Tactics to Get Unstuck as a Mid-7-Figure Brand

(upbeat music) - Today I'm joined by Brad Plock founder of WRK Marketing, a performance shop built around a core idea. Stop guessing, instrument the system, then scale what's provably working. I've had the pleasure of working with Brad before, so it was extra fun into eating him in this context. On this episode, Brad walks us through the exact diagnostic he uses when a mid-7 figure brand is stuck. It's tactically specific, so if you don't want that, you should skip this episode. We also talk AI as a force multiplier, using it to generate concept variance, score add to land page congruency, and raise the creative floor. And Brad closes with real outcomes, including launching an internal brand from zero to 1.5 million in six months, with 25 senate margins. Welcome to In The Money, an exploration of where they can still make money in D to C and CPG. We talk to some of the most interesting, five to $50 million founders, operators, investors, acquires, and lenders in the space to ultimately answer the question, is D to C and CPG still a good business? Hope you'll enjoy the show. Brad, there'd be a lot of listeners that are stuck at a mid-7 figure brand. They can't quite break through. What are a few things that you typically see or that you'd audit in your growth strategy for them? - Yeah, I think you have the first identify what the problem is. And so with all the clients that we own board, we take them through a process of just kind of like discovering what the problem is, and so that we can, we can uncover that and then build the strategy that solves it. And so I can walk you through how we think about solving that problem, and then maybe some specific tactics for the problems that show up commonly. So the first thing that we do is we build out a dashboard in anybody, whatever your favorite tool is, that organizes metrics in a very specific way. So you've got overall revenue, ad spend, MERs kind of your blended top level. The next layer underneath that is, what is the split between new customer acquisition? So new customer revenue, CAC, if that's something you're paying attention to, MER, if that's another version of kind of CAC in efficiency, new customer orders or new customer sales as a percentage of revenue in orders, and then another split would be repeat customers. And that's kind of the first split. Then there's additional layers underneath that, which is like, how do the channels actually break out? But usually that first view is very obvious because either it's not uncommon that we'll get clients and they're like, yeah, MER is fine and this is our goal and we're at our goal. But acquisition is a huge problem. They're actually burning cash on acquisition, or the opposite can be true, which is acquisition is fine and their retention is miserable for any number of reasons, whether it's baked into their model or they just have a bad product or something along those lines. And so we build out the dashboard that helps us understand which one of those metrics is off first. And then we can actually start to dig into, how can we fix that? So if it's an acquisition problem, which I think is a pretty common where folks come to us and they're not as efficient as they want to be, they can't break through certain spend ceilings, what we just need to really do from there. And so we've spent a lot of this year rebuilding our process around is actually understanding what's working. And like it sounds really easy and obvious to say that, but tactically what it means is basically another dashboard of creative. It's pulling in all of your creative and then starting to tag it with all of the important themes. And this is in the way you use is pillars, personas, and angles, personas being who you're talking to, pillars being what's the core message and angle being how you communicate that message and actually quantifying it. Because I think you've probably exhaustively heard it as I have this idea of creative diversity. And it's like, cool. What does that actually mean? And I think as you start to tag your ads by all these different things, you can actually start to quantify how much have I spent into this pillar versus this one? What is my efficiency when I talk about that thing versus this thing? And how does that differ across maybe different products? Every time we've done that, it helps you build a very clear roadmap of what to talk about next. And time and time again, I've seen that be one of the more valuable things we do. It's an unlock acquisition is actually understanding what's working in your creative, down to the angle of the messaging and all that good stuff. And just like truly quantifying what diversity means in your ad account today. - Yeah. And so if I were to read that back, there are maybe two common problems for a stuck mid-7 figure brand. One is they have a high level understanding, maybe they're a MiR or they're a CACC, but not a granular enough understanding that maybe, hey, MiR is working on a blended level, but it's too high on new customer acquisition, which is why you keep losing money. And on the creative side, they're not being scientific enough on, hey, they're just throwing a bunch of creative, maybe only picking one that works, double down, then hits a cap, then they're like, okay, I'm stuck again, they're not kind of running an iterative enough process. - Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, exactly right. And there's a bunch of other, like creative is not the only lever that you can pull, right? You might just be spending too much on Google branded search, or maybe there's something silly in your actual spend allocation that could be off. But one of the common ones we see is people don't actually have a scientific understanding of what's working in their ads and at least the hypothesis for why, because when you start to ask the questions why, you can start to check the box on yes or no, at least for a moment in time, right? Like you may have executed a concept or a pillar poorly, and it's worth revisiting in the future, but you have to at least try to answer the question so you know where to put your attention next. - Just to set some reality, I'll put my brand owner hat on thus your agency hat owner on, which is for a mid-7 figure brand, they are somewhat upper limited by the funnel math, the ad account math, the product market fitness. Would you say that it's still in reality? I don't know talking about WRK, I'm talking about most agencies that service the space, that you don't have the magical liquor, but it's gonna take them from five to 30. You can do best practices and probably have efficiency improvements, but for founders that are looking for the agency to take them to the promised land, that's the exception rather than the rule. - I would say that's probably fair. I think, and in all of the biggest wins that I can think of, at least at the top of my head for clients over the last year, call it. All of them came to us with at least one thing clearly that was working, and maybe they didn't totally know what that thing was, but when we opened up the ad accounts or we looked at the dashboard I just mentioned, it was always that something was working, they just needed to do more of. Or they were doing too much of something, and they were overspending a new customer acquisition and need to be dialed back in. But they have like some, some ones of success. It's usually not a zero to one kind of piece of it. Yes, as much as I would love to say, I have the magic wand. I think my job, in any agency's job, is to have a system or a playbook that they run and be really good at executing that playbook. It can change over time. And like I said, we're changing ours this year on creative strategy pretty heavily. But if I can't convince you that I have a system that I believe in that I know how to execute, then you probably shouldn't hire me, because it's just like, what is that agency going to be doing? That doesn't mean it's gonna work for you, but it should be able to provide evidence that it's worked for other folks. You wanted to deliver a ton of value on the pod today. You've got a list of tactics that you've seen work. Maybe you can share that with us. Yeah, absolutely. I was looking, we had a client I wanted to share, kind of a recap of some stuff that was working. I figured it would be helpful for just like our entire internal team to look at. So I just grabbed a couple of, hopefully very specifically tactical things that are somewhat easy to implement that you could test out. And it's worked more than once. So that was the qualification for this was, it wasn't just a one off swing that we did, that worked. And so there's a couple of themes for this. One of them is landing pages. One of them is tracking improvements. We've got ad formats, and then we've got an actual campaign set up inside of meta. Any particular one that like screams here that you might be interested in starting with? I think that let's go through all four, because I think it's super relevant, and we've had feedback on the pod saying that we want tactical, kind of takeaways that we can go and implement. Cool. Sweet, I'll just go and order that. So starting with landing pages, where we found the most value with landing pages is every ad account probably has an ad or two, that's like carrying the majority of the spend. Or you've been in a position where that was the state of the business for a while. And so what we've done is, take in, you kind of wash that ad exhaustively. Play it once, don't take any notes. Play it a second time, start jotting down all the things you notice, the things that the person's talking about. Play it a few more times, and just keep taking notes until you get through it. And then you go into meta and you look at, where's the spend delivering to, who's seeing it, age, gender, where are they seeing it from a placement perspective? And you start to kind of formulate this hypothesis around, who is this ad very specifically talking to? Now in some cases, what it might look like is women 45 it up, and that can be as simple as it is. And sometimes it's more kind of defined information about how a person's feeling. I can't think of a state of mind off top I have, but it's more like a state of mind as opposed to like a specific demographic kind of persona. And then you just, you build a landing page that matches that specific ad. And the easiest way that we've done this is five reasons why or X amount of reasons why, for the persona. So five reasons why blank persona is switching to blank product and why you should too. And what's great about that, I'm sure this has been mentioned exhaustively across any, you know, e-coms advice, this is build a landing page. But what's great about that format of LannyPages, it forces you to order a certain amount of reasons why an actual specific person should switch to your product and then speak clearly about those things and then choose the importance of the order of those different things. And I think it puts you into a different mindset of how you're actually building that page. And we've seen that that just like takes those top ads and just gives them additional runway. Doesn't mean you have to turn off the PDP ad, but it just adds a little bit more congruence and allows you to push more volume through that one specifically. What I want to tell you about today's Parker credit cards. Look, there are multiple subreddits dedicated to credit cards points hacking and I get it. But what don't you put those really want in today's market? Help managing their payback windows when acquisition starts ramping. With Parker credit cards, you get up to 90 days repayments on ad spend to help you on your cash conversion rather than having all that upfront ad spend before revenue starts coming in. Parker allows you to spend aggressively while still managing cash flow, including that a spend. So instead of hunting for best points or cashback programs, realize that the best ROI is to be able to increase your ad spend without hurting cash flow. Go and check them out. Parker credit cards at getpalker.com. That's getpalker.com. Parker is a financial technology company, not a bank, the Parker commercial credit. MOSTICOT is issued by Patriot Bank and a member of the FDIC pursuant to license by credit card international incorporated. Just to ask, I'm curious, what is the percentage of traffic that you're sending, let's say from meta specifically to PDP versus LP? Yeah, it depends on the brand a little bit, right? So in a parallel, for the most part, if you're a no-zack from Hollisox, he spends most of his traffic through landers, which I think is uncommon for a parallel. But I think it's not single-squeue, but single-squeue in the sense that he sells socks for specific people. And so going through the landing page I think allows to add that kind of layer of context for who the person is coming through. But if you're a brand with 100 skews in a parallel, PDP is probably going to be fine for you unless you have a very heavy problem solution-oriented product. So I think there's some context there that's required. But in the most poignant example that I have for this landing page that I was giving for the one I was just talking about, it's like 90% of their spend goes through landing pages or landing pages like that. But yeah, the mix depends pretty heavily on the category. Yeah, let's go to the second one. Yeah, cool. So tracking improvements, these are not as fun, because nobody likes talking about the pixel. Although everybody divides to think that there's some magic solution to optimization that you can just like a setting on in meta and all of a sudden it's solved. But there's a couple of things. So we've seen some issues with like match rates for excluding existing customers for when we use something like just the pixel straight up or clavio audiences. Like for whatever reason, clavio doesn't have as good of a match rate back to meta. And so when you try to exclude customers, they just don't work as well. Shopify audiences has worked extremely well for that reason. Now, I don't love Shopify audiences for, I guess like prospecting or trying to scale. Like I just haven't found as much success as just using what meta has out of the box. But they're really nice at excluding people from campaigns, which is great. That'll come back to kind of customers' exclusions in a tactic in a bit, because I think they're supposed more there. But something we've been experimenting more with recently is for brands that are kind of mature in their marketing, I guess, journey. And it really depends on the market. We have a client that sells, you know, like a digital product to photographers as an example. And like it's pretty niche down. And so they're very mature, although maybe their revenue isn't as big as, you know, it's not $100 million a year. It's not $50 million. But they're big for their market. So mature, I think, is the word that I'm using there. Optimizing for new customer purchases has been something that's forced meta a little bit further in the direction of finding kind of incremental new customers. And we've seen some indicators of successes one, AMI, Ardust and Proves as a result of it. But you can see some kind of like precursor metrics to that. If you pay attention to new visitor percentage, that can be something that tells you that meta is actually forcing itself outside of the box a little bit further. So you do need, to my understanding, at least you do need a third party tool that can help you optimize for new customer purchases specifically. But that has had some kind of incremental wins from doing that. And when you're pushing meta to do that, are those new visitors per visitor more expensive, even though on an aggregate basis, it's more efficient? Yeah, you might find like the cost of the traffic, like a CPM or CPC ends up being a little bit more expensive. But it ends up netting out in the conversion rate improvements or just the better optimization that you can make for new customers over time. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's interesting. Yeah, let's keep going. Cool. Sweet. OK, I'm going to jump down from my list, at least to the kind of Shopify audience customer list point that I was making just to close the loop on that one. This is like, I don't know. Maybe this is an old school tactic, but we kind of revived the idea of retention campaigns in meta this year for similar group of customers where they are either really mature in their segment or they have a lot of new product development that's coming out. And so what this looks like is we are building campaigns inside of meta that targets directly customers lifetime customer list or however you want to define that customer list. There's an important distinction here, though, which is you are excluding what you might define as an active customer list. I think CTC talks a lot about how they define active customers. Simple way to think about it is, the person is very unlikely to come back and you've been sending them emails exhaustively and they're not purchasing. You can include these people in this hard getting, but you want to exclude people who are opening your emails. They are buying over the last 30 days. Maybe they're an active subscriber if you're a subscription-based product. But going back out into the well of people who are familiar but haven't purchased in a long time and probably won't and running your top-performing ads and/or a catalog to them. And just like recommencing them why they should come back and purchase. Now, when we do this, we're holding it to a higher standard, from an efficiency standpoint because we don't want to just go repay the same cac on people who are familiar with us. There should be a little bit more margin built into that expectation there. And also, yeah, I guess that's actually kind of the main point is you should leave more room for margin on those folks because it's not a brand new customer. So you have to squeak out a little bit of additional margin. On top of that, the buzz word here, incrementality of that campaign is probably a little bit less incremental because they're familiar with you. So you kind of have to hold it to a higher standard. For one of the clients we've been doing this for, they've basically doubled their repeat customer revenue year over year, not exclusively because of that. But I would say it's probably 50% of that at least. On top of that, they've been releasing new products and we're reaching people who they've emailed them. They've tried to get in touch with them. They're in their Facebook group. They've gotten emails from them. They texted them. They're not coming back without being recommenced through an ad to come back and purchase. Yeah, I know. That's super interesting. And brands are either excluding them completely because they think that they're active customers and then missing out on the incremental lift of re-engaging them. Well, that's probably the default. Yeah, exactly. And I think that that actually brings up an interesting point, which is, should we just include them, include the non-active customers in our prospecting campaign? Should we just let that campaign go and run free? And I don't have a strong opinion on this, but I've seen, we have a client that sells a protein bars. And when we set up a campaign for them, we built out a new offer, a new landing page, and built out a bunch of new creative this year. And when we relaunched all of that, we forgot to initially kind of exclude the full customer list before we had this strong opinion. And the first day, I was like, okay, that looks like way too efficient and too good to be true. Okay, second day, it's still the same. So, and then I'm like, okay, well, then I'm looking at the difference between new customer or between Rua as a new customer Rua as, and there's a pretty big gap. Now, new customers still looked awesome, and the volume looks great. And the reason I tell that long story is because I think that there's probably some validity to having your repeat customers help influence meta who they should go after can be valuable, 'cause it can give some signal to the campaigns. Where it becomes tricky is if meta starts to like hone in on that a little too much, and they overspend and kind of back to the point of incrementality is meta might think that they're doing a good job because attribution looks nice, but if that person was likely to come back anyways, that's where it can get tricky. So, I've seen some success with like that igniting a campaign, but then eventually we exclude those people anyways, and then build a separate campaign for them. But yeah, I think back to your original point, a lot of people are just like blanket excluding them, and they're not coming back. So. - Yeah, yeah, no, that sounds like a really potentially a really big win for brands that are doing that. No, I love this. Let's keep going. - Cool. So, I've got one more, which could be a bunch of mini sub topics if you wanted to dig into any of those additional pieces, but two types of ads that have worked very well for us across a ton of brands. The first is kind of an expert, but really more like a founder kind of video. And I think what works about founder videos is kind of like naturally is, in most cases, if you started the company as a founder, like you had an obvious pain point or several that you were trying to solve. And so, you can make whether it's a super professionally filmed or it's you holding up your, you know, you're doing this, doing the UGC type of thing, you can very clearly articulate the pain point that you had and communicate how you built the problem specifically to solve. that. And I think there's a lot that goes into that. One is it's very problem solution oriented. So it's very easy for people to understand the problem that you experience because maybe they experience it too. And then also I think people just like the idea of buying from people that they can relate to, which is, you know, that's probably what pumped out this whole UGC wave that we've been seeing for years. But I think that that format is just like worked very, very well, just clearly stating like here's the problem I had, here's how I solved it. And you can do as many features as you want. And that can be really fun. The second format that's that's great. And I love it because it's low lift from, I guess an effort perspective like filming a founder video might take, you know, some time to think about what you're going to say and film it and maybe if you're awkward on camera, you got to figure that out. But this next one is just grabbing customer images and videos from your actual reviews and launching them as is. So the way that this works for us and we've played this out a few times is we'll just go into our reviews, we'll download it, the image as is, we'll edit literally nothing. And then we'll take the word for word review and paste it in there. Like leave in the typos, everything in quotes, verified customer and just throw it up. And that's worked very well. We've tested this for a client recently where I we took the review images as is with some copy to match that was like their top performing copy of all time versus the actual specific customer testimonial customer testimony will crush the best copy of all time because it was it was actually the story being told by by that person specifically. And it's super easy to get more of this. You can send an email to your customer list right now and say, hey, I would love to give you a free product. Can you just go leave us an image review and give us permission to use it in our ads? Now for legal reasons, they're probably supposed to say like, hey, I got, you know, you're not asking for a five star review, but they should probably say I got compensated for leaving a review as you might want to add that there's claim we're in there, but you don't need a graphic designer to do anything to these images. You can just set them up. One additional hack I'm just on was this rant right now about review images, but one thing that you can take on top of that and get more life out of those specific ads with is just take one of your top performing headlines and your top spending review customer image and marry those two things together and just like letter rip. And we saw an ad which was capped out at like 20k and profitable spend over its lifetime. We added that and it literally 10x the volume of spend through that ad budget spike taking and adding a headline on something that was already working. If you're like most founders, supply chain is probably one of those things you just deal with because you have to not because you love it and not because you're an expert. If you spend hours chasing suppliers and negotiating tiny price breaks, trying to figure out if delays were real or just another excuse. You probably want to pay attention to this next bit. 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You're kind of creative matrix. I imagine there's a big spectrum of creative output from your median, kind of five to 15 million dollar client. On the one end, they've just got the muscle. They're either kind of creative lead at the founder level or at the executive level. They've got a couple of people. They're producing a ton of social content. On the other, maybe they're product focused but not creative focused. Or maybe they're operations focused on it and not creative focused. I presume that it's easier to work with the highly creative. We just have a ton of assets. Is that right or is there a point like you can only test so much in a certain period to get the signal? That's a good question. I think, I don't know. I don't know if I've played it out. I mean, it's certainly helpful if a client has a bank of assets. If they have a bank of assets and they're doing a photo shoot a month, and they before the photo shoot, they say, "Hey, what's working right now? So we can add in some of these things to the mix." That is definitely the case. If you are just naturally creative and producing something, I think that obviously gives you a like up because it's like even if we do no edits to this, we have a floor for how much creative is going into the ad account every single month. In our process, we edit and remix a bunch of stuff kind of exhaustively to make sure that we squeeze every single possible drop out of it. But yeah, I would say it's probably fair to say that. But if the more creative side is definitely a like up. When you think about the brands that you worked with, maybe what's the most common misconception founders have about working with paid media's role and growth? Yeah. I think there's just like one of the common confusion points that comes up is that brands, they look at Roas and it is what it says it is. And so even to this day, I'm sure the people listening here are like very sophisticated. So it probably won't surprise anybody. But like Google Roas is not the same as meta. You have to account for branded search and they kind of have this assumption that attribution is this perfectly crystal clear thing and they should spend into it based on attribution. Now, granted, it's a very difficult topic. The incrementality is the buzzword of the year. It's a very difficult topic to try and solve for. But I think it just gets, attribution is a very tricky game. And I think people are still very bogged down by the differences between how meta reports and Google reports. And that just shows up in how they spend. And then it just gets infinitely more complex as you introduce Amazon. Maybe you get into retail, and you start to open up the bucket of where people can convert. And so I think that that gets a little bit tricky. And people don't like fully, like if you're building, it kind of off the off of the attribution game, if you're building a P&L that is exclusively looking at Amazon versus your D to C business and not thinking about how they overlap, you probably aren't either you're overspending or understanding it in some regard because the view of how you're looking at it. To take the other side of the funnel, there is no longer any edge in retention marketing in 2025, agree or disagree. I think it depends on the brand and how they're executing that specific kind of retention channel. Because I gave you, we were just talking about something you can do differently in your meta account that is a retention tactic that is meaningfully impactful. And so if you're not doing something like that, then I'd say it's underrated. You're not doing enough. And then if you think about, but to your point, right, you can anybody can go upload all their brand's history and their website and whatever into a cloud project and rip out a ton of emails and send a ton of volume. So I think the value in that is one having a strategy for the messages that you're saying and how you're saying it and probably having a product calendar and things like that that align with what you're saying. But then also just like being human. And the way that the way that I see it, there's a lot of value on the retention side of that is like plain text emails because they again, back to my point about like it forces you to write out something thoughtful there like the landing pages. It forces you to communicate with like a real person on the other side of the email inbox. So yeah, I don't know if that's a fair answer. I'm kind of wishy-washy back to forth, but let's keep pulling on the thread of AI. I want to ask a better question than this, but like my question is like, how much are you using it? Creating emails, creating landers. Yeah, we use tool. I mean, so we use we use a decent amount of it. I wouldn't say that it's it's 80 or even 50% of like the output that we do. But I think it aids in like getting the creative engine started when you're stuck. I think it can be super helpful for that. And then also like for iteration and ideation, I think it can be valuable for that. So I keep a board on the tool called Poppy that just has like all the different ways I think we can use the tool. So I'll just ramble off a couple. So this Poppy board is basically like you connect context into a chat GPT or a cloud window and that it can do something with that information. So maybe we have a brand's context or top-performing ads and all of that connected in and then we have a specific tactic. Okay, it's the creative diversification blueprint Poppy board where I have a top ad that works, but I want to say it in 20 different ways, whether it's a static or a video and it just gives me an idea for the next concept that I can do. So it gives me 20 of those. And again, I'm not going to keep all 20, but it gives me a starting point for how to diversify. We've got and across creative, there's a bunch of those. It's how can I change change the hook to make it look like it's a new video without actually losing the essence of what the video is and it can take a top video and it can do that. It can produce a bunch of different headlines that you can choose from. One that I really like back to the landing page piece that's been cool is taking your current top-performing ad, the video or the static and the landing page link and just saying like what is the congruency between these two pages? Like here's as a customer that's responding. to the ad right now, is this congruent? And how does this stack up? And how would you make it more congruent? And that's been really fun to kind of unlocks of insights, what you can do in the Lanny page example that I gave earlier is like, let's say you write out of five reasons why Lanny page, you can test them against each other, you can say, hey, Claude, here's my top ad, and here is my Lanny page, my PDP, and then here's my top ad, and here's my Lander. Can you give it a congruency score out of 100? And that's been really, really cool for it to come back. And now you kind of have to build some process into defining what congruency means and what a good score is and why, but in the times that I've done it, the page that's performing better usually gets a better score. But that, you know, trying to max out your congruency score to 100 is a fun way to use it. - AI, AI, AI. Everyone's talking about it and you're worried you're getting left behind. 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Real savings, real automation, real AI that actually works. I'm gonna keep roofing on this because I think it's a really fun and relevant topic. Let's match congruency with context. So if you would have put context as an input, and congruency as a constraint, and maybe congruency to where the business is today, but on the edges of the e-commerce frontier, there are probably some believers that are like, hey, let's just give it context and go unedited, right? And just ads, landers, let's just let it fly because the market will tell us better than we should not be the editors as humans. Is that a moronic idea? If you were to be able to put the congruency check in, you can't go from selling supplements to selling dog food. So there is some congruency check, but it's not a human edit. It's a pre-baked control. Yeah, how far are we from that? We have a client, they probably have the most creative output of somebody that I can imagine. And with that, they have the fewest constraints in the context of they will kind of, if it's not perfect, or maybe the messaging is like the grammar's like gray or whatever. I know this is ripet. Now that's also not like, they're not saying anything illegal. They're not making any crazy claims that they shouldn't be making, but they are just ripping a ton of creative. And it's very little is edited in the form of like this script. Now they've still edited the video nicely together, and they're not just like clicking, if you use a creative tool like HREA, there's a clone button. They're not just clicking clone and putting all of them up exactly as it's cloned. Maybe they're making sure that it's like, okay, the product actually looks like the product. But they're about as close as I think you can get without just launching everything as it is as the AI produces, and their performance is fantastic. That on the other side of it, I do think that they're probably as value in having a consistent way that you message across the board because a lot of marketing is just like helping customers with pattern recognition of recognizing if this is the thing that solves their problem. And if you show up and you're saying, slightly competing things because the AI said whatever it wanted in a bunch of different places, you might just be confusing them. That said, I kind of skew on the side of being a little bit more open because the ability to like personalize stuff at scale is probably only gonna get more ridiculous as we all start wearing our meta-ray bands, and it's giving us the perfectly contextual added to whatever moment in time, and it's connected to our brain at some point too. But I don't know, I could see both sides of it. Yeah, I can't wait for meta to start hooking like physical dopamine drips through the glosses of like, I see the ad, I feel good. I wanna buy it now. Yeah. Right, yeah. They know what triggers the dopamine receptors, but now they are actually like physically triggering them on your behalf. Yeah, yeah, just a little massage of the brain and the back. What's a marketing truth you believe today that you didn't believe five years ago? I think the creative piece of it is where I lean. Even two years ago, this idea that creative was important, I think was there, but you're not gonna find many companies us included five years ago who were pumping out hundreds of ads for one brand a month. There's gonna be few and those few probably did really well. But five years ago, it was not this idea of creative volume. I don't think it existed in the way that it does now. And meta is telling us that it exists now, right? The whole Andromeda roll out is telling us that back to the point of personalization at scale. It's like they're trying to hit the right person with the right message at the exact right moment. And at some point, probably in the not too distant future, they're gonna tell us what that is instead of us telling them. Maybe that's a little AI-maxy, but I think in general, the whole, the point about creative strategy being super valuable, I think the tides have shifted even in the way that agencies hire or brands hire. I think they're prioritizing creative strategies over media buyers and now both kind of have, they can be interchangeable, but I think that is just like showing up in the way that people are actually hiring today too. - Yeah, but I imagine that for a media buyer today, it's probably easier than ever with AI to be a creative strategist because of how much easier the quantum production is. - Yeah, and I think it kind of depends on how you want to define what a media buyer does because it can show up different across different companies, right, the way that I think about it is allocating the right amount of dollars at the right time in the right moments, right? So it's building your marketing calendar, which is based on a forecast and understanding when you should spend and how much you should spend, and then also what you should be spending against, so which products with what messages. And so we split the roles to have, we have a media buyer growth lead and a creative strategy, so that way we're on the media buyer to come up with all the ideation, but yes, I think you're 100% right that, at least a floor, like the way that I think about AI right now, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but my hypothesis is that hopefully the floor of what we do is being raised because we have this super intelligent thing that we can go and ask advice of. Now there's plenty of cases where that's not true, but at the worst it's raising the floor, and then hopefully the human brain can continue to try and raise the ceiling in the short term. - Yeah, what's been the single biggest win in the last year, either a client or internal at WRK? - We've had a couple of clients go from, like they just had some insane unlock. So internally we started a brand last year, and in six months we went from zero to one and a half million dollars in revenue, and we did, I call it 25% bottom line. Now if you know anything about E-Com, you don't really get to take any of that money, it goes back in inventory, but it sounds cool. So if you just edit out the context that I gave, that I took zero dollars out of that company, it sounds way better. But we took very profitable company from zero to 0.5 million in six months, and that was cool. We've had another client go from one million to 15 million. We had a client recently go from doing 150K a month, and now this month they'll do 700K, just like some product and messaging on locks can go a long way. And I think the thing that I've learned through all of that is, and I know this has been repeated on the Twitter sphere several times, but it's like you are constantly one thing away from insane amounts of success. Sometimes it's creative, sometimes it's a product in the positioning of the product, sometimes it's the offer, but if you just keep taking swings, thoughtful swings and intentional swings, you're probably just wrong in the corner from unlocking something pretty big. - Yeah, and I bet that in reality, most brands aren't taking big enough, or thoughtful enough swings, which is why they're getting a little bit stuck. - Yeah, yeah, just changing the headline on your ads is headline and messaging matters, but if it's the same image and you're just changing the headline, meta is now just straight up telling you, we're not gonna spend against this. It's not meaningful enough of a difference. Yeah, go change the, take your top performing video and hire somebody who does man on the street videos and go have them talk on the street about that specific problem. Change up the complete context of how that's being recorded as an example, yeah, and take bigger swings. - We talked about a bunch of tactics earlier, but is there anything else or channel or tech that's working especially well for a client brands right now? - I think those are the most top of mine things that I can think of. I mean, everybody is hammering on partnership ads and something that we talked about a couple weeks ago on our podcast that has still been true, which is cool, is a low-lived way to get into the whitelist thing in partnership ads is just make a page that is in your persona. If you have, you sell to people who hunt, my dad hunt. a lot. So it's top of mind for me. Like just make a page that is like the page name is built with the persona and duplicate your top hunting ads and run them from that page and you probably find some success in doing that. It had super low lift. Everyone should go and do that today. Brad, as we head to Walter Rap, is there anything you're seeking from listeners, brands, operators, collaborators, anything you want to promote? Where should people find you? Yeah, you can probably find me on Twitter. I don't know actually what my Twitter handle is. It's Brad Plock in some variation. Maybe it's an underscore. I'm not sure. It's a period. Yeah. You can, I mostly post, I try to post like somewhat serious things, but there's also some some unsuruse things. So I just try to be relatable, but no, I've got nothing to immediately sell. So if you want to check me out and DM me and just chat about e-com, like I love this space. So I'm happy to jam. Brad, thanks so much for coming on and can't wait for next time. Yeah. Thank you so much, man.