What are the Traits of a Great Media Buyer?

[00:00:00] Richard Gaffin: . Welcome to the DTC Hotline. This is your direct connection to hot takes, cold truths, and real ecomm advice from two of the best in the business. Call or text, 866-DTC-2263. Get your burning ecomm questions answered. That's 866-382-2263. 

Leave us a voicemail or just send us a text asking what is ever is on your mind, DTC-wise, both of our operators are standing by.

And speaking of which, let's introduce 'em right now. We got coming to you live from CTC studios for the first time here. We're Costa Mesa, California. We got Tony Chopp, “The Chopper,” who's our VP of Paid Media here at Common Thread. Tony, what's going on today, man?

[00:00:36] Tony Chopp: Hello, Richard. Thanks for having me back.

[00:00:39] Richard Gaffin: Oh

[00:00:39] Tony Chopp: I haven't said too many hot, I haven't said the hot take that's gotten me kicked off yet.

[00:00:43] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, that's right. We haven't booted you yet, but but you're on notice. We'll see what happens this this week, next in we got CTC’s, VP of Ecommerce Strategy here. Mr. Luke, “The Weatherman,” Austin. Luke, tell us what's going on today?

[00:00:56] Luke Austin: Tony and I just look forward to this every week. It, this is a highlight of our week being able to, we, we have conversations throughout the day in the office about what we're seeing across our data set of brands, our customers and being able to try to package those up and share them with the world in some way that hopefully a nugget here or there is useful is is just a highlight.

So we're we're excited.

[00:01:19] Richard Gaffin: And we all get to wear our vacation shirts, of course. Which means this is the closest thing to a break that we get, you know?

[00:01:24] Luke Austin: Exactly.

[00:01:24] Richard Gaffin: all right, let's jump into it. Just real quick, a couple notes about how this works. fairly straightforward. We get questions from listeners. We get questions from members of our admission community here at Commentary Collective.

We bring 'em to these two guys. They answer 'em for you bringing of course their hottest takes and laying down the coldest truth which is I think, how we're framing it right now. So let's let's jump to the first one here. This is a question that. We get from smaller brands from time to time and maybe even get from larger brands too.

I don't know, which is should we be, this is how this specific thing was phrased.

Should we be moving away from a SC based on the way that meta overspends on the wrong age bracket? Now, to give you more context here, the issue moving away from a SC at this point, I don't know if that's really a thing, but the issue here is that kind of our general philosophy here is you let the algorithm do the work. You set it up properly on the front end with your cost controls, blah, blah, blah, the algorithm will get you the result that you wanted to get. And it can't really make mistakes. So in this particular situation, but it seems like what was happening is that meta was driving a bunch of traffic, but it was driving people from quote unquote, the wrong age bracket. And then this also connects to similar questions around meta appears to be everything's set up right, but appears to be overspending on an ad that's not really performing. So maybe the, the hot take framing of this question. Is, what do you do when meta gets it wrong? So who wants to jump in?

[00:02:48] Tony Chopp: It happens all the time.

[00:02:50] Richard Gaffin: Well, is a hot take, Tony.

[00:02:53] Tony Chopp: Yeah. I mean, the first, the first thing when you're talking about that age stuff, like, you know,

[00:03:00] Luke Austin: know,

[00:03:00] Tony Chopp: You got.

Bid multipliers, which is a feature that they released about a year ago, that, that lets us put pressure upwards or downwards on audiences or gender or age ranges. 

[00:03:13] Luke Austin: You

[00:03:13] Tony Chopp: know, so I, I'm not, I'm not opposed to that stuff.

I think, I think the, the thing okay, hot take

[00:03:18] Richard Gaffin: Great.

[00:03:19] Tony Chopp: the sort of like dogmatic, like all or nothing sort of thing. It's just, it's just not real. It's not real like. Meta works a hundred percent of the time, like, set your cost cap and never touch it. Like, no, of course not. You know, so the idea of, of like, okay, I understand something about my audience or, or I'm trying to push into a certain audience or certain age range, and I, and I, and I wanna let meta optimize, to use the algorithm to optimize, but I wanna put some pressure, I wanna put a thumb on the scale. Throw in some bid modifiers for sure pl plus plus up the the age range that you think is right. Plus,

[00:04:01] Luke Austin: you know.

[00:04:02] Tony Chopp: minus down the age range that you don't want, I guess like prepared to have all of your preconceived notions challenged about what is the right or wrong audience for your product.

[00:04:12] Richard Gaffin: Right. Yeah. So that was one potential takeaway was that actually maybe, maybe this other age bracket is the one that actually your product or that it's best suited for, or something along those lines. But it's so you look.

[00:04:24] Tony Chopp: Yeah, I think.

[00:04:25] Luke Austin: foundational belief is that meta has infinitely more signal than any one of us do. And so, it's based on that understanding that orient our, we try to orient our behavior around. and example of that is, the curve of day. We, none of us really know what the curve of degradation looks like on any individual campaign within any of the platforms. You can access this in Google for most of your campaigns and sort of start to see at different spin levels what the projected CPA or the projected conversion value is going to be, and sort of model this out on a campaign specific level. Meta will give you it sometimes on certain types of campaigns, but. you see when you start to look at that is the range of outcomes is way wider than we we could possibly imagine. And we just, we just had a conversation and are doing an offer around our spin MER models, which is modeling the same thing. The, the degradation of efficiency is wildly, very varied outcomes across different brands.

And even on the campaign level, we look at one campaign for brand A and then the second campaign for Brand A. And there's a really different degradation of the efficiency curve between just those two campaigns. And you start to do that on a brand level. And so I think it's really hard for us to know what that, what that looks like to be able to base our behavior upon to say, where's the next best dollar spent? An indication of over the past seven days or the past 14 days, the female 25 to 34 bracket is underperforming male. 35 to 44 is no indication of what the curve de degradation in the future looks like and the volume available based on infinitely more signal that meta has. So someone making an assertion that they would know more I would be very hesitant around that idea. Then. Outside of that, the the, yeah, I think there's nothing outside of that. That's all I wanna say.

[00:06:18] Richard Gaffin: right, cool. So what, what about the situation then outside the age demographic piece where. It at least appears on the surface, like meta is blowing bad spend on an ad that's underperforming. say in the scenario you have your, cost caps are set correctly, or your cost controls are set correctly.

Rather you have the kind of like everything is set up properly according to best practices on the front end, but it feels like meta is just pushing spend to the wrong thing. What's what do you, how do you investigate that, I guess?

[00:06:47] Luke Austin: Yes. So this is actually the other thing I wanted to, I wanted to say which is the timeframe against which the results are assessed is really important as well. And typically. We all have a high time preference, which means we, we like to look at things. It's easier for us to assess things in a shorter time window. And it comes to campaign performance, whether it be the age demographic or a specific individual ad performance It's really hard to assess over a longer period of time how that, how the efficiency of that is going to actually play out. we were just talking about this a few weeks ago, like, we wish that 28 day click optimization was still around for meta, because that's what, that's what Google is optimizing against, is typically 30, 31 1 or 37 1, and there's a meaningful.

Increase in the value captured over a longer period of time. And we see this with post-treatment windows on incrementality tests, which is if you extend your post-treatment window 30 days or even 60 days, you start to see a really different result on what the true incremental impact was of the channel over a longer period of time. That's why. Back to the main point, the platform has infinitely more signal than we do, and being able to assess over a long period of time with a clear eye view is not, is not something that, that we're good at and the platform is gonna be more effective in, in going about that exercise. anecdote is the case where you see an ad that's getting a large majority of the span and the efficiency appears to be low. Of us have done this at some point in our, in our lives, even if we don't like to admit it, which is if you were to turn off that ad spend would start to flow to the other ads, and then the next day you'd refresh and that ad would be higher efficiency than all the other ads in the account. And those would start to be performing at that lower roas because the, the level of volume and degradation associated with it was just so widely disparate.

And then you end up turning that back. Add back on in a day or two. 'cause it's like, oh, wait a second. After even just a day or two of realizing some of the incremental value this was by far the top performing ad relative to the others in the, in the account.

[00:08:45] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, Tony, that's the face of a man with a hot take brewing.

[00:08:49] Tony Chopp: So like, let's just pretend that we're talking about like a relatively small investment, like five, maybe $10,000 a month. You're honestly probably better off. Setting the budget, getting

[00:09:05] Luke Austin: everything.

[00:09:05] Tony Chopp: set up correctly in the account and closing your computer and going and doing something else, you're, you're probably, you're almost certainly causing more harm than good in your ultimate pursuit, which you're this, let me be clear.

Your ultimate pursuit is. If you're spending $10,000 this month, six months from now, to be spending 15 or $20,000 a month, that's your ultimate pursuit to be deploying more investment. So you are almost certainly doing yourself more harm than good by chasing some fool's gold of efficiency. In the short term.

Close your computer, go outside. Touch grass

[00:09:45] Luke Austin: Or make more creative or

[00:09:47] Tony Chopp: better. Yeah.

[00:09:48] Luke Austin: marketing moment or, yeah.

[00:09:50] Richard Gaffin: Sure. Well, I, I like touch grass is the hot take of the day for this. And that connects directly to what Luke was saying about like your perception that the ad is not performing or is underperforming or whatever the case may be, is from your limited human point of view. And there's probably something else going on, something a little broader. is that fair to say, Tony?

[00:10:08] Luke Austin: Yeah,

[00:10:08] Tony Chopp: mean, I think it's, I think it's fair to say, I also think like it, like all of this is, all of this is wrapped in what your expectation is, right? So, I mean, let's again, we use the example, if you're a smaller brand, you're a new advertiser. Like if your expectation is that you're gonna put $3 $1 in the meta machine and it's gonna be gonna give you three or $4 out, like your expectation is wrong.

[00:10:29] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:30] Tony Chopp: Especially at that early stage. So

[00:10:32] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:10:33] Tony Chopp: if your expectation was, let's just pretend I have a business, I'm gonna invest as much capital as I possibly can in figuring, in allowing, I'm gonna invest as much capital as I possibly can in creating creative stories. Okay, I'm gonna take the remaining capital that I have and I'm gonna put it in the meta machine, and I'm gonna try to increase that investment over time in a, in a scalable way.

And I'm not gonna screw around with tactics. You're gonna be further, you're gonna be a lot further along in 12 to 18 months than tinkering with bid modifiers, multipliers.

[00:11:08] Richard Gaffin: Makes sense. Okay, let's let's jump to another question here, which is,

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[00:11:47] Richard Gaffin: How do you approach media buying for a subscription business? So this is a business, let's say, that has a relatively low A OV, but if you can capture the subscription, LTV becomes higher over time. So what are our basics of approaching that sort of scenario where first, even first order profitability is maybe not option or break even is probably the goal.

[00:12:09] Tony Chopp: All right, so I got, I got a couple, and then Luke, this is gonna be Luke's jam right here.

[00:12:13] Richard Gaffin: All right.

[00:12:13] Tony Chopp: Number one obvious you have to understand your LTV, the, the reason why. Number two is you're in an auction. You're competing with other advertisers who do understand their LTV, and so. The advertisers in this, that, in the space of subscriptions that have it figured out are hyper aggressive put pushing well past, well below first order profit.

So good deep understanding of LTV puts you in a place where you can actually be competitive.

The other thing that we're seeing and and exploring is, you know, optimizing for subscription at the event level. So doing some things on the pixel that, that are like specific around hunting for these types of customers that are, that are more likely to be subscription as opposed to single, single purchasers.

Yep.

[00:13:01] Luke Austin: Yeah, so step one is to figure out how aggressive you can be in your new customer acquisition. 'Cause. You to Tony's point, having the LTV having high LTV gives you a leg up and be being able to be more aggressive and take more market share and grow your customer base. But step one is understanding what is, what are the monthly fixed costs that you have to have money for that in that individual month to cover those obligations. Step two, understand how much contribution margin you are gonna get from your returning customer base in the coming months, looking at the delta that exists between the two. If I have OPEX of $250,000. And I have returning customer revenue of $500,000 at a gross margin of 50%. Then my con, my marginal value of my returning customer contribution margin is gonna exactly cover my fixed cost.

So it's basically netting out at zero. I'm gonna be able to cover the expenses in that way. Now I can be now that gives me an idea of how aggressive I can be on new customer acquisition, which is. I have to be break even on first order or better, right? Because I have enough contribution margin from returning customers to account for my obligations this month.

But I don't have any buffer. 250,000, 250,000. I have to be break even or better on first time customer contribution margin now. If you have a million dollars in revenue from your returning customer cohort and $500,000 in marginal value against your 250 K opex, now you have $250,000 of margin from your returning customers that you can use to float negative first time customer acquisition. Now you understand how much room you have to play with and how aggressive you can be in that game while also understanding your cashflow considerations, which is, which is another piece. But we'll just kinda leave that, leave that aside for now. once you do those steps, now we know how aggressive we can be on new customer acquisition, whether we have to make money, whether we can break even, or how much money we can lose. Then the final step is being able to model out through something like the spend a R model, which is why we created that CTC 'cause it's critical to understand what is the new customer revenue, new customer order count, and first time customer contribution margin. I'm gonna get at differing differing spend levels and with something like the spend a ER model, what we. What what it's able to show us is, okay, if I'm willing to lose $250,000 on my first time customer contribution margin, this is how much I should plan to spend, and this is gonna be the likely output that's the high level budget setting. Then breaking that down on an individual unit level is you need to understand to Tony's points, the LTV related to each of the core products or the product categories, as well as the marginal value differences between each one of those, and use that to set what the. Return rate should be on each of the funnels. So likely if you have five products, each of them have a different LTV over sixty, ninety, a hundred twenty, and 180 one year LTV window. So understand the LTV percent increase for each of those product categories separately, as well as the marginal value differences between the two.

Product A has a 50% gross margin, but product B has a 63% gross margin, right? after taking into account the marginal value and the LTV. Then you can back into what the ROAS target needs to be for each one of those to be at breakeven or to be at uh uh, or to be more aggressive if you're able to be. And you'll end up with individual ROAS targets for each of those funnels where I can, I can operate at a 1.2 for product A, but I can operate at a 1.05 for product B 'cause the marginal value's better. And then product CI can be at a 0.93 'cause the LTV percent increase is better than all of them combined.

And then that's, those are the targets that get. Adjust those targets for incrementality. That's what gets set across. Meta, Google all the other platforms in terms of what the ROAS target should be. Push as much volume as possible against those within the constraints of the contribution margin. You need to be able to, cover your fixed obligations for that month.

[00:16:53] Tony Chopp: We should just call this podcast Unit Economics one oh one.

[00:16:56] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, seriously, I. I feel like we could call all CTCs content that on some level that's basically how it is.

[00:17:03] Tony Chopp: We've seen some pretty big, pretty big differences in LTV at the product level, like pretty, pretty big swings in what, in what drives products that drive LTV versus products that don't like, and so to Luke's point about the unit economics, like up from, from top to bottom, like it's gonna have a big impact.

[00:17:19] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:17:21] Luke Austin: yeah, I think we could keep going down this lane. So we, we worked with a number of brands that have very large catalogs in terms of the, the various products that they sell, and the average order values being everywhere from $10 to a thousand dollars within the same. Brand and then the marginal value against those being very different. We're in the process with one right now. That's, it's millions of skews that span the range of like, that range $10 to $2,000. And then the marginal value is different because the suppliers and the licensing associated with it, the different artists that they're working with is, is different on each of the products.

So for brands that have really large product catalogs like that, you have to make a really strong case for running cost cap, bid cap campaigns or tar or target CPA campaigns. It should all be Target ROAS or Min Ross because there's, so, there's way too much complexity in the product catalog. If you go conversion, highest volume or cost cap, bid cap based, it's just going to, you're just gonna index towards the lower A OV items and you're gonna leave volume on the table. And then the second challenge is being able to understand. The marginal buckets. You can't, if you have a million SKUs, running a million separate campaigns on meta and Google, like probably isn't the way to go, but you also can't run one because each of them have different margin associated with the product costs and the delivery costs associated with a piece of art versus furniture, for example. So. marginal value to look at. Okay, four. Four products that live in these two or three categories. The marginal value related to COGS and cost delivery is really similar. Great. We can run those in one campaign. Those are our, this is the ROAS target associated. Okay. Here's the next one. And get it to, maybe it's 10, maybe it's 15, maybe it's 20.

Campaigns that have sort of buckets of what the marginal value is in separate ROAS targets each, and then each of the products flow into those categories accordingly.

[00:19:17] Richard Gaffin: Oh, I was gonna say, so my next question was actually literally, we have a massive product catalog with tons of SKUs. How do you approach. Cost controls when you have, when it's difficult to determine expected. A OV. So let's throw that. I want to hear your take on that too, Tony.

[00:19:31] Tony Chopp: Yeah, I was just sort of like reflecting as Luke was talking about, like, you know, we, we get so many questions about media tactics, but then we come in here and we talk about like, pretty much like all the things that lead that happened before that, like understanding the, understanding the unit economics of what you're selling.

So. It's, it's the same. Luke already pretty much gave the answer like,

[00:19:53] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:19:53] Tony Chopp: we're grouping around AOVs, we're grouping around marginal profile. I, I think there's a, there's a tension that exists between with the desire to group and consolidate as much as possible versus the necessity to separate out based on marginal profile, based on A OV based on LTV.

So there's, there's always gonna be some tension between these two things. I think.

[00:20:15] Luke Austin: think

[00:20:16] Tony Chopp: To Luke's point around

ROAS or T ROAS bidding versus cost cap or TCPA we, we really favor ROAS space bidding for, for catalog ad products as opposed to TCPA because of the variance in a OV. But, but that's not to say like throw your whole catalog in a DPA or a shopping campaign and set the bid.

Like it's not that either. I think, I think on the horizon. Both of the big two media platforms are pushing towards bid for profit. Google's, we participated in Google Pilot and we've got some stuff going on with Meta as, as well, which I think represents a, a bidding strategy that, you know, potentially could put us in a situation where we're like, yeah, throw everything in big DPA or throw everything in a, in a big shopping campaign.

But, but we're not there yet. So, 

[00:21:10] Luke Austin: yeah,

[00:21:10] Tony Chopp: what's, what's the hot take? That was just a lot of words.

Find, find,

group your DPAs

[00:21:17] Luke Austin: based

[00:21:17] Tony Chopp: on a combination of a OV and margin. Make as few groups as possible while also accounting for those differences.

[00:21:27] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:21:28] Luke Austin: The thing I would add is that we're, we're also talking like ideal workflow, which is if you, if you really do have a million SKUs, you have to start somewhere. So start identifying the SKUs that drive 80% of your revenue, which is not gonna be 80% of your SKUs. It's gonna be, it's gonna be 10% of your SKUs, maybe. 

[00:21:46] Tony Chopp: So,

[00:21:46] Luke Austin: identify the SKUs or the product categories that drive the majority of your revenue outcome,

[00:21:51] Tony Chopp: and.

[00:21:52] Luke Austin: Go after those, start to bucket each one of those and go down the line. And that'll, that'll focus the energy in a place where your, the output is focused on the majority of where the revenue's being driven versus ideally working through the whole catalog

[00:22:06] Tony Chopp: Yeah, so I wanna double down on this 'cause we've, we've encountered this bunch of times in big SKU businesses where we end up advertising a much smaller set of the products that are available in the sku. So 50%, 30%, 20%. We focus on products that are, we're, we're able to create, able to create volume with and capture volume with.

So I think the, one of the answers to this question is consider cutting half the skews out of your, out of your feed.

[00:22:36] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, that makes sense. No, I feel like there's two good, say hot ish takes here, which is or, or rather maybe I'll just say like the

[00:22:44] Tony Chopp: Lukewarm. Lukewarm takes.

[00:22:46] Richard Gaffin: I'm not gonna say lukewarm. I think they're the perfect temperature. But the number one being, yeah, sell fewer things, which I think can sometimes be counterintuitive to people. Then the other thing that's like maybe mildly counterintuitive is like the idea that you're essentially merchandising your ad account, which we've talked about before. Buy a OV rather than buy like product category or type, which I feel like is where people's brains go automatically. 'cause if you would about like you walked into, I don't know, raw dress for less. that's not a great example. 'cause they don't, they only sell clothes, but like, let's say you go to Kohl's or whatever, and each section of the store is like, these are all the things that cost $50. These are all the things that cost a hundred dollars. That would be a weird shopping experience. But in the case of the ad account, like that's, you have to consider grouping things in a different way in order to get the outcome that you want.

[00:23:33] Tony Chopp: Well, well, retail stores do this though, like grocery stores that, but they do

[00:23:37] Luke Austin: it

[00:23:38] Tony Chopp: it at at height level. So

[00:23:40] Richard Gaffin: Right.

[00:23:40] Tony Chopp: important marginal mar high margin products are at eye level. All the generic stuff is down here.

[00:23:47] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, that's a good point of like, yeah, within the category at least there's some level of like a OV sorting, I

[00:23:54] Luke Austin: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:55] Tony Chopp: And, and I want to caveat too, I didn't say sell less things I said, I said advertise less things.

[00:24:00] Richard Gaffin: right.

[00:24:00] Luke Austin: So.

[00:24:01] Tony Chopp: so as soon as you, as soon as you're gonna start to advertise something, then with paid media dollars, then you have to absorb a cac. So.

[00:24:10] Luke Austin: yeah, another, another worthwhile point on this topic. So we've. We've worked hard over the, over the recent months to create a product matrix report on top of our dataset that lives in stats. And the whole idea of the product matrix report is that it highlights what your MVP product, individual products, or product categories are. MVP being the intersection of the marginal value associated with each of those products, the volume associated with each of those products, and then the potential for additional upside opportunity relative to where they sit in the context of your broader catalog. And so what we've done is we've taken the product product level and category level. Revenue data not difficult, but then we've matched that back against the ad spend from each of the channels against those products. In the product, product categories, this is the most challenging part because every brand has a really unique structure in terms of URLs on the website, their product naming the ad account structures.

It's really challenging to match spend data back to a product or product category level. And so we do that. In a couple different ways using a logic set and then AI as well to sort through URL structures as well as ad naming conventions and campaign naming the conventions, the ad account, as well as copy that's presented on each of the ads.

So we take these data sources to help match in the best way possible, spin back to the product category level and in and the individual product level. And it's really fascinating because it starts to highlight. Products or product categories that are driving majority of the sales but are underserved or underrepresented in the opportunity relative to either their volume or their marginal upside.

And, and then it does the inverse as well and starts to show, starts to show product categories that have real marginal strength but are just being under invested in compared to the the higher sales volume product. So this is ultimately what. You want is to be able to look at a report like that, that that is able to match the opportunities that exist within your product category. Revenue contribution against the spend allocated against each to identify where you're over underserving the opportunity

[00:26:14] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, feel like, yeah, this, this has turned into a little bit of an ad for good reason. I think for our proprietary software stats, is part of making these smart decisions about these things requires pulling these specific like data sets that you're mentioning. Luke and Stats can help you do that.

[00:26:30] Tony Chopp: We just build the things we need. That's all. It's really simple.

[00:26:34] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Yeah, so whatever you need, it's in there. Okay, let's let's, we got two, two more that we can go to both of these, being a little bit on the curve ball side. So first, let's I'm gonna ask this question, which is,

what personality trait would you look for in a great media buyer? are the characteristics of somebody who's actually good at this?

[00:26:52] Luke Austin: They have design skills.

[00:26:55] Richard Gaffin: Oh, interesting.

[00:26:56] Luke Austin: They can,

[00:26:57] Richard Gaffin: Unpack that.

[00:26:59] Luke Austin: So the, the heart of that comment comes from, the conversation earlier, which is. What we don't want is someone tinkering with budgets and bids all day. What we want is to set the target associated with each of the campaign. I'm not gonna say the whole thing again.

We, the whole thing we've just talked about, that's what we want. And the initial strategy and, and then to inflate the budgets against those outcomes and let, and let the platforms dictate where, where the volume's gonna come from. the effort should go into what are. The new campaigns and creatives that we can launch and add into the ad account, that's where incremental value is going to come from.

So how do we create additional creative volume in a diverse way of creative formats? What is the, what are the products or categories that we're under serving? And we don't have any ads in the account for that. We should create some ads around. It is identifying how we can add incremental value in the form of, additional creative and campaigns to the account that live at the intersection of these MVP products and our marketing calendar moments. That is where the thought work and the time should go into relentlessly. And then whether that person is a designer themselves or is really good at using cap cut or really good at using Icon me, or really good at using Canva.

Or really, or has outsource design resource that's able to help them execute is sort of besides the point. But the, the core point mean being that they, they make more ads and add the ad account that sit at the intersection of MVP products and marketing moments.

[00:28:35] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, that's interesting Tony.

[00:28:38] Tony Chopp: Yeah, I, I mean, I think, I think curiosity is a trait that makes. Digital marketing people excel in, in the profession,

sort of, trying to hunt for cause and effect knowing that our pursuit is to produce

[00:28:53] Luke Austin: positive

[00:28:54] Tony Chopp: margin dollars intimately

[00:28:58] Luke Austin: understand

[00:28:59] Tony Chopp: that our mission in media is.

[00:29:01] Luke Austin: to

[00:29:02] Tony Chopp: deploy more media dollars to, to, to invest capital on behalf of our partners successfully. More. The, the pathways to get there are, they're not unlimited, but, but there are, there are, there are a bunch, and I think you'll hear us talk more and more about how those pathways are not in,

[00:29:23] Luke Austin: you know,

[00:29:23] Tony Chopp: tinkering of small knobs, but in taking, taking big shots. Big shots on goal. The, you know, there, there are, there are tactical things that, that I think are, are worth exploring.

You know,

[00:29:33] Luke Austin: metastatic

[00:29:34] Tony Chopp: this incremental attribution product, which, which we're, we're like pushing into. 'cause if it, if it helps us deploy more media dollars more effectively, protects contribution margin as we go, we're, we're into it. So, yeah, cu curiosity in general, and I guess being sort of wi willing and able to you know, to, to be wrong a lot, to have a theory and say that that didn't, that, that didn't, that, that sort of go the way that we hoped and, and to correct quickly.

And,

[00:30:04] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:05] Tony Chopp: I think the, I think the inverse, well, let me describe what, what I think doesn't work. Not trying, not taking big swings like de defaulting to only the framework or only like

[00:30:19] Luke Austin: the, the

[00:30:20] Tony Chopp: the sort of checking boxes. Like I think that that is, you know, doesn't, doesn't really dig into the spirit of what it is that we're trying to do, which,

[00:30:28] Luke Austin: What

[00:30:28] Tony Chopp: trying to do is, what we're seeking to do is invest capital on behalf of our partners and create, create a return with that capital.

We're we're investors really?

[00:30:38] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean it sounds like one thing that kind of ties what you both are saying together is like what you're looking for is a minded person who has the confidence to. Execute on big picture outta the box ideas, which maybe is like the description for what makes anybody successful in any field.

I don't know. But I think particularly in media buying, there's certainly a stereotype of, you know, a few years ago at least, that it's the media buyer's, sort of somebody who's just like playing a bunch of slot machines at the same time or whatever, or like a day trader or something like that. Who's just there to kind of like look for these tiny arbitrage moments, pull some levers, whatever. But that's just sort of not the case anymore. And it sounds like how you're framing it, Luke, is that the job of the media buyer is basically to be a creative strategist, like to be thinking about creative opportunity Whether it's from the perspective of like, oh, this product's being underserved, or We need more creative about this product because it's performing really well, or whatever the case may be. And if they have the ability to execute on it, that's even better.

[00:31:34] Tony Chopp: It, it's just impossible to decouple these things

[00:31:37] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:31:37] Tony Chopp: like it's impossible to decouple media buying from creative strategy, from growth strategy, from product.

[00:31:43] Richard Gaffin: Yeah,

[00:31:44] Tony Chopp: They're, they're all part of an ecosystem that is the brand.

[00:31:50] Richard Gaffin: yeah. Makes sense. Luke, any final thoughts?

[00:31:55] Luke Austin: No, I, I completely agree with what Tony said last, which is we see these things becoming one thing. And that's the, and that's the trajectory that our system is built around and our folks are built around, which is like sort of the the more nuanced way of saying the, like they're a designer comment that I said earlier, which is that they are the highest level. Head of growth that is able to affect every single channel and see the create out see the creative output and affect that Similarly, which is they need, you need to understand the whole business. You need to be a growth strategist that's able to actually go all the way down to launching net new campaigns on meta net new campaigns on Google.

And that tie up to the business objective. These things are cascading into the same thing. So that is the trajectory that we see and where the opportunity lies for businesses and for. Individuals looking to make the most impact themselves in terms of their growth.

[00:32:49] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Cool. All right. I think that's gonna wrap it up for us for today. Now, I did mention that I had one more curve ball question. We're gonna save that for next week, so you'll have to

[00:32:57] Tony Chopp: Oh,

[00:32:58] Richard Gaffin: to hear it.

[00:32:59] Tony Chopp: cliffhanger.

[00:33:00] Richard Gaffin: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There's drama in the DTC Hotline. okay. So, just a quick note, if you want your questions answered on this pod, please call us and leave us a voicemail at 866-DTC-2263 or send us a text there. You don't have to, we're not gonna play your voice on the podcast, if you don't want us to, you can just send us to us via text and then I can read it off and we can answer to your questions as well.

But yeah, since it's there, we might read your question on subsequent episodes. So, for Tony “The Chopper” Chopp and for Luke, “The Weatherman,” Austin. I'm your host Richard, “The Professor” Gaffin. Thanks for listening to the DTC Hotline and we will talk to you again next time. See ya.