Performance Creative in 2026: What We’ve Updated and Why

I'd love to hit some of the OG episodes and one that really struck out to me was performance creative workflows And then we talked ad creative analysis So I thought it'd be cool to kind of reflect on what we were talking about back then Where we're at now, how this brought us to a season change We're like, we're sitting here last week thinking about big broad brush strokes for 2026 And there was not a single mention of we need to launch X number of tests per week It was all concept driven and very creative driven I like this idea of moving from arbitrary volume to concepts to be done Do you have a sense of like, roughly, how much ad content do you want to be creating a week? We're probably like 30 concepts a week We've really ramped partnership the most I just think age-old debate, quality versus quantity Sometimes it's five concepts per week, sometimes it's ten Whoa, that's a cool wall of x-clad Hybrid pan, stainless steel and non-stick I've seen everyone talking about the genre of Miracle Bomb Every time you launch new tests, it's a new campaign And then you could turn off losers and then scale up winners in that campaign at a CVO With creative diversity being so important, I do think the challenge is having one team produce all of the content Give them strategy up front, they know what makes it good ad, they know what makes it good Post like they know about the brand And then they just create and then it's just like every week they're just boom, here's five assets It's like literally the, I think one of the most important functions in e-commerce now All right, welcome to another episode of Marketing Operators We're going to do some refreshes on creative volume today We're going to talk about ad creative testing, everybody's favorite topic It's been probably 80, 90 episodes since we last really went deep on it But first we got some cool, we got some backpack updates We wanted to thank Portland Gear For some fresh, I'm holding it up here, some fresh leather backpacks In belazings with the Marketing Operators logo, so shout out that Did you guys get one in the mail as well? I got one, I thank you I'm sad to say that I took my stuff out of my Ridge backpack and I put it in my new Portland Gear backpack It's not that the Ridge backpack is retired, but I had to break in the new backpack So now I get through what's the use case here I was at Best Buy yesterday, I happened to snag the last Ridge backpack they had So Conor's going away from Ridge, I'm going towards Ridge You know, you know, no, this backpack is sick But no, it was funny, some product feedback for you I went to go get it and one of the associates there was the other one I said, "Oh, I didn't know Ridge made backpacks" And the other guy was the other guy was like, "Yeah, they make really good stuff They used to make wallets" So you've got like, you've got like mixed really good awareness on your products being good But you know, I think your wallets are going down We're burdened by our own success of the new products Yeah, I guess that's like a good thing for you guys Yeah, no, it's definitely, yeah, it's definitely not a good thing It's hilarious, it's more or less exactly what we wanted It's like, you know, you're not going to be that big of a brand if you're a wallet brand But you still want to make sure people know you make your hero product Yeah, but it is cool how even like the product quality associations, transfers over People are like, "Oh, they're known for good products" Totally, totally, yeah, 100% Also, one of the best buy blusher, it's not knowing that we made backpacks We could do a little bit of, a little better employee education there Yeah All right, let's get into it But before we begin, I want to thank Motion Rich Panel, Pression, Aftersell and House [Music] One thing that's become really obvious is here is creative strategy is changing It is no longer just about make better ads or even make more ads You have to have AI and your workflow, you have to understand all the right best practices today And the leverage point is how you think about the creative And that's where a lot of teams are struggling People are still learning creative strategy the same way they did years ago through trial and error, intuition, and there hasn't been a structured way to learn that role properly It's also super hard to find great creative strategies these days It's still a new role and it's one that's extremely important But there's a lot of self learning And so that's why the training in the space is so important And Motion is a huge leader of that And they're launching a new free course and community launching in March This is going to be a new way that people can really master creative strategy And what I really like is that this is all taught live Things are changing so so fast, so rapidly right now That courses that were recorded six or eight months ago Like those are all outdated by now The course won't just be listening to people talk about ads You will actually be hands on in this course So you're building concepts, you're actually making creative, you're testing it And you're ultimately learning how to make decisions When things don't work out the first time And the instructor lineup is legit There are creative experts from brands like Caraway, Calm, Harry, Space Goods Happy mammoth and agency leaders and founders from scaled brands They're teaching what they're doing right now Not what worked three years ago There also be some potential I'm supposed to say internships, at least for Jones Road I'm going to say job opportunities You'll have the ability to sign up and learn more But we will be interviewing a few candidates as part of this partnership with Motion Which I am so excited about The course is live, it's free to register, seats are limited If creative performance is part of your job in 2026 Then this is worth paying attention to We'll drop the link in the show notes All right, so I went back It's funny, we were talking about what sort of content do we want to do And I was like, I'd love to hit some of the OG episodes And one that really struck out to me was Performance Creative Workflows and it was episode two And then we talked ad creative analysis in episode 15 So dozens of episodes to go Over two years ago, basically, just about two years ago So I thought it'd be cool to reflect on what we were talking about back then Where we're at now, how those processes have changed And then, you know, how are things looking differently as we move forward over the next couple months So I want to start with creative volume Because we literally talk about this all the time Cody, you just brought it up, we were in another chat But I'll start with you Connor So 2023 Connor Rowlane says Your biggest thing was you guys were cutting back You were creating such high volume And you wanted to focus on higher quality stuff I'm curious what's the experience been since Is it the same strategy today or has it evolved at all? Yeah, it's uh, we've been very happy with this approach Part of that strategy too, that maybe didn't get brought up Like it wasn't a That strategy wasn't necessarily just like a cut volume to cut volume strategy Part of the other side of that sword was We thought we were over indexing on low fidelity content And obviously low fidelity content like iPhone shot, UGC It's the easiest stuff to shoot So often when you're like pumping out volume You're shooting a lot of low-fi stuff So on the yes, we wanted to like trim back volume Because we thought we were like pushing volume just to push volume But the reason we wanted to do that was A, we wanted to go invest more in other channels Like YouTube, CTV, linear TV And we just needed to like Open up bandwidth to do that And we also wanted to just introduce more high fidelity content Into our Instagram and Facebook ad library Because we thought we were under index there And like naturally that content just takes more time To ideate, to shoot, to plan And we've been like, we've been very, very happy We're, we're, we are very much now Not going towards volume and going towards I guess you could say more of like a A concepts to be done approach Where it's like hey, if we have good concepts ideated Like let's go make them If we don't like let's slow down and think about new ones that we should make So we're letting the We're letting the ideas drive it forward And not this like arbitrary number of ads to be launched And yeah, I mean I'm, I'm happy about it Like it's pretty, it's pretty hard to look at Our year-over-year meta account performance And not be convinced that that's worked And then if you go like to the ad level And you kind of organize by ad spend There's tons of new ads that we launched this year That I've you know, show it up now And our top spending ads So yeah, I think overall account health looks good And we're also seeing some of these new, these new ads Scale well So I'm, I'm very happy with the approach And I think we'll just keep going down that route this year Like we're sitting here last week Thinking about like big broad brush strokes For 2026 And it was a really fun meeting There was not a single mention of We need to launch X number of tests per week It was all concept driven And like very creative driven And I think that swirl will continue to go Okay, and okay, so I like this idea of moving from arbitrary volume to concepts to be done Do you have a sense of like Like roughly How much ad content do you want to be creating a week Do you have any any any sense of deliverables Like where you just happen to land Land in this concept to be done approach I mean, I can pull up our calendar We in 2023 So now that we are launching like 15, 20 concepts per week With tons of iterations under there So now we're seeing that's often like Sometimes it's five concepts per week Sometimes it's 10 It just depends on kind of like when certain assets get pumped through And like what time of year it is So I'd say it's You know at a minimum half of what we were doing And probably at a max like a third or a fourth And less iterations under each concept So it's I don't have like specific I could pull up our creative testing calendar Is it like a follow up here But it's it's significantly less volume Awesome, yeah, so Cody You were you were asking in a in a chat We had with a friend this week how they were set in creative volume goals. So I'm curious, let's see, 2023 you were saying, use what do like, let me pull it up here. - I also have a lot of questions for Connor too. - Oh dude, I hope you wanna go there first. So Connor, what percentage of your, if you can share like what percentage of your meta add account is creative testing spend? 'Cause I was looking through the notes that Connor was putting together. And it seemed like it was like decently high, like maybe 30% and it, and if that's the case, it seems like you're more, like we have much more volume, but our creative testing spend is less than it. So I wonder if you are just like spending more per test because you have higher conviction in them. If you're spending more just because, you know, you're AOV or if you're like more successful, you know, your hit rate is higher and you're able to scale them harder. Like what's that look like? - It's not, it's not even that high. I mean, like I'm looking from September 1 through October 31 and we had 6% of our budget went into our like dedicated creative testing campaign. Now that's not truly what's creative testing for us 'cause also during that time period, we have like a big, nice landing page test that we broke out as its own campaign that we spent a good chunk of money on. We're launching a bunch of new sweepstakes ads that were all in their own campaigns and that you could call that creative testing too. So I would say all in all over this time period we're quite like 10%, 15% going into creative testing. So it's not even that high as an overall percent but also like the way that we just launched a cocktail shaker like we talked about, we didn't launch those ads in creative testing that was our broken out into their own campaign 'cause that's how we've decided to launch new products. But like that is creative testing. They're brand new ads, we've never ran them before just 'cause it's not under our like evergreen creative testing. So yeah, I'd say like 10% over this time period. Roughly, it's not a huge chunk. - And what's your, like if you can share, what's your portfolio look like? And I guess like Red Dead Beacuse you guys as well. I feel like Connor, you guys are doing a lot in-house. I don't know, like would you say your 100% in-house, would you say you're like 50%? Do you still have agencies in the mix? Obviously you have influencers in the mix. Like what's that that portfolio look like? I mean, it's all in-house. If you obviously like the influencers shooting on their own, but like we're facilitating it. So I guess I would technically call that in-house. Same with any net new content production. Like technically we might go honestly for like the paid social stuff and the YouTube stuff. If stuff it is pretty much primarily in-house. Now for the higher level like CTV, linear TV ads, our head of content is going out and sourcing, you know, like writers and people to help with the production. But again, it's like, so you don't have any of that. - You see the issues that are shipping you content for like paid social. Not, not anymore. Yeah, not since like Q1 of this year were pretty much 100% internalized. And we were just, yeah, we were just looking at the fees that we were paying some of these like byspend agencies. We're like, we should hire two more creative strategies, more in-house production people. And like it'll be a fraction of the cost, but probably better quality once we really get up and running. So yeah, we're fully, now this is just in the US. We definitely lean on something like we lean on static. For example, in our EUK hubs. So we're definitely not fully in-house over there. But yeah, the US is. - Yeah, awesome. I think it's a good, I wanna walk through that same kind of set of questions for you, Cody. So where are you landing right now with volume? Because if I remember correctly over the last couple of years, you guys didn't have that much of a focus on volume. Maybe you came more of a priority over the last year and a half or so. - Yeah, we definitely have tried to ramp up volume and wanna continue to do so. I should know, we're probably like 30 concepts a week. I don't know exactly. We've really ramped partnership the most. So that's really like the biggest focus and probably like the most number of, the most volume of concepts that we're launching. But I think it's somewhere around 30 per week and one I do it bigger. I just think age, older, quality versus quantity. I think we are shipping a lot of not good ads. And I think that's a little bit pointless to do. So I think it's volume once you get the right muscles in place. And so we've definitely had successes in a lot of areas. And then I think a few recently, we're trying to make some bigger swings and kind of change the way we're doing it. Which I think you have to, just a performances in there, you have to restructure and shake things up. But also if the platforms are changing, you gotta do it. I think our approach was a little bit, and the team we had was a little bit like three years ago, which doesn't sound like that long ago, but things have changed so much since then. And so I think we're trying to take a very different approach to it. And we'll probably scale back up volume even above where we're at once. We feel like that's in a really good spot. Operators, quick gut check here. Q1 is when everyone realizes the same thing at once. Traffic is more expensive, growth flows down. So the question isn't, how do I drive more demand? It's, how do I make more money from the demand I already have? That is exactly why we use AfterCell by rocked. Most brands think Upsells are about being aggressive, but they really aren't. They are about timing. And the best time to upsell someone is when they're already in buying mode. Which is when it's right after someone buys. So AfterCell, it lets you put the right offer at the right moment with one click. There's no reentering payment info. There's no extra checkout steps. Brands using AfterCell see around a 30% lift in AOV. And when you're running real volume, that adds up fast. But here's the part most people miss. It's not just Upsells that AfterCell adds. Once you're live, you unlock the entire rocked monetization suite. Rocked thanks monetizes your thank you page with premium non-competing offers. Think Disney Plus, Hello Fresh. And brands are seeing 30 cents to 50 cents in pure profit per order. Rocked pay plus as a clean wallet placement at checkout. And kicks back another 10 cents to 15 cents in profit per order without hurting conversion. And in some cases, it actually improves conversion. No inventory, no new ads, no operational lift, just margin. This isn't growth hacking. It's just found money. If Q1 is about tightening margins and getting paid more for the traffic you already earned, go to AfterCell.com/operators, activate rocked thanks or rocked pay plus. And you'll get the full AfterCell suite free for a year or an extended 60-day trial for post-purchase Upsells. Right. So 30 concepts? Okay, so being like slightly pedantic here, how do you define concept? We call it jobs. It's essentially what's given to an editor or a strategist. It depends. For a partnership ad, that's a unique video. Right. And so that's an influencer doing a unique video. If we got. And usually there's three hooks in that. So those are iterations. But a concept would be, you know, I'm Jane and I'm doing a Miracle on Video in my car. Like we might do three hooks, but that's one concept. If Jane does what the Foundation video in a kitchen, that's a separate concept. So that's like a unique ad, not necessarily edited, but unique footage. And then I think what's statics, it gets a little harder because the way that we've gone from testing statics is like a bunch of very similar statics with, you know, different headlines. Like we're not really doing that. And so we might have an ad set that has like eight different statics or 15 different statics. And there are variations, but like, it's kind of muddled. I don't know. Yeah, totally. No, I mean, this is like also extremely blurry. I was talking about it with Reza from Motion. And I said, I don't have like a clear view on what a concept is. I think roughly the way we treated it, it ridges some combination of message and format. And like, what are you talking about and how are you talking about it? And then there can be, you can imagine there are variations within that. Headlines or hooks or so. So, but it could be, um, you could edit it differently, right? It could be like, you could remove the voice over and add sound and things. And that would be variations of the same concept. So, okay, cool. So, and you think you're delivering like roughly 30 of those. That's, that, that seems, um, with variations, and we're talking about 50, probably 60 unique ads a week. Yeah. So, we're probably going and doing three variations of like all partnership ads. Two or three of partnership ads. Not above that. We usually like six, which is like, used to be overkill. Now, it's way overkill. And then, yeah, and then the other stuff. But one of the differences that we've made is how we test, is trying to go to this like ecosystem approach. And so, rather than testing like, three ads and in different ads, and then you like scale them out into the whole one, it's almost like a campaign. It's almost like, hey, this is like, and we're not fully there. We're like hybrid or we're going towards it. But it's almost like, hey, this is a persona or like a value proposition that we want to test behind. We're going to create like 12 to 15 ads. And we're going to launch those. And there's going to be statics. There's going to be videos like, they're all going to be grouped around some type of shared theme. But they're all going to be like different ads. Because I think that's how meta is saying it kind of wants things. So it's still a work in progress. Like, I love it in theory. I don't find that we get as, as accurate of, necessarily clean data or learnings from it. Because you got, you know, three ads that get spend and the rest don't. But that's at least a little bit. And I think that just like completely makes that conversation of what is a concept so much more challenging. Yeah. It's why it makes for such good podcast fodder. That's why you can't just know the same thing. There's no other way. Yeah, we'll be able to do dozens of these episodes. over the next decade. - Yeah, and that's a quick question about that. So are you launching all those, like if you have this, all right, so let's say that it's like a certain messaging angle around a specific product, like a certain problem that people have that your product solves. So you're saying you'll go produce a like robust stack of content, like maybe statics, like high-fi, maybe some UGC, and then you'll, will you launch that all under the same ad set? - In theory, yeah, we're definitely not there yet. It's like we don't have like all of the production and all of like the capabilities, like line them all up at the same time, but yeah, if we're doing like a sprint or we're trying to test in your persona, like we're trying to create different ads, right? Let's say we're reaching busy professionals and we're trying to talk about how this is great, like before Zoom and stuff like that, like we're gonna shoot different stuff, we'll get some UGC go and we'll get some, you know, existing assets, we'll usually start with that before like shooting new production stuff 'cause usually we wanna test the message sooner, but yeah, we'll try to find a bunch of different ways to speak to the same thing or the same person and we'll put that together. - Got it, nice. And then in single campaign, then all around that. - Yeah, often single ad set. So we have, and I know one of the questions like CBO or ZBO, we have two ways we test creative. One is partnership ads, we have, and it's really, right now it's like our second highest spending campaign. We have a partnership ads, ABO, where we test things for partnership ads, usually like 250 bucks a day. That is more traditional testing where it's like one concept, three variations, 250 a day. We'll let things spend a thousand before we do anything. So that's usually like five days. But it depends obviously how quickly we scale it. If we see any signs of life of leading indicators, so, you know, North Beam Roas, percent new visits, you know, cost per 1,000 counts, we'll start scaling the budget up in there. If after a thousand looks bad, we'll cut it. And then we'll scale things in there. Like we have stuff in there that's probably spent like a hundred grand over the last like, you know, month. But we'll obviously try to scale it out into like another campaign, but if it's performing we'll leave it. So that's like one way we do it. And I think for partnership ads, I really like it because we are investing a lot in this content and we kind of maybe it's something cost-falsy, but like we kind of do want to, you know, we do want to force some spend to it. I also think we're investing a lot in this content, you know, because we are confident in it. So it's like, it's all just like a level of probability. The other campaign that we have is a CBO with, I think, it's been a while, but I think we do minimum spend on it. And we'll usually have like three ad sets in there with minimum spend and that's kind of those like 12 ads in there concepts. I think if we were more confident in a lot of that stuff, I think we just haven't really had the right approach or strategy. I probably would be more comfortable going ABO, especially because there's a lot of ads. It's not like you're forcing spend to like two ads, but we'll do that and then we'll kind of just like let things, you know, see how they perform. So we have both going. I do think I lean towards the ABO approach a little bit more, which is obviously different than being able to hear. Those are the two types of campaigns that new creative gets put in. Yep, yep. Okay, super interesting. Why do you feel partnerships should be its own campaign? Because I wanted it strictly because I wanted to test them in ABO. And we didn't have ABO. Got it. Got it. So more for like the cleanness of it. And because I want the reason I wanted to be ABO is, you know, some of these partnership ads, I mean, on the high end you're spending, like we just had our largest partner, who's 30 grand a month, just on content. Like I don't want to put that in ASC, and like hope it gets spent, right? Like, sure. I'm going to spend some money on that, because I think you're, everything is a bet. And you're saying, hey, I'm willing to spend this money on the content because I'm that confident. Like I then need to put some level of spend behind it. And maybe I've just gone a little bit away from trusting the system. But I think on that content where you have a something cost of the content, like it definitely is worth it. And so that's the main reason why, otherwise we could, we could, if we were doing ABO everywhere, we could just have one campaign for it. Yeah, 100%. Okay, interesting. I, um, to jump in on, on, you guys want to talk campaign structure for creative testing quickly, we could jump around a little bit. And then I do want to talk about how you're sourcing all the content that you're, you're getting Cody. Cause I've come around on this a bit, like one of our big differences year over year, really, is that we have a far more consolidated campaign. And that comes from a couple of places. One, I asked about the partnership ads, because we've just been less, we've been more flexible on the ways in which we'll consolidate different product or licensing deals or, you know, just seasonal newness or promo ads into the same campaigns. I do think there's like, it's like, what are the dimensions that you really need to be breaking it out of? We obviously have different ad accounts for our different categories. Our meta reps will sometimes say, like, just throw your ring ads, your luggage ads and your wall ad ads, all in one, you know, CBO campaign. And it's like, just give us everything in like one budget line. We're not going to deal. We're nowhere near that. But we went from thinking, hey, we, every new launch should have its own campaign to saying what we think there's value in, you know, meta uses the phrase budget liquidity in giving meta more budget liquidity between these campaigns. Unless we're like, unless we really care about inventory or the margins are significantly different, let's roll up more of these campaigns and group them together a little bit more. So we just have a far more consolidated structure. So if you're out accounts, you have three ad accounts, we've three ad accounts. And you have, are they same pixel, or are they all unique pixel? So two of them have unique pixels that fire conditionally on the product type field. So if you're buying a wallet, you're firing a purchase event from meta just for that. And that's a wallet purchase, we know that. Same with rings and travel right now uses our, travel right now uses our general pixel that fires on all purchases unconditionally. And we're gonna try to move to consolidating to one pixel and then using custom conversions. - Cool, cool. Yeah, I was gonna ask if you tried, like 'cause we're, we're one ad account. We used to be like so consolidated that it was one campaign and now we're trying to break things out further. And I feel like separate accounts, separate pixels, like as far as you can get. So I was curious if you've like tried different ones 'cause otherwise it's, yeah, it's like a hard thing to test. - It's an impossible thing to test. And it's hard because like really, the categories that use, yeah, use a little bit of a side dance in here. Every time we've moved to a single pixel, the categories performed better. That's not causation. I'm not saying that those things are like, are caused by one another necessarily, but it has happened. So then the whoever we're talking to, are reps or someone else would be like, you should try consolidating. And it's like we don't really have any reason to. Things are performing well. It technically got better when we switched it over. There are limitations. You don't get any server side tracking. So you lose all of the happy stuff when you have conditional pixel firing. And that's a problem. And like I think over the long term, it probably makes sense for us to figure out how to get happy on all of our pixels. But it's kind of a delicate, a delicate what's the phrase here. We're walking the line as far as like how we want to approach. So we're going to try to consolidate. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully we don't see any like negative impacts at the category level. That's really how we'll be looking at it because we're not going to be able to A/B test it or do any sort of household out. So we'll just see how that goes. So you're going to go, you're going to go, you're going to try to go separate accounts, one pixel. Yeah, one pixel. And then just optimize for the custom conversions. So the problem, the reason we do it, and we can actually even see this in our travel add account sometimes. The one that uses the purchase event that fires on all purchases is we're promoting a product that has a $450 A/V when you buy it. It's extremely high. If we allow, there are many times where, because we don't have the best performing ads or for whatever reason, like just things are not really working in the account, we'll see meta begin driving $120 average orders. And it's like, oh yeah, you are no longer acquiring luggage customers. You're knowing you're doing what we're asking. You are just kind of like feeding off the bottom of funnel. The people interested in Ridgewalls are coming in and they're purchasing, you know, a Ridgewall and a key case and a tracker card or whatever. And that's not at all what we want. But if you don't even allow for the purchase event to fire on that sort of purchase, I think meta has that constraint and will is more accurately optimizing towards the goal that you're setting for it. Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's probably how we're going to test first is we're going to test different out-account, same pixel, do some signal engineering. Because I think the separate pixel seems like the most risky or like the biggest one. And obviously, you said there's some downsides. I don't know how much. But wait, I think this is one of those things that like, I'm sure some meta reps will be listening. Like they can't advocate for it. Like I just think they're never going to say, hey, I think you should set up a different account. It's like admitting a little too much of, you know, maybe the system's being inefficient or maybe Olivia's point from house is like, the systems are actually so good at getting what you want. This is like, you know, somewhere where you need some signal engineer. But yeah, I think that's that's always been my theory is that the system is so good at optimizing for the thing that it's tracking the most stuff. And like that is, I think if you look at the best brands and D to see, they're like, they're like single buy buttons on websites. They're like, A.G.1 more than ever. All the like invoked brands right now or like extremely low-sku account. And all of your paid social channels are just optimizing for one. very simple thing. And I think if you're trying to build a big catalog business or potentially even more difficult, like just for very unique lines of business, that like the idea that you don't need to do any sort of signal engineering is just like kind of silly to me. Okay. And then I guess to close up the point of missing, get back to crypto. So you think rather than try to get meta to optimize for multiple different things, have it optimized for one single thing multiple different times. Yeah, exactly. It's just building redundancy. And that's why it's like okay. So the one thing I'll say quickly, we don't really, I don't think there's much value, at least our belief at ridges that there's not that much value in the different add accounts. We just think that's more like organization more than anything else. It's really about like the event that you're optimizing for. We set up those pixels to build that redundancy. We want to be optimizing for exactly what you said. The one thing, but doing it multiple multiple different ways. But but there are there are learnings at different levels. Like I don't think it's just that account. I know there's learnings at page level. There's learnings. I believe at some add account level. I don't know. Obviously, there's learnings at pixel level. So what I've been overmitted is if you're going to do it, you almost have to do it. And again, we haven't tested it. You almost have to do it clean. It's almost like groomed approach like different funnel. Totally different. Everything. Totally. Yeah. Or you look at like, you know, a fanbletics as like a fanbletics men Facebook page. Because I think there's there's learnings being rolled up there. So we could probably be even more. We do a rich traveler, rich rings separate pages. We'd probably be even more experimental. But as it relates to the pixels, we're going to try to consolidate a little bit more and then have those custom conversion events and then optimize for those. And that should give us a ideally a nice mix of like, capy and all the server side stuff that you need. You've access to the full suite of value optimization tools. But you're still optimizing for like the exact thing that you actually want to be driving. 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The real questions are, what happens if we scale this campaign by 10% are we already saturated or is there still an efficiency pocket we're missing? If we cut spend will performance hold or will it collapse? And are we balancing top of funnel and bottom of funnel the right way or starving one side of the system? With oppression, you can forecast at the campaign level, model different spend scenarios and understand the real relationship between spend and outcomes. So stop wasting budget on outdated assumptions. Because a dollar in December is not the same as a dollar in August. So instead of defending your numbers in a budget meeting, you can walk in with a plan. And if you're ready to stop guessing and start forecasting, visit pressionai.com/operators. Pression AI like GPS for performance marketers. Yeah. And you're doing that now. Sorry, you are not optimizing for the custom purchase event right now. We have separate pixels. We have examples of, oh, right. These separate pixels are fired conditionally. You don't get capy. We're going to try to consolidate to one pixel, get happy and use custom and conversions to still get the effect of optimizing specifically for like a ring order or a luggage roll. Yeah. Because we do the, we do what you're moving towards, but slightly different where we have a single pixel, but custom conversion events. But we are not actually, we're still optimizing for the single like overall general purchase event. We're just using right now the custom conversions as a measurement tactic. But I, but we've had these custom conversions set up for, I mean, over two years now. So we have tons of specific purchase conversion data and we'll probably get into like how we, how we like the dimensions that deserve new campaigns because that's kind of the approach we've taken. But I do want to go and we haven't felt the need to like make any big swings because we're getting pretty good performance out of all of our broken out categories. But I do want to try and see like what happens if we do optimize for this knife purchase in this knife campaign and not only use it for measurements. So I'll be curious to check in with you once you guys have made that, made that test and got some data back. Totally. Yeah. I do think like the campaign level though, like that's been our approach and that's why our our ad account looks like if you were to go in there, I'm sure all you guys were like, oh my god, like there's a full, a full, you know, ad account page length of live accounts. And it's because we, we don't break out our, our product categories into new ad accounts. But like every time we do this, it like revalidates that as long as you're breaking it out at like the campaign ad set level, like we just launched our cocktail shaker. Couldn't be more clear that a it's a different buyer. What I've been very happy about is I can very clearly see this the campaign optimizing over time. Like we started off at like it's just the CPA has been slowly going down and down and down. We haven't done any refreshes on creative. We haven't done any refreshes on the campaign. It's just clearly more data is getting passed back to meta and in meta is getting better at going and finding a more efficient CPA. So I've been, that's like just like a recent example for hex clad where we didn't have to do any like the signal engineering was happening through the just the campaign structure. We didn't have to do any like we're technical pixel stuff. Maybe again, maybe we could and to your point Connor, maybe we should test that, but it seems that just by having it broken out as its own ad set ad campaign ad set ad funnel. It's, it's kind of achieving what we wanted it to, which is reaching an incrementally different audience. Then we're reaching with our like, you know, cookware ads going to a 12 piece at landing page. What what? From my experience, the only thing that I would add to that is when things are working, I think meta will do that, right? Like if you're saying, Hey, I just, I don't care about any conditions. Just optimize for purchase. I'm going to give you these cocktail shaker ads and go do it now. And if it can get cocktail shaker ads, it's a cocktail shaker ad to a cocktail shaker landing page. Like obviously if things work, the best thing it can optimize for is cocktail shaker purchases. If it's not working for some reason, then I've then I feel I see meta begin to like, oh, we're just going to we're going to see perfect, uh, percent new visits go down. We're going to start driving people that like are just buying wallets and things like that. So it's like, you almost lose, um, you lose the constraint when you don't have constraints, you lose leverage in like low volume periods or when things aren't working, you have to be like more deliberate about testing into them. That's where we've seen issues. I also think that's how to start like like start the less, yeah, less, at least drastically demanding. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like and then if that doesn't work, right? Because like, that's what we're going to do is separate campaigns. Maybe some we're going to test some custom conversions with, you know, whatever it is, different ways, different value rules as well. And then if that doesn't work, then you can figure out what is your next step from there as it, right? Totally. It's a page is an out of count. So for me, it's campaigns out of count pixels is probably how I would go about it. And then and then I'd even put the custom conversions like earlier in that process. Campaign campaigns and custom conversions. Yeah. Totally. Agreed. Yeah. We have seen that by the way, though, like fragrance, when we when we try to put fragrance as it's happened a few times in makeup campaigns, just weirdness. Like we're like makeup will stop miracle bomb ads, stop performing. Like it just throws it off. I do think like high level this, I think any no matter what size you are, I do think now more than ever, I mean, they were harping on this at the performance summit, right? Was was signal engineering, like, whether you're going to be set in doing like the more advanced stuff like Ridge or whether you're just going to be doing it in the out of count with how you structure it. Like I do think like you got to be going into it with like signal engineering in mind and keeping the signal clean for your business objectives and not just like, oh, I have two campaigns and I like 10 different products. I'm I'm dropping under all these campaigns. Like it is going to that will definitely have adverse effects on your not just your ad account, but like you'll probably see that flow all the way up to your like revenue growth. Totally. So I were definitely thinking about that more and more and more. And I think that's what like that's the big takeaway I think here is like you don't have to be doing all this super technical stuff. I think you can if you need to, but you should be like everything you build out in your ad account should have that like signal engineering, signal clarity lands on it. 100%. So we were talking about we got on that topic because I was talking about campaign consolidation. That's where Ridge is at. And another place that we've I don't know if you've considered this campaign consolidation, but I've liked where we've landed from a creative testing workflow perspective. So we're we're at now we've won creative testing campaign for each category, but like we're not breaking out different, you know, in in the past, we might have had a video campaign or an image campaign or something like that. Just dimensions that we've decided were better off consolidating now. So single creative testing campaign CBO concept gets launched as a new ad set. So we'll have a number of variations in there. We're doing minimum budgets on it. So that's how we're ensuring that dollars get allocated to new concepts. And I guess the the concept variations of a single concept in an ad says not a hard and fast role. There are scenarios where we're grouping in a few more. But by and large, we're launching a lot of new ad sets in the CBO campaign. We're using minimum ad set budgets to make sure that dollars are getting allocated there. And then what that's allowed us to do is it's become like a hybrid winners campaign plus creative testing. So when things begin to perform, We. It will naturally take up a larger percentage of the budget because we might have a $10,000 budget for the creative testing campaign and only minimum set up to spend $6,000. So all of a sudden, whatever's winning gets to spend that additional $4,000. We have any concerns about one ad set spending too much. We can set maxes too. So you get a lot of control there. And then we're able to scale that campaign while continuing to launch new ad sets within it to say, hey, yeah, we need to spend $400 a day on these XYZ new concepts. And this is what actually I got from the performance summit and was something that we implemented in the summer of last year. Is like, we just want to get to budget liquidity faster. What we've been doing in the past is we would be testing everything in A/B/O campaigns and then we would be like trying to like pseudo scale those and then we just had a media buyer making decisions at the ad set level, which is just like, it doesn't make any sense. So like just how do we, how do we set up the testing campaign in the structures so that we can get to that liquidity faster? And that's kind of the place that we've landed at now. And it's allowed us to, the creative testing campaign, we've been talking about creative testing budgets. It's hard to know. I don't know actually like our creative testing budget on a day to day basis because a creative testing campaign ends up being able to scale so meaningfully because we're able to learn to maintain this hybrid approach. Yeah, so like I'm looking last, this is like last 60 days, it's like almost 40% of our ad account was spent on creative testing. But the majority of that will be going to things that we've deemed are winners. And then it's just a, it's just a subset of that that's like truly testing with the ad set minimums. I like that a lot. I think the point of getting to liquidity faster is great 'cause like I can tell you on the, it's kind of funny 'cause you and I have flopped from CBO to ABO over the year. But on the partnership stuff, right? That is an issue, especially when we get a winner and we have 30 days rights and we wanna scale it as fast as possible. It's like, all right, we're launching this as 500 bucks a day or 250 bucks a day. Like yeah, you can double that for a few days in a row. You're still not spending that meaningfully. And so it's like, for example, we had a winner recently, those 30 K a month and we actually launched it a little bit later. So we didn't have a full month, so we're like, all right, we gotta spend, we try to spend 10%. So we gotta spend 300 K minimum on this. Titt our goals and I'm like, all right, we launched it at a thousand bucks a day. Like I'm, that's not much. I'm like, I can either just double triple it up in here, and do that, I can relaunch it, right? And not me, my team, but we can relaunch this five grand a day. See how it does? We can try to scale it into other stuff, but it doesn't always perform the same. So I love that you have the option, the liquidity in there, I think makes a lot of sense to scale it faster and take advantage without having to manually decide. Totally. And we've talked about this before is the other way that intuitively made sense to me is just to be launching new creative testing campaigns like on a weekly basis. Every time you launch new tests, it's a new campaign. And then you could turn off losers and then scale up winners in that campaign at a CBO. And then we just, we just landed at this spot that is like this big hybrid campaign where we can get a lot of volume behind it. And do you have any concerns with kind of competition of like, do you ever feel like the newer stuff doesn't get a fair shot against the older stuff or do you feel like the minimums take care of that? I think the minimums take care of that. I think it's a really like elegant solution where it's like, we can make sure if we have some like in your case, we have some expensive piece of creative that we really wanna put budget behind because we feel good about it and we wanna make sure we like fully flesh it out as an idea. It's like, you can set up $3,000 per day minimum and just spend $30,000 over 10 days on it. So you get the like, you get full control in the low end and then as soon as you want to scale, we've at least gotten to the point as it relates to this campaign to say, okay, meta, we will allow you to allocate however you best see fit over like, over the minimum amount. We have minimum set for 50K a day or whatever. We wanna spend 100K on this campaign that the rest of that $50,000 can be divvied up however you choose. And then you even have control on the high end with the maxes where like if all of a sudden meta wanted to spend the additional $50,000 on one ad, we might just set a maximum for that ad set and just say, okay, no, we actually do want you distribute it a little bit more than this. But we try to like, we're trying to like minimize the amount of manual decisions there a little bit and this is at least the current approach. - So can I, so if you, 'cause we do a similar set up, CBO minimum, minimum ad set spending. So we're not gonna like drop a new ad set in there and the new example that's gonna get, you know, $3 to spend. So when you, when you find a winner and it's in a CBO and you're like, hey, we wanna scale up this, this winner, but it's a CBO. So you don't have as much control over the ad set except with like some of the men in the max. Like what's the actual like tactic to make sure that you're spending more on that winner? Like are you, if meta is not doing it, so let's say you spend like, you have a minute and 500 per day or a thousand per day, maybe one scenario is like that ad starts working and meta is recognizing that and it starts to spend way over that min. And in that case, you're probably like, great, we don't maybe need to touch it. It's doing what we wanted to do. Do you ever have a scenario where like, wow, this ad set relative to our other creative test right now is really crushing, but meta's not spending much over the min. Like do you have any tactics to be like, how do we get more budget behind this outside of, you know, duplicating it into a scale campaign or something like that? - Yeah, yeah, so I mean, it's really just those two options. You have, when it comes to getting more dollars behind a winning concept, I guess there's three options. Meta either figures out its winning and does it for you. You're saying that doesn't, that doesn't happen. If you want to get it within that creative testing campaign, we would just set a higher minimum. Yeah, now all of a sudden we're saying, this isn't a creative testing minimum, this isn't $500 a day, this is like, we want to make sure that we're spending $10,000 a day here. That's totally possible. So now you're a man, one from like 500 a day and you're like, we've called this a winner. We're gonna actually go into the ad set and edit 500 to 5,000 or 10,000 or whatever it is. - Yeah, that's the lever that you have there. And then we do still take winners and then we have two scaling campaigns that we have that have different types of exclusions. So we do get it there. So like, but those are CBO as well. So just if you were trying to get budget behind it, we do get it in more places in the account. If it is a winner, you'd like to think at some point, meta figures it out and just start putting budget behind it. But if not, you just have the controls around the minimums. - Yep, got it, that makes sense. And do you, maybe I'm jumping the gun here, but what do you see the most success with now? Do you see the more success with raising the men or duplicating the ad into? - We've put the most success we've seen, what I think feels like a meaningful difference is the performance and scale we can get out of what is called a creative testing campaign. Just because this is where the ads are first launched, it's where they get the most learnings. You're giving meta the flexibility to deliver more budget behind each of those new concepts. So you can scale that campaign further. So again, there's like weird hybrid that feels like the most beneficial. We've never had, like I said, last 60 days creative testing for meta, for our wallet business is like almost 40%. You would never expect that. Like that would be really high. Yeah, it's about 40%. - Yeah, but it's not actually. - But it's not actually. And that's like, and I actually think that's the win is that we were able to more quicker and more effectively get to winning ads getting budget. - Right, that makes sense. Our meta reps were happy with it too. They were like, hell yeah. - Well, we've seen more, I think when we had this conversation like on episode, whenever we had this conversation last, like Hexca was having a really hard time getting winning ad, or like new creative test winning ads to serve in our scale campaigns. That's actually not, that is shifted. And I wonder if that has to do with the Andromeda update 'cause it's like again, theoretically, it does seem like Andromeda would allow for more horizontal scale amongst ads if you give the account like the setup to do so. And now I'm going through our scaled campaigns, this she and like tons of new ads from this year are showing up in our scale campaigns, which I'm pumped on 'cause it's allowed us to kind of reconsolidate our scaled campaigns. Now again, our account still looks crazy 'cause like we have scaled campaigns for cookware and then like different like audience enhance bidding and like value bidding. So now we end up with like a bunch of different like technical settings to scale out certain categories. And then you also have like the non-cookware stuff so it still looks kind of crazy. But I've been very happy that we've been able to take winners and not have to like do as much kind of like campaign jockeying or even just scaling up in the, like we will still scale up and creative testing as long as it performs well. But I was looking at our like creative testing campaign from September one through October 31 just because we don't do as much net new testing in the following two months. Like I think our highest spending asset was like 50 grand. So I'm like great, this is because we're finding winners and we're effectively getting them out of this campaign and getting them to scale in the scale campaign. So I think there's a right way to do it necessarily. But I've been happy at least about that and what that's meant for like the amount of live campaigns we have in Hexcutter in a given time. - Totally. So yeah, in Drumb it obviously plays a really big role here, right? That's what's driving a lot of the decisions or changes or experimentation around campaign structure. So I do want to go back to Cody as it relates to you guys are delivering 30 concepts a week that diversity is more important than ever with things like in drama, that who's producing all that content? - We're not current, we're pretty agents heavy. We're not currently producing a ton. So I would say we have a decent amount or different workflows pipeline. So like our creative team who's less like paid social focus. We have a lot of launches every two weeks. So all of our statics comes from our creative team, whether it's our creative director and creative team working with our external photographer. We do every probably two to three months of a campaign shoot or we'll get multiple products. So that's just all of our e-commerce assets, all of our hero products, stuff like that. One person on our internal team does a lot of product, still, and video. So that's a lot of assets that then gets repurposed, whether that's, you know, or B-roll. We'll try to get some like social style iPhone stuff on those shoots as well. And then like statics. So that's a lot of it. And at least that's like a lot of statics and a lot of like launch stuff. We'll shoot some stuff with Bobby, whether it's, you know, a little bit more higher produced or iPhone lately, like we'll do that internally as well. So that's just our internal creative team and creative strategy team and social teams. We have probably one to two agencies that we're working with at a given time for, you know, creative and not whether this is the episode or not. Like happy to share how our approach is changing. Obviously, you know, we talked about kind of moving towards the organic social stuff, but we have kind of like creator agencies. That's more like, I'll call it more of like your like UGC rather than like influencer. And then influencer, we do a combination. Right. So this is like mainly the partnership ads of internal. We have, you know, people on what we try to do is if we get people that are performing, get them on a, you know, six month contract and get, you know, multiple deliverables. We have people like that. We have just like people from, you know, our internal teams effort that like we can kind of reach out to and get some content. We have super bloom. So we had Lily on like there, definitely the bulk of our partnership spend is with them. We do two things. Some of it is just a UGC pipeline where it's it's influencer stuff. It's what it's white listing, but it's, there's no like organic influencer posts is just getting content and white listing. And then probably double the about a budget comes from, you know, people posting on their on their IG, either whether it's a real or a story and then getting, you know, getting rights to that as part of it. TBD on which style performs better but it seems like both of them work. So they've been most successful. You know, we've tried some other stuff like a Gentio and some other agencies, but really consolidating that down to super bloom for the majority of it and then some internal stuff. For for white listing ads. I think yeah, we'll use like static right? We'll use like, you know, static like really trying to build up a fleet of designers, you know, we use like activate and tell on stuff like that to get like a bunch of designers. Starting to ship some AI stuff like it's it's getting time curious if you guys are, but like just with statics, not with videos like I'm not interested in like AI UGC, but with statics where it's like very close to just like unlimited amount of of those. So that's that's kind of currently where we're at. Lately every market I talked to says the same thing, budgets are tight goals are higher than ever. And I have to prove what's working, not just report it and that is the new reality of marketing. If you can't afford to rely on guesses or platform reported result, you need clear causal proof of what's actually driving growth and that's exactly where house comes in. Incrementality testing is the new scientific way to measure true impact to see what's moving the needle and what's just noise. So you can reallocate spend based on fact and not faith. Cody Connor and I all use house for incrementality testing and it's become a core part of the modern measurement stack. They're not working with more than 40 of the top 100 DTC brands which shows just how quickly this approach is becoming the new standard for serious growth teams. House helps you run real experiments across your channel so you can answer questions that actually matter. 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In a world where every marketing dollar is under a microscope, you need to know what matters with house by going to house.io/operators. That's h-a-u-s dot I-o slash operators and start allocating your budget with confidence. Do you think it will always be so like given given how diverse the creative needs to be and how much you need of it? Will you as always be this agency heavier? Do you think you're in an explorative phase and you'll eventually start in-housing more of it? Yeah, for sure. That's how I feel about it. We will definitely do more, like on the influence side than super one, but I'm not just trying to like pitch in, like they're really good at it. And so we've had better performance from then versus others. But yeah, I think we'll do both, right? We won't just be them. We'll do more internally. For creator stuff, definitely, definitely, I think more. I think definitely we'll in-house it more. I think definitely it's been, you know, as we explore, want ideas or as we've had team turnover and stuff. It's kind of like, who can we bring in against some kind of fresh ideas? But I think it depends. What I'm learning, I know you've said this, but you're influenced by partnerships. Less partnerships, but more bigger ones. That's kind of how I'm approaching agency stuff. So in the past, we might have had like five agencies at a time. Now it's like, I want like two agencies. We want like fully utilized. You want like, you know, the lever business. They know like everything, but it makes total sense. The one thing, this is why I was asking Connor about this, is like with creative diversity being so important, I do think the challenge is having one team produce all of the content. It's just hard to come up. Totally. I just, the biggest change that we're making, obviously we're going to change, we're going to we're merging organic and paid social under one. So that's a big change that we're, we're, we're go, we're actually not really producing that much content or right now we're, we're not going to be producing that much content. We are going to be working with creators. So I think an internal team can work with a wide range of creators and get the creative diversity you need. I think the challenges, if you have like an internal production team, they are probably good at one style of creative. The total. And that's a, I personally think. The scenario where you have an internal team quarterbacking like a network of creators. I think of that as internal. That's almost exclusively what we do at Ridge. Like we don't, we don't actually have anybody who's filming any content that gets in the ad account in any meaningful way. Like there's maybe a handful of exceptions there, but by and large, 95% plus of the, especially the volume based content that we create, I would consider being done internal, but it's all briefs that we're sending out to creators. We're paying $100 of video, $80 video, $200 video, something like that. And that feels, I consider that an internal process. I just don't see any scenario where we have any sort of system that is truly employees of Ridge creating content in that way. Yeah, unless you have like specifically creators and residents. Right. And I guess sorry, it can happen obviously, but then to your point, they're not going to be producing diversity. You're not going to be able to have a couple on staff and a single young dude, and a single old dude and like people living in different parts of the country. Like he'll just never be able to do it. So you can produce content internally, but I think just quarter, like working directly with creators should be considered more or less an internal process. I can't see it getting any more in house than that. I think it's about like if you're going to enter like what we've done is we've internalized a lot of it. But we have multiple different flywheels going on internally where like when I talk about stuff, we're shooting that's like anything super high fidelity. Right. Like anything that we think is going to be more of like a premium feeling high-fi asset that we just don't have that raw footage for. We will brief that in with our content team. Often it's just like shot list, right? It's not even full on it is. It is also full on baked out concepts, but also it's also like just, hey, here's a list of shots that we don't have yet. That like a creator can shoot for us because we want to cut them together with some other high-fi assets. We've already made and then we have like what you just described where you know we have tons of creators that we are briefing to shoot all sorts of stuff and obviously that's like not happening in our studio. But we will also bring creators in studio because we found good success with some of these like high-fi more studio produced like influencer that adds. So we're doing we're doing a little bit of all of it. Totally. And it's like I think allowed us to still be diverse because we have like different teams owning different flywheels. And it's like created just kind of baked in diversity because of that. Yeah, I think yeah, that's a good point. The Xero has been who's producing and who's who's strategizing. And I think yeah, more of the strategy in house that he used to be with temporarily. I think the one will definitely be you know, Subaru and just because they're like influencers experts. I'm like I think they give us a ton that we don't you know have and we could build it. But you know, it's currently working very well. But I think on the other side, yeah, our are too not to get into it too much but like our two like real big rock things are like having a. We'll call it like a discord river is like a community of creators that you just have a deal with. And this is not like influencers. You do see, but it's just like all right, you're on whether you're on retainer, rather you're posting organically or not. Right. Whether you're a TikTok shop creator or not. It's just like there's just a pool of people now, you know, HUD's comforts is like 17,000. expect that, but I think that's it. I think even hundreds you can get a lot of value from, but it's just like, they don't need a full brief, they're coached, right? 'Cause I think like some brands, well brief creators, some will script them even. I haven't found that approach working. I would rather give them strategy upfront, give them like, us do the research, we give them strategy, and they're coached, they know what makes a good ad, they know what makes a good coach, like they know about the brand, and then they just create, and then it's just like every week, they're just boom, here's five assets, here's whatever it is. That's the goal, so we're working with an agency right now, build out like an organic tip-tock and IG reel like trend dashboard, so we can just see what's trending and our space relative to the other stuff, and they can literally just see that, and they're on retainer, and they can just be like, "All right, cool, redness is popping off here, the top five organic videos in redness, I'm gonna go make five, and we'll just get them uploaded that week." And sorry, where's the TikTok trend dashboard living? It's just like a dashboard we're building. We're building it with an agency, but we'll just essentially have like a BI tool, and people can just see that and walk in on Monday morning and be like, "All right, I owe Cody five videos today, "I owe five videos this week." Like they already know about the product, the brand, all that stuff, like, and then this is what we're working right now is in progress, and then it's just like, "All right, here's the ones that are performing, I think this is what we can do," and they just like shipped it, 'cause what I found with like UGC agencies, this is what we're not doing, like the tube science and narrative, the whatever it is, where it's like, it's scripted, right? It's like, it's UGC in quotes, but it's like, you know what you know what I'm talking about, like the very like forced kind of direct response, very scripted, that has never worked for us, and it's just never what works for us, this was stuff that feels very organic native, right? And the other thing that I've learned about it is like, I remember when we were at the meta, we went to the meta performance road show, just like brought my team there, and you guys know how they have that IG Reels, like trending thing, so it's like in meta business suite, but you can see like what topics are trending for Instagram Reels? I was like, I wish I had like a full time employee, creator, who just sees this, and they're just like, "Oh, that's what's trending, I'm gonna make a content, I'm gonna up to that day and see how it does," 'cause like, what happens with these agencies, right? It's such a long process where you have to, you bring them on, you have to ship products, you review creators, you go over briefs, you script them, you get round one of footage, you edit it, it's editing by committee, and you have five people who are giving notes on it, and you don't even, everyone's got their opinion, the agency is editing stuff a certain way for the brand, just because the brand is paying the money, but they're probably doing it begrudgingly, you end up with this like, watered down piece of content, that's like pretty produced, but it's also not produced like Conner's team is doing it in like a beautiful thing, you know? It's like this middle ground, right? And so I'm like, you just wasted two to three weeks, you could have just shot something, put it up that day, seeing how it did, got some data iterated, and so what I'm trying to do, and this is very similar on organic and paid socials, avoid that middle ground of like multiple edits, multiple people, groovles, it's either something gets shot and uploaded that day, whether it's organic social or paid social, you see how it does, and then you make iterations based on the performance of it, and it's all based on trends or organic insights or something like that, or, you know, or you're gonna then do production stuff where like you're gonna take a long period of time to make a perfect video, but I think that middle ground is like, what I'm trying to stay away from. And so that's the goal, we're literally building like a creator residence program to do that, and like that's what we're trying to get to, so hopefully in six months we can come back here, and I can be like, yeah, this worked. Well, that's exactly what I was gonna say. Like it's funny looking back on some of the older pods, like what we were talking about creating, and we're still kind of at the point where you're creating dozens of concepts a week with variations, maybe you're landing between like 50 and 100 ads. What you're describing, Cody, and it sounds like it's maybe the most critical question you're addressing at Jones Road right now. It's like six months from now, you might be creating hundreds of pieces of content a week. If you have a discord of 17,000 people, I'm sure comforts posting and testing thousands of ads a week, I would think. So just creative volume that you're from now might look like so significantly different, it just won't even be recognizable. I think so and that's like the bet and the hope, and it's, you know, again, but it's all organic and paid. And yeah, just the ridiculous one, but again, it's not possible for a brand to create that. It's all done internally, but it's all creators. Okay, and then, and then in that scenario, like if you think about a creative testing campaign, is it what you were describing earlier? Like if you're getting, let's call it 200 posts a week now that are going direct, you want to test it on paid. Do you set those all up as ad sets and run 200 bucks a day and just have this like, I don't know, do you have any idea? - No, I haven't gotten there yet. I feel like that'll, it probably won't be an overnight fix. So it'll be like our account will like mold as we scale, you know, 'cause I don't know. I'm curious how comfort does that. I remember I talked to somebody from Verizon one day, and I'm like, yeah, we launch creative every day. Like that's the goal. It's like, it'll be so much creative that I don't think we can launch it weekly. - Right, let's do it daily. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Conor, I'm curious, what's your answer? Thinking about what we were talking 18 months ago, two years ago has changed a lot. You guys are at a good kind of steady state today. What do you think are the critical questions you're addressing that you'll want to be circling back on in the future? - Yeah, one thing we're trying to figure out a solution for right now is the filler content from creators. And while we have a lot of influencers that we work with regularly, and these are not necessarily like huge influencers like we find people that have 10,000 followers, 20,000 followers, perform really well for us, and these are very cost effective. You know, we're paying, you know, probably a thousand bucks per month when we're sourcing new creative from them and much less than that, or not sourcing new creative. But one thing we are trying to be better at, and I know some people like have creators in house and do it this way. We are going a little bit of a different approach to start is just bringing on someone that is like super experienced in e-commerce, working with creators to source content. And that will not even be full time. There's gonna be a freelancer. But having this person is like a freelancer, I don't know how many hours per week, exactly like 10, 20 hours per week. Where anytime we need creator-led content from not an influencer, just like a creator, that person has an absolute army of people that we can go and get content for, whether it's a 65 year old woman or a 24 year old man, whatever it is. And like we can kind of go fill that content much quicker because we just have the network. And we have a single person who is just, all they're gonna be focused on is sourcing that like creator-led content and like filling our library with any gaps that we have. So that's like one of the big bets that we're taking in 2026 is like bringing this person on and seeing if we can just like get this creator content much, much, much quicker and get it indoor ads, much, much, much quicker versus right now. It's like we don't have that. - It's like literally the, I think one of the most important functions in e-commerce now. - Right. - Yeah, it's like what Conor just had is extremely similar to what you're talking about. - Yeah. - And we're in the same bucket. Now let me ask you guys this, because I do think there's a trend where people were creating a ton of volume. It wasn't meaningfully different. So I think we all went through the experience of wanting to like cut back and taking more intentional, we wanted to be more intentional in the way that we were creating concepts. Would you guys agree that that happened over the last two years? It's like we would happily take a reduction in volume if it meant an increase in quality, diversity, and thoughtfulness of concepts. - Yes. - All right, so I've got some interesting numbers to share from Ridge from a beloved sponsor, Ridge panel. We switched our support stack at Ridge to Ridge panel about 15 months ago and our cost particular has dropped over 70%. That means same team, same volume, and over $500,000 in annual savings. Seasets have not changed. We've been sitting at 96% week after weeks so the automations did not come at the cost of customer experience. Our last platform talked a lot about AI, but nothing was really changing under the hood. Ridge panel is genuinely AI first. They came in, they rebuilt our workflows, and we were live in under two weeks with basically no lift on our side. And they're about to roll out a returns portal, which for us is huge because they can do the same thing for returns as they did for customer service that would be sick. If you wanna cut down your support costs now and save on returns platform with an AI first platform, talk to Ridge panel. Go to richpanel.com/demo, tell them Connor from Marketing Operator sent you, and they'll take good care of you. Thank you. (air whooshing) So now we're talking about creating massive amounts of concepts with like huge teams of creators. Do you think? Like, so I'm having this thought right now, but like actually, maybe the most important piece will be like the coaching aspect to make sure that you're not getting just a bunch of average concepts or like boilerplate stuff from the team of creators. Or I could also see, hey, it actually, it doesn't matter so much. We're just gonna solve it with volume. If you have hundreds of people creating content, it's like even if, even if it's only 20% of them are doing meaningfully, you know, new and interesting and creative and diverse concepts, and like, you're still gonna get more than what you need, and it's just a volume play. Or are we gonna go through the same thing where it's like, it's less about quantity and it's more about how are you finding the right creators and coaching them to the right concepts and like, actually focusing on quality. What do you think we are in that like adoption curve? - Well, I can, speaking from a hex-clad perspective, we are, we kind of have two separate things happening and we have like cookware, which is like our most mature funnel. We've been running cookware funnels for four years and very much so gonna be intentionality over everything. If we're gonna have a lot of fun, If we can get to more volume through intentionality, great. And I absolutely think that this freelancer that we're looking at hiring will help us do that. But then on the other side of the spectrum and all of our conversations we've had on here, I've kind of shifted how I am thinking about this. I want to introduce a lot more product funnels into our account this year because to the conversations we've been having and some of the holdouts you've ran, you've validated that those different products are reaching new audiences. And sure, we do have like some big product launches that I think can be like good acquisition funnels on their own and that's one part of it. But I also think that we have products in our stack right now that are really popular products like the R Walk, our griddles, our high-sided pans that we don't push creative across those. But if I think if we did, we would be reaching new incremental customers, then we would be reaching with our current cookware stack. So I think when you think about the like a plus product launches as well as the like, hey, we just want to get more ads across our griddles. I think we're going we're going back to a more like immature phase in those funnels where volume is way more important. So like yes, we're still going to be intentional, but we're almost going back to where cookware was in 2022 where it's like volume volume volume we got to scale through. So like we're going there with certain funnels, but we're still going to be very, very, very intentional and like letting the concept lead the way in our more mature funnels. So we're trying to we're trying to strike that balance and like do kind of different things for different funnels. And that's where like having this person where we can just source creator content super quickly is going to help us check that that volume box for like these new products that we have launching in in 2026 that we're all very confident can be, you know, big new acquisition pipes on top of the ones that we already have builds out. So yeah, kind of going back a little bit in time to where we were totally time ago and needed to serve that a little bit more. I think I think working with creators correctly actually fixes the or like naturally allows for diversity because I think if we if you're working with creators correctly, you're not over scripting and doing things like that. And you give them I think the right strategy up front that's like like the right brief is like here's maybe a few of the value props that we want you to touch on. Here's what's performed for us. Here's do's and don'ts and then like go create right we want you to be creative right. And so I think if you're working with them properly and you're not like overly scripting and briefing it and trying to make it on brand. Like I think you actually get that natural creativity. I spent if you're doing probably and then part of creativity is like one thing I'm really curious about is trying and it probably is so simple is like when you get a winning ad or winning creator ad, just give that let's say you have that discord of people, just give that to them and have them recreate it because either they're going to create it in a different way, but like also part of reach and traffic is who it's coming from. Right. So let's say you get a you know mid 40s male talking about you know, Ridge wallet. Well now you get a you know and he's he's you know essentially has a certain look maybe he's you know middle of country when I get somebody you know 30 year old different ethnicity different background like and it's not that all of them will work, but if you have this big pool of creators doing the same thing like either they're all going to give it their little unique approach, but they're all going to maybe reach different people differently. So I think that's like one aspect that like if it works, I'm curious what you're I think is it's so simple that it's like you just need that creative that that creator pool to then just go ship it off to and like already have structured 100%. And I said this for a long time. I think most problems can be solved with volume and if you just have a ton of creators, it just kind of naturally addresses some of the issues exactly to your point. I also agree with Conor's point that it's like we will probably if we all do our jobs well or like if if if this strategy plays out in a way that we anticipated to we'll all build communities of creators over the next year and then we won't care too much about the volume will help and then we will reach a certain point where it's like, oh, it's actually we need to be shaping this like resource like maybe a little bit more effectively. And that's where and that's just like the natural flow of things like just get the volume, get the ball rolling, get traction, get people creating content, you'll get all the benefits of that. And then as that business matures in the way they connoisse it, it's a matter of like crafting a little bit differently. And that's why Cody I was curious about the even the TikTok dashboard seems like such a great resource where I think there's a scenario where you can find just a couple bits of information and a couple bits of guidance that can actually be like super effective and just like helping this network of creators produce like even just slightly more relevant or better content. Yeah, yeah, we'll say and again, like I'm always going to bring it right now back to organic social like we'll have some critters that are just doing ads paid social, but a lot of it is going to be that because I also think that's such a great testing ground. It's really the same algorithm and environment and it's like, but I don't know if you guys look, but like there are creators on TikTok that post essentially the same thing every day. Yeah, totally. And it's just like slight difference and like some of them take off some of them don't. So there is, I totally get quality and like, especially with that and drama, like the same ad over and over is not going to necessarily do much. So like it's not the exact same as organic social, but there also is something to like the way the social algorithms work and the people behind them, you just have no idea what's going to perform. So there's some level that I think probably it's like like almost marrying, having different funnels or pipelines where like creator stuff is like super high volume, very not briefed at all, like not scripted. And then you also should have some stuff that's like what hex-clad's team is doing and this like beautiful polished things that you're like meticulously editing and like you're not shipping 40 of those a week, you're shipping like two of those a month probably. Yeah, 100%. And it's like some of the stuff that now is just become a part of our product workflow and other stuff is like the one off stuff. See if like the cocktail shaker, Dr. Dre collab, right? Where that was obviously all very meticulously ideated, edited, edited again, edited again, launched. And then you have other stuff where we always shoot product hyperls now, like always. Whenever we're shooting a new product, there's always that hyperl and it's like just a beautifully shot. It's value prop driven. It shows like the use cases really well. Like that's just part of our like checklist now whenever we do a new product. So it's a little, and then some of the stuff that's one off gets like ultimately brought into the, you know, kind of the checklist now. Totally. All right, guys. Well, I feel like this was pretty good. Pretty good little check in. Yeah, it was great. All right. Thank you for listening to another episode of marketing operators as always. Thank you to our sponsors, Motion Rich Panel, Prussian, Aftersell and House. Make sure to like, subscribe, please leave comments, questions, tweet at us. We'll be doing a marketing operators hotline coming up soon with love to get some of those questions addressed. Thank you for listening. We'll see you again next week.