not a that's not a novel concept, but you know, Para is creating this AI powered tool to just like enhance it. So, totally agree. I think uh it's fun to see some of these like AI powered tools come to life and just see how they're like innovating in um existing areas that are that have always been good for marketing and decision making and now they're just leveling them up with with that enhanced technology. It's pretty it's pretty fun. Para is very cool. Um, we got some awesome, some awesome voice notes coming out in our SMS pretty soon.

Connor MacDonald: Awesome. Uh, all right, cool. Let's get to the let's get to the Q&A. We've got we've got a couple more minutes here. I liked this one. So it's got a good mix and I appreciate everybody uh submitting some questions. Thoughts on last chance final messaging pushes at the end of Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Um, I'm actually not going to talk about last chance Black Friday, Cyber Monday messaging. Um, what we've found success with, which I also think is really cool is maximizing the like shipping cutoff. So we we actually promote a little bit longer than some of the brands do and we really push it up to Christmas shipping cutoff, which is like, and we push that as far as possible. So depending on the day of week, it could be the 21st, 22nd, but we get a couple extra days from Amazon. So we take like the last 36 hours to drive some amount of paid traffic who I who we identify as like the warmest possible people because we can't optimize for conversions, but email, site highlights, SMS driving to Amazon to just try to squeeze all that pent up demand we've developed over the last couple months in that not last chance Cyber Monday necessarily, but last chance like holiday shopping and gifting, um is something we've found some success with. But uh, what how do you guys approach it?

Cody Plofker: Yeah, we'll we'll do some. Definitely this is one of the things we learned from every year. It's just like, oh, we we didn't think through this angle or we didn't go through this timing. We will and we'll launch some, you know, last day things like that. Um, it's kind of hard because they don't have the same data as the stuff that we've had running, so they don't always get the same spend. But it's pretty easy to do, just a little bit more of a static, like pretty low effort. Um, I think it's worthwhile definitely. So we'll we'll we'll try to put dates on the other things, but we will do a little bit of that, but again, they're just some statics that we're doing. We also try to lean a little bit more into the, uh, you know, last chance for gifting and then last chance for obviously to get it by a certain date. And usually those perform very well.

Connor Rolain: And whatever you do, please don't lie to your customers. You you you get one chance to like it takes one moment to like lose all trust. Like urgency works. There's no doubt about it. We also do the like the shipping date cutoff stuff and it crushes. We do last chance messaging and it works well. We don't lie to our customers. We don't say, hey, this sale ends in 24 hours and then let it run for another week. I I think that's tacky. I think it's it's like a low integrity thing to do as a brand. Um, I I hate that and I would not recommend it. Nate Lagos had a good piece of content about this not too long ago and I I fully agree that urgency works, but not not at the expense of uh being dishonest.

Cody Plofker: Absolutely.

Connor MacDonald: Awesome. Uh, let's see. We'll just run through a couple of these other ones. Um, this is going to work? Yeah, here we go. How do you consider influencer or creator strategy timelines? So for us, we'll we'll spend over seven figures um on influencer during the holidays. Our experience has been and this has also been iterative because uh demand and intent is going to be highest like around shipping cutoffs or last chance or things like that. But for influencer and creators where I think there's more of a halo effect, we try to we try to pull that up as much as we can. So we actually like front load all of our creator spend um early in the period. So for us, our Black Friday, Cyber Monday sale is starting mid-November. Um, we're going to try to get everything live as early as that and some stuff will even fall before that just to promote the general kind of holiday and gifting opportunity. Uh, and then we'll have very little go live in December. It is like 90% of it will go live in November. Uh, Cody, do you guys have any plans for influencers or creators?

Cody Plofker: Yeah, we we don't do a lot of paid. Um we're kind of starting to do official paid, you know, testing, um, like paid influencer stuff in January of next year. You know, like I just talked about as like a bigger bet. So we don't. We are seating a lot of our minis, um, because people know how coveted these are. Like just to like our VIP influencers. So I do think those will get a lot of talked about. We will see it to our affiliates as well. We have a lot of creators that are affiliates. And then in terms of for ads, yeah, we we have we have briefs going out that we we will get influencer or creator content to use for ads. Um, timeline, that would not be me. Um, not not super involved in that and I'm not a not an ops person, but uh definitely give yourself enough time to get those briefs in and have enough time to kind of go back and forth with the edits if needed.

Connor MacDonald: Totally. Uh, Connor, you guys you guys have diversified the partnership program quite a bit. What what are you guys doing?

Connor Rolain: Yeah, so I mean like all of our like brand ambassadors that we pay like a monthly retainer to and they have monthly deliverables, we'll make sure that all of their like everyone's November, December post will be about our offers. And like like you said, Connor, we try to front load that in the offer period. Um, and then we probably won't do a ton of net new this year, but we did a bunch of it last year. Like some of our bigger name creators like Gordon, we'll have them, like we did some shoots with him where we had him do a bunch of like BFCM holiday intros and then that'll get pumped into our ad account. And then last year we did like a pretty big like micro creator um strategy that was like same thing, like just one-off deals all pumping BFCM. I don't know if we're going to do it this year just because we've been seating so much and I think we've done a really good job of building top of funnel awareness um all year long in an evergreen way that like those people are just going to see our BFCM ads. So I don't know if we need to do that part of it again, but yeah, I mean it's certainly it's certainly a pretty fairly robust part of the strategy, but um that's those are like the two big the big components of it.

Connor MacDonald: Yeah, awesome. Uh, all right, cool. I got a good one. Very tactical. Who wants to handle this one?

Connor Rolain: I got I got this one. Uh...

...this wasn't in our, actually, you know what? I'm going to I'm going to share this real quick because I think this is interesting. Uh, all right, if you look close here, you'll notice that I got to I got to zoom in close. Oh no, it didn't. Oh, this is the wrong one. One second. This one. Yes. Okay. So if you look at this bar right here, percent net new visits, if you look at statics versus videos, statics have a what? 13%, 12% lower, 13% lower net new visit rate than videos do. Pretty pretty obvious that like a warm like that's more middle bottom of funnel. Naturally, if it's more middle bottom of funnel, it's going to have a better one day click performance. I couldn't tell you why necessarily that um Facebook decides to serve statics to um, you know, repeat visitors or engage more. Maybe it's because generally they're more product focused whereas the videos are like more like brand product explainer videos. But that's that's my my takeaway or like why I think it is the case. Statics just more middle bottom of funnel whereas video creative is working more top of funnel.

Connor MacDonald: Yeah, totally. They like fundamentally can do pretty different things. And during a sale period, if you're a brand like HexClad who serves billions of impressions throughout the year, it's like you can be middle and bottom of funnel. All you need to do is show them that you'll save like $1,300 or whatever the the offer always is. Um, Cody, would you would you agree?

Cody Plofker: Oh, absolutely. Definitely. I also think the better your offer is, the the less good your marketing needs to be. You know, I know there's for like Gary Halbert, like one of like the the top direct response copywriters uses this as an example. He's like, if like you were at like the finish line of like a like a marathon in the desert, like it doesn't matter what you say, you could charge whatever you want, but if you had ice cold water, you could even like curse at people, but if you had ice cold water at, you know, the finish line of a of a hot marathon, like people would buy it. And so the best the best way to, you know, sell products is to have a starving crowd. And I think when you've got just a really hot offer, especially if you've done what we've done and you've, you know, seated the market like HexClad is, just make it really clear. And I think statics are just a really easy way to get that across. Um, much easier.

Connor MacDonald: Totally. Yeah. So I would say like performance is almost in air quotes. I think it all depends on brand, it depends on where your funnel's at, it depends on what your offer is. What we do is, I mean, we we do lift studies by asset type. So we've seen video and all brands are different and people should validate this themselves. We've seen videos provide a higher incremental lift versus images and therefore we plan our our budgets to some degree that way. Um, we don't just show up week of and spend 90% of our budget on images. I think that would be bad for the business. We wouldn't be reaching those those new people. So, um, it's a great question. We definitely over-indexed on statics crushing, but it's it's a little bit more nuanced than that. So, I appreciate that one. Um, all right, maybe we take one more. No, we'll take two more. Uh, no, we'll take one more. Uh, Mel said, Cody, bro, what did you have for lunch?

Cody Plofker: So I was looking at the chat and I was like, I was going to ask you guys like, do I have food on my face or something? Because I kept seeing people comment about it, but I guess I realized I have it over there and you can like see it in the corner. I was getting super self-conscious about it. I was like, I don't think I have anything. We we had this place called Falafel Hut today. We got some falafel uh catered in. So I while we were backstage in the uh green room, I shut my camera off for a minute, had like four minutes to eat and uh didn't have time to get up and bring it to the kitchen, but it was delish. Hopefully you guys got some pizza or something.

Connor MacDonald: Awesome. All right, yeah, let's let's wrap it here. Any uh good one to wrap on. Yeah, Cody, you have any any closing comments for the group?

Cody Plofker: No, I think this was great. I totally agree with everything you guys have said. Um, don't don't over complicate it, get that offer dialed in, learn from previous years, use motion like we all do. Um, last thing I would say just to end it with this, you know, naming conventions are the heart and soul of D2C brands.

Connor MacDonald: Yeah, thank you. Thank you. No, I'll also plug our pod, Marketing Operators. Connor doesn't typically call from the airport, so uh if you guys ever want to hear him, hear him, you know, with like a a full desk setup, uh that happens every Tuesday. Um, so yeah, thank you guys for having us.