The 7 C’s of Media Buying: How to Win in the Holiday Season

[00:00:00] Richard Gaffin: Hey folks. Welcome to The Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective. And I'm joined today in this pre-holiday season by Mr. Tony Chopp, the Chopper himself, VP of Paid Media, live from CTC HQ. Tony, what's going on, man?

[00:00:15] Tony Chopp: Richard, the professor.

[00:00:17] Richard Gaffin: Professor. That's right. Yeah. That used to be my nickname here. The professor, a few people call it call me that anymore. So I always 

[00:00:24] Tony Chopp: you and me, we've been around for a while.

I'm coming up on my five year anniversary with CTC, actually, in November. 

[00:00:29] Richard Gaffin: Wow. And I'd be coming up on Six or seven. One of those two. We're old, old vets for 

[00:00:34] Tony Chopp: Hold that, 

[00:00:35] Richard Gaffin: That's right. Yeah, I've been through a lot. But today we're talking about we've been so we've been talking about our holiday.

Plans basically both on our blog and in our podcast and a lot of our marketing materials, we're talking about the prep that needs to happen in Q3 to make you for as successful as possible. And what we want to talk about today is as Tony is our VP of paid media, from the perspective of paid media, specifically how we think about media buying on both Meta and Google, how we, how we're thinking about approaching.

Q4 and how we're thinking about preparing now. So I think Tony, you want us to kind of start the conversation off by talking about incrementality. Which of course has been the topic of conversation for us on this podcast in all sorts of ways, but specifically from the perspective of paid media, we want to talk about incrementality and how it relates to holiday prep.

So why don't you kick us off with that? Tell us what you're thinking along those lines.

[00:01:23] Tony Chopp: Yeah, sure, yeah, it's like, if you were sitting in the office with Luke and I you'd probably hear the word incrementality maybe, Two or 3000 times a

day. I'm I'm obviously exaggerating, but we're, we're just really excited about the idea of having having a, a mechanism for communication between growth and paid media that is, we feel like is the best that we we've ever had. And I think the, the tricky part, one of the tricky parts in the connection between growth and paid media is. How do we get ourselves all the way down to targets that we set in platform that we believe serve the greater goals that our partners in growth strategy are, are seeking. So in the idea is pretty simple. If you were to take all of the revenue that is reported in meta ads and add up all of the revenue that is reported in Google ads. And then add to that all the revenue that is reported in TikTok ads, for example. Those three numbers are going to add up to more than what you see in Shopify. So something's got to give here, right? And getting a better read on the delta between those two things is where Luke and I are really seeing a big impact from, from incrementality and all the testing that we've done with our clients so far this year. One other, one other point that I want to mention here is. Phil, philosophically I, I believe it is our job on the media team in, in partnership with our media platform partners to hold the absolute highest standard of value creation, right?

We across all of the media platforms that we run, a couple hundred million dollars in media spend. We are excited to invest that money on behalf of our clients. And the flip side of the coin is. We want to make sure that we're holding the absolute highest standard of output and that's where this incrementality testing and learning comes into play. So, CTCs has a number of baseline frameworks that we're using for how do we get from what we know we need In in from a media channel, from an output, output perspective to getting to an end platform target. And I'm going to use. I'm going to use an example from a recent audit that we did for for a large client that we're, we're pretty excited about and I'm going to use it as an example to connect to another one of CDC's core beliefs, which is cost control bidding.

Okay. And so this is a, an audit that we did on a Shopify brand. It's actually one of the largest stores that we've ever encountered. And as it turns out, it's one of the top 10 Shopify brands on the system. Super large. So, and we're dealing with approximately 75 million in meta spend over the last 12 months.

So a significant amount of media spend. And what was really unique about this particular project is they had a partnership with measured, which is one of the incrementality partners that, that we work with. And they've been collecting data for the last year or so. So we had a bunch of cool stuff to dig into right out of the gate. The other thing that's super interesting about this chunk of media spend the 75 million worth of media spend is they split it got split about half. between two different types of bidding on Meta. One type was cost controlled. In, in this particular set, they used bid cap as the cost control method. The other set was volume based. So they used a combination of lowest cost and highest volume for, for that set. And what we were able to tease out from the incrementality data is that The, the cost controlled bidding cohort of traffic was approximately 30 percent more incremental,

[00:05:35] Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

[00:05:36] Tony Chopp: dramatically different. So what this means to us is when we go in platform and we set a target, what we can do is we can use the AMER target that Luke and his team gives us. This is what we need to get to from an acquisition ROAS. And we can use the incrementality percentage to get to do a little bit of math to get ourselves to an in platform target. Knowing that we're going to get a higher incremental result from the cost control bidding set. What does that allow us to do? It allows us to set a lower in platform target. What does that allow us to do? It allows us to scale further. So, and I want to make a really important point here that this isn't this isn't a right or wrong premise, right?

There's lots of different ways to go out and make this sausage. However, what we want to do is hold the media platforms to the highest possible standard. And we want to invest dollars in a way that creates maximum incremental output. And, and we're really excited about this. In fact, so much so that we, we ran the numbers for this particular brand for the last 12 months and came to the conclusion that had this incrementality mindset been applied to the media deployment for the last 12 months, It was a meaningful amount of revenue that they would have realized from the strategy somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 or 50 percent more revenue with the same amount of media spend.

So how does this all connect to the holiday? Well, for most of most, if not all of our CTC clients, we are exploring incrementality testing through our partnerships, whether that be through measured, or we also have our own offering called CTC incrementality. Where we can execute geo lift, holdout tests across our portfolio. All of this is designed very simply to get us to what do we need to set our targets to in platform to achieve the highest incremental result. The thing, the thing that flows from this that I think is probably the most important thing of all is when our channel managers, are doing daily action in the account.

Do I push here? Do I pull there? Do I build this? We have the highest level of clarity that we've ever had around do we have this target set correctly? Is this the right target?

[00:08:08] Richard Gaffin: So in a sense, I was gonna say, it's a matter of like, holidays, the most crucial time, therefore the clarity of data becomes more important over holiday. And that's sort of the connection of why this is important for a holiday spent

[00:08:20] Tony Chopp: Yeah,

100%. 

[00:08:21] Richard Gaffin: enough. Yeah. I was going to ask, because you mentioned like, this isn't a question of right and wrong, and there's many ways to make the sausage, but isn't clear ultimate clarity of data and having like, and the best sort of the highest standard of outcome.

Isn't that a better. Option or like, in what circumstance would that be? 

[00:08:37] Tony Chopp: Well, yeah. So, so the way to say this is every marketing activity is incremental up until some point,

right? So when I say it's not a question of right or wrong, no matter what tactic we're talking about, whether it's, you know, whether it's bidding strategy or attribution window or ASC versus BAU, no matter what tactic we're talking about at some level of investment. maybe a small one it's going, there's a potential for it to be positively incremental. The challenge that we face is in our, in our line of work, our job is to deploy more and more media dollars at and maintain a threshold of efficiency. So when it comes to the, like, think about CTCs, general principle about cost control bidding.

Right? So we have think about it as think about it as a starting point, right? And cost control bidding gives us, whether it's cost cap or min ros, gives us a lot of advantages to protect against downside risk. And to add on top of that, We also know it's more incremental. Now we're doing some interesting things.

Taylor's actually been exploring some interesting things with Bamboo Earth around an idea, this podcast, I'm going to talk about like the new, new, new, super new stuff about using different Styles of bidding or even attribution. And the functional output of this is actually different audience targeting.

So

for example, one same campaign, same creative, same everything else. One on Min Roast, one on cost cap, very low audience overlap. So really fascinating. So for a long time, we've talked about creative as the targeting, right? Creative as the mechanism for the audience targeting in Metta, we're starting to explore the idea of. Things like bidding as the audience targeting or even attribution as the audience target. Now I'm going to use this to parlay into the, what we're calling the seven C's of CTC's media buying principles. And I want you to think about all of these things as Guidelines. This column, think about it as like building the train tracks that we're going to, we're going to drive the train down as opposed to absolutes, right?

There very well may be cases where we want to explore different types of bidding. Because we want to go see if we can unlock different audiences, right? Or we want to invest in some sort of incrementality study around Can we, can we access a different pool of potential audiences? So, does that answer your question, Richard, about the nuance of like right or wrong? It's important for us to deploy media at the highest level of incrementality. But it's also really important for us to be continuously exploring.

[00:11:28] Richard Gaffin: Right. Yeah, no, that makes sense. That's it. Well, the example of using the different like bid styles, I guess, to uncover different audiences. That's fascinating to me because those are two, I guess what those are uncovering is two different behaviors and different audiences are going to behave in different ways.

And that has some meaning as to who they are, maybe where they in the funnel, they are something along those lines. But yeah, I think that's, that's a really, really interesting route to go down, I guess. But Do you think now's probably a good time to segue then into the seven C's of media of CTCs. So I'll, I'll read all of them one by one, just so we kind of have a summary up top and then you can dig in wherever you want to dig in.

So one, we've already talked about a cost controlled bidding to click only attribution, three customer exclusions, four clean conversion tracking, five catalog campaigns, six calendar campaigns, seven core campaigns. Because of alliteration, there's probably nine season there, which is pretty good. So,

[00:12:21] Tony Chopp: We should keep going. 

[00:12:22] Richard Gaffin: Absolutely solid.

But yeah, so let's, where do you, where do you want to dig in there? So we already talked about cost controls a little bit, but 

[00:12:28] Tony Chopp: Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think, I think attribution is the next logical one. And so another topic that, that we've, we've talked about for a long time and I, I want to sort of double, double down on the point of like cost control bidding or click only or tight attribution is the, the premise is. Hold the media platform to the highest possible standard.

Make the algorithm work as hard as possible for the hundreds of millions of dollars that we invest on behalf of our clients. Right. So, also same audit project that we worked on where we got some incrementality reads on the cost control versus. Lowest cost, highest volume bidding set. We also got a read on the attribution set.

So the data set was split. It wasn't as nicely split where it was like 50 50 in the two cohorts. In this particular case, the vast majority of this account was run on a seven, seven, seven and one, seven, eight click one day view with a much smaller percent on a one day click. So click only, but the same pattern emerged here where the click only, The click only attributed spend had a higher incrementality percentage.

So about 25 percent higher on that set. So, think about, think about, think about the seven C's of CTC's media buying principles as the place to start, start with cost control bidding. Expand through MinROS, CostCap, some BidCap is, we don't use a ton of BidCap because it's the most restrictive of all of them. Start with that. When you get to attribution, start with tight attribution windows. Use 7 to 8 click as your starting point. You're going to set yourself up. You're gonna, your starting point is going to be really solid in this case, right? And of course, we can expand from there. We can try to do the experimentation like we were talking about that, that Taylor's exploring over on Bamboo Earth.

Like, well, let's try to see if we could, if we do some 7 in 1, for example. Let's look at the audience overlap. Let's see if we're hitting a different pool. And then let's bring it back into an incrementality study. To see what the difference is, and this goes back to the point I made to you earlier, which is, this isn't a question of right or wrong. This is a question of the contribution of each of these tactics. And what, what we would assume, what I would assume to be true is that the incrementality percentage is going to be higher on the click only leading to the ability to set a lower in platform target. The incrementality percentage is going to be lower on the one day view, which just means we have to set a little bit higher target. But if we see a bunch, like not a lot of over audience overlap, And we have good increment, incrementality data to support it. There may be some level investment at seven, seven and one that makes seven seven and one that makes sense, right? So there's some nuance in how we think about these things, but the framework of starting with cost control bidding and starting with click only attribution is going to get you set up in a really good, a really good foundation to build off of.

[00:15:36] Richard Gaffin: right. So that, that basically provides you the most stable environment, let's say to kick when, when you actually make the bill, when you're actually kicking off your campaigns, it's the most stable sort of way your ad account can be, but something you sort of alluded to is like, under what circumstances do you then, like, what's the signal to begin to expand out and start experimenting with other other like bid styles or whatever.

[00:16:00] Tony Chopp: Yeah, I think. I think the, so generally speaking, what we, what CTC does that I think is unique we have a philosophy for how we run, for how we think about media that is build is the, if I could sum it up into one word, it would be bill. And the, the idea of build is in opposition to. The idea of let's tweak this, tweak that play with this bid cap, play with that main row setting, try to get a campaign to spend.

Okay. And this, this all stems from the idea of this CTC sort of core philosophy around you be really smart about what you're selling in a funnel be really intelligent about the unit, what the unit economics of that funnel are use that to arrive at what the target needs to be. Now this is being informed by incrementality as well. And once you have all of those things dialed in. And if the campaign spends with all of these constraints, that's great. That means we have something that works. If the campaign doesn't spend with all of these constraints, that's great. Then that's a signal not above the system, right? So back to your question about when is it time to explore in like more exotic or sort of like less CTC principled tactics. What I would offer to use that is very likely that you haven't built enough stuff yet. You haven't gotten into this the, the rigor of inputting enough new things into the system to actually find what's working. So I would caution. So I would bring us back to the starting point is cost control bidding. Click only attribution. The, the next phase, what we do with our clients is we're looking at concepting through the concept log and getting to, we're, we have some really exciting stuff going on the creative side that's helping us understand and answer the question about, well, given these constraints, click cost control bidding, click only attribution, how much creative do we actually think we need in order to get to where we're trying to go to?

So I think that's the problem to solve first. Before you start going into, well, what if we, what if we, what if we lowered the standard for the media platforms? Cause I can tell you for sure what will happen in that case. Can you guess? You're going to spend more media dollars for sure.

[00:18:27] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, no, I think that that makes sense. And it's, it's a theme that we've come back to over and over again. It's like, get, get the basics right first before you freak out and start expanding. So let's, let's, let's keep going. So we can keep going down the seven C's here. The next one is customer exclusions.

Clean conversion tracking is four, but maybe let's jump into the exclusions piece then.

[00:18:48] Tony Chopp: Yeah, I think the exclusion piece is just another part of the system that's being that we're refining and adding fidelity to through our through our incrementality studies, right? So it goes back to the same idea that we've talked about a couple of times now, where it's not right or wrong, it's about understanding the incremental impact of of reaching out to these customers. So in, in StatList, we have some we have a more refined definition of customer groups. So we have new customer, existing customer we also have a group called at risk customer, and then we have lapsed or lost customers. So the, this same, the same idea of applying the incrementality percentages. To to these various customer groups. Getting the targets right and then applying the exclusion audiences in the in the campaigns is, is is part of how we recommend for our clients and how we would recommend everyone else out there to think about it as well. So, have a remarketing campaign, have a retention campaign. For sure have it and be smart about the definition of that audience, AKA the size of that audience. And then also be really smart about how you set the target. So to go up and reach out to your lapsed customers, for example, right? Or let's, let's use at risk. So, StatList will give us a definition of at risk customers for based on, based on the frequency of purchase. I'll give you, for example, if 80 percent of the customer file makes a repeat purchase within 12 months, for those that are going to make a repeat purchase. And then let's say they if they don't make a purchase within 24 months, I'm just using these as four examples. That they are lost. So that group of, that group of customers that are, haven't purchased again after the 12th month, but are before the 24 month window, we would call those at risk, okay? So, now the game is go acquire, go reacquire those customers. And understand, and first understand increment, incremental impact going and paying a CAC to acquire them again. That's it. That's all there is to it. So when we talk about customer exclusions, it's not as simple as Always exclude the entire customer file. That's that's a really broad brush stroke, right? We definitely want to think about our audience exclusions with a couple more layers of granularity. And we want to think about our campaign structure in a way where we're targeting these different, these different cohorts of customers in different ways and that the targets of those campaigns are informed by increment. It's all part of one big happy system, Richard.

[00:21:30] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Of course. Yeah, right. It's all, it's all part of the profit system. You know what I mean?

[00:21:34] Tony Chopp: All right. 

[00:21:35] Richard Gaffin: That's, what we're doing. Okay. So let's, I think that's, that's fairly straightforward. So let's jump into four, which is clean conversion tracking. And what I think is interesting about this one is that it also brings into the conversation, some elements of data clarity as well, which you mentioned beforehand, so let's, let's get into a clean conversion tracking,

[00:21:50] Tony Chopp: Yeah. I mean, it's like, I don't know, it feels like the thing that is like the least sexiest

part of paid media and possibly one of the most important, maybe the most important thing. So think about everything that we're talking about, right? We're talking about using, using the algorithm to we're, we're trusting the algorithm to find the audience. Do the bidding make the media by essentially really, really handing the keys over to the meta ads platform or any of their media platforms to, to handle the logistics of the, almost the whole thing. It's a lot different than the way we used to do it a bunch of years ago, where we'd set manual bids for everything. The, the validity. So, the validity of this whole system is contingent on the quality of the data signal. So, so not only is the validity of the whole system contingent on the data signal, but in addition to that, the higher the quality of the data signal, the better. the entire system works at going out and finding the audience.

So how this applies to the holidays, we're going through a process for all of our clients to, on the meta side, to audit two specific sections the, our event match quality scores. And so we're looking for we're looking for really high scores in four key categories of events. So view content, add to cart, initiate checkout and purchase. And Meta gives us a bunch of great signals about the quality of those events. And what we're looking to evaluate how good our data signal is for these four things. And we're looking for spots. If we see spots that need, that need tune ups we have some various partnerships that we're bringing in to get everything tuned up.

So we, we want really a high quality signal on those four key events, including browser and, and Cappy server events. And we want to make sure that we're prepped for the holidays to have the strongest data signal that we can. So that's on the conversion tracking. I'm going to get the next C is around catalog campaigns, and I'm going to connect these two together. The other place that we're looking at in in commerce manager for meta is the catalog match rate. Okay. So what this tells us is how how clean is our data signal from our data feed or catalog based campaigns. Being matched up with the available attributes that Meta can use to tie conversion signals.

So there's, there's a bunch of different components of this, but the nuts and bolts of it are we want to make sure that Meta understands what products we're sending, what are, what are the attributes of those products. And, and this allows us to get the most amount of delivery and maximum output from the next piece of the seven C's. Which are catalog based campaigns, which are hugely, no matter what media platform you're talking about, Google meta, tick tock, no matter which one you're talking about. If you're an e commerce advertiser, catalog campaigns are an, it should be an extremely important part of your stack. So for anybody that doesn't know, catalog campaign, really simple, really simple. It's a, it's a feed of information from your store. And it's the, the ads that have little pictures of your products. That's it. Every media platform has a different name for it and a different presentation of it, but this style of advertising this, this style of advertising campaigns is really important. the the clean conversion tracking data piece. Of the seven C's part of it on meta is EMQ. And we're going to go through we're going through an audit process for all of our clients. The other part of it, which connects to the data feed piece is the the catalog match rate

[00:25:31] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. So actually you mentioned EMQ, but I don't think we've defined that yet. Can you break down what, what that is?

[00:25:37] Tony Chopp: event match quality.

Okay. So, yep, yep. Event match quality.

[00:25:42] Richard Gaffin: Okay. And if the explanation isn't like, you can't explain it to the layman, just let me know, but I am curious to how does one evaluate the quality of the signal? Like what is it possible to dig into like the process of what that looks like? How do you know that like

[00:25:58] Tony Chopp: Yeah. 

[00:25:58] Richard Gaffin: and you good or bad, or what, what even how you would even sort of phrase that?

[00:26:02] Tony Chopp: Yeah. Yeah. Let me give you a couple points. So one thing that we're looking for is freshness. Okay. So how, how fast the data

is flowing in, in one of the, one of the, um, the general principle is the faster the data flows, the better, right? So I'll give you a practical experience. Have you ever let's see, done something online.

Let's say you looked at some shorts or

joggers or something, or maybe click through a meta ad and all of a sudden you just get served tons of similar products.

So your ability as the, so let's say you clicked on a meta ad for some joggers. And now let's say, let's say you see a bored primitive ad. Bored Primitive's ability to get into that auction really quickly for somebody who's in market, aka you that clicked on a meta ad, is a function of how fast that signal is moving and how the quality of that signal that's moving through. So freshness and the speed of the data is one thing that we're evaluating. The other thing that we evaluate with event match quality is, excuse me Is the amount of different variables that we're matching. So, Meta has some information about its audience And and the idea with the robustness of the data is, Without PII, without personally identifiable information how much of the data can be matched?

There's a bunch of different fields that you can look at. So there's, and it's all hash. So email address, location phone number all designed as a mechanism for meta to better understand the user and what they're looking for in, in the interest of being able to serve ads as effectively as possible. So you, the advertiser, the more signal. That you are able to share with Metta through your event match, event matching process, the more Metta is going to be able to find audiences, potential audiences for your product.

[00:27:56] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha.

[00:27:57] Tony Chopp: It's all about I think the best way to say it in layman's terms is when we talk about this, the quote unquote signal, the mysterious signal think about it as a collection of data points that can be shared and can be captured about your potential audience. That then allows Metta to understand where your audience is online and go target.

[00:28:21] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Okay. Well, that was honestly clearer than I was expecting. So that's, that's super helpful. No, I think that's really interesting. So, and then of course we, we hit the fifth C already, which is catalog campaigns. And again, there's those little tie in to holiday there, which is like catalog. is the most crucial for like remarketing or like as an evergreen kind of ad product.

And so like during the holiday season, those tend to be the best performers. I think that's still the case, in which case making sure your catalog is set up becomes absolutely critical for getting those sort of bottom funnel people are ready to go.

[00:28:52] Tony Chopp: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think like I've heard, I've heard people say like catalog is is sort of bottom of funnel. And I don't, it's not that I disagree. It's, I think there's, I don't think it's only that I think catalog serves a high intent, bottom of funnel audience really well in a remarketing capacity. I don't know about you. I know these are anecdotal and stuff is below it, but like. In my own anecdotal experience I love catalog ads on beta. I think the shopping experience is the most fun for me personally. When I get a catalog ad and I just like, I don't leave the app. I don't click through, but I just swipe through the catalog.

And I can't tell you personally, like how many, how many products I've discovered through through catalog campaigns. Right. And I think, I think again, anecdotal, whatever, just one guy's experience. But it, for me, it really. It really is about the experience that I'm having interacting with that particular ad unit. And it's almost like, it's like shopping. It's like browsing. It's like, yeah, cool, cool. Not cool. Not cool. 

[00:30:02] Richard Gaffin: That makes sense. No, I mean, like fundamentally, like, Maybe what you're saying is it's a good ad product and particularly for, for products that don't need a lot of explanation, I would say, like, if you just want to buy shoes or something, and you're getting, you're sort of fresh to a brand or whatever, like you are top of funnel, but you're seeing a catalog ad, then that may be all you need to make the purchase.

So there is sort of a discovery element to it as well as the sort of thing I was thinking of, which is like algorithmically, you were looking at this one shoe before now you see it on Facebook or whatever, but

[00:30:29] Tony Chopp: that's right. That's right. The way that you're thinking about it. is getting reserved because you already looked at the product and the way that, the way that I experienced in the way that we, the way that we think about deploying them. At CTC is, is very much as a, as a discovery element, for sure. The other thing that catalog campaigns let us do really well really effectively is when we think about when we think about merchandising and ad account, for example oftentimes in let's, let's connect back to one of the first points about having getting really clear about what we're selling and the unit economics of what we're selling, oftentimes we'll use catalog campaigns. And have meaningfully different targets set. So I'll give you, for example, let's say you're let's say you're a retailer athleisure wear brand, and you have a men's set and women's set, and you have really different unit economics between those two. Let's just say you have a higher AOV on the women's set.

They you know, the cart's bigger, whatever else it is. So having two catalog campaigns, one for men, one for women. It's going to do a couple of things. Number one, it's going to help us, the, the algorithm, no, the audience target, but number two, it's going to give us the ability to set those targets differently based on the unit economics of those two different kernels. In, in those, in that particular case, we would want to most likely want to use some sort of min, probably a min rows type of bidding. If we don't really know the exact AOB of what we're selling. I think that's. That's an interesting kind of sub point in the catalog conversation, like how to get the bidding right. Minroas is, is a really good choice on the meta ads platform if you're not exactly sure what the AOB is going to be. So when we think about another thing that we think about, another thing that's important to us with catalog campaigns is matching as a way to merchandise the ad account. And a lot of times we think about matching like, Whatever our clients are doing in their navigation on their website, collections, whatever else it is, we really want to have corresponding catalog campaigns for all of those.

[00:32:25] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Is this, actually, is this a good place to maybe jump into the social commerce piece of this? As long as we're talking about a good in platform experience. Maybe, yeah, if there's more to dig in there, maybe this is 

[00:32:37] Tony Chopp: Yeah. Precisely. Right. So, the, so social commerce is is an area that is very exciting to us. So think about it. We call the various platforms like execute it differently and have different names for it. But the principle is pretty straightforward. Check out. In app. Right. So as opposed to click through over to a website.

So, in meta, it happens with the shops product and tick tock. They call it shop. So,

And I think that there's, there's some really, really big differences in the style and the strategy. But let's talk about the meta shops piece. First of all. So one Yeah. A critical point to activate Metashops is to have, right?

So you have to have the catalog as the starting point. So when we think about making sure we have clean really well articulated catalogs, one of the reasons why is because it helps us feed Metashops. And from, in Metashops, we're seeing some really fascinating things happen. For one of, one of the clients, Metashops. Where we've seen the most impact. We're getting like a meaningful amount of purchases happening on the shop about approximately 20%. But I think what's even more interesting about this particular account is. We're getting some data from Meta on what they're calling shops assisted conversions, meaning somebody clicked through, got the shops experience and didn't ultimately purchase that way, but browse that way.

So, and I think this goes to my point about the, the experiential nature of Meta. Viewing the set of products in, in a shop, as opposed to clicking through a website, the shop experience is very similar to a catalog ad on the front end of meta where it's like. Scroll through product collections and it's pretty fun. And I think what, I think what's happening is the story I'm telling myself is that we are the shops process is not only expediting the checkout because it keeps it all on the platform, but it's also having some sort of impact on the shopping experience itself. Right? So we're exploring we have we have a bunch of stuff that we're looking at right now on. How to actually make sure your shop is the best it can be because you can actually configure the shop The meta shop so that you can add collections to it. You can bring in some UGC. That's another point That's really cool point that I that of this like little sub genre one of the things that meta is doing is automatically, we're giving you the option to automatically pull in UGC into your, into your meta shop, which is cool. So if people are out there tagging your brand that can get pulled into the shop and think about, just think about it as like this shop is like the storefront instead of your website, it's the storefront, it's happening all on the meta app. Users don't have to click off, checkout happens there, everything else. And it's primarily fed by a catalog. But the storefront is augmented by potentially by UGC or collections or other pieces of content that you add to it. It's really, you can really think about it as I think a storefront is probably the best analogy. If your website is one storefront, your meta shop, your Tik Tok meta shops, your Tik Tok shop is another.

Storefront

[00:35:57] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Yeah. So more more real estate, let's 

[00:36:01] Tony Chopp: or realism. 

[00:36:01] Richard Gaffin: using that. Yeah, exactly. That analogy in time for the busiest day of the year. So, okay. So let's go down to, let's get into six and seven then real quick. So talking about calendar campaigns and then seven being core campaigns. So tell me about calendar campaigns.

Cause that, that phrase is new to me. What does this mean?

[00:36:18] Tony Chopp: So yeah, so I mean it might have been a function of having to tie everything

in 

[00:36:22] Richard Gaffin: to get a C in there. Yeah. Sure.

[00:36:23] Tony Chopp: theme But this is not this isn't a new concept for us this is a Part of a functional part of our growth mapping process So, I'm sure most people in this audience are familiar with our growth mapping process But we think about I think about it in a sequential way.

So it starts with growth strategy at the P and L level, it goes over into our creative team. Our creative team works in the concept log and on the concept log, there are a number of inputs that we map, but one of those inputs is a calendar moment. So new product drops, sale, et cetera, whatever else. So calendar moments is a phase of maybe a clunky way of us of me saying that One of the critical parts of any media strategy is to align to moments on the calendar, whether it's product drops or sale or whatever else, not not like a super new idea. But for those that are thinking about like the seven C's of the media buying philosophy. Catalog campaigns, calendar campaigns and core evergreen campaigns are the are the types of campaigns that you should be thinking about in your media mix at all times

and to get to the last one, the core campaigns is just another is a C way of saying evergreen. So these are your all the campaigns that you're deciding to be always on.

[00:37:39] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. And so, and then obviously, like, I think it's a good point to reiterate here that in this context, when we're talking about the holiday season, obviously large, that is one big calendar event, but there's, we've also been talking about there being sort of seven mini peaks last year. It was for this year.

We're finding even more. So one being early bird, two being black Friday, three being cyber Monday for being your sort of Post or rather, so your holiday offer pre Christmas, but then we're also adding Labor Day, which of course is right around the corner, then thinking about lead gen leading into the sort of heart of the season.

And then what we're calling the Q5 offer, which I like that one. 

[00:38:14] Tony Chopp: Yeah, that's a good 

[00:38:15] Richard Gaffin: but that's sort of like, yeah, exactly. The post holiday kind of pre, New year, new you type of thing that happens as well. But just like prepping for like understanding that those peaks happen, that they're cultural realities and that you have to build for them.

I think is maybe the heart of this, right?

[00:38:31] Tony Chopp: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So when, so, Luke and his team talk about it through the lens of the seven peaks. When we, when we think about it there's, there's the seven peaks and one valley of H2 is a overarching premise for the second half, which is true. But what's always true for us on the media team, always, no matter what, is that we're mapping media against important calendar moments, whether that's push or pull for the holiday specifically the media teams are going to be looking at really being thoughtful around the election time.

So in how we're thinking about we, we don't want particularly the week or 10 days prior to the election representing a large portion of our media mapping. We want to really think about how we're dovetailing in and around that space when we think we're going to see the most dramatic when what the data is telling us from recent election election cycles, we're going to see the most dramatic impact on CPMs. So as we think about, as our growth strategy friends were thinking about the seven peaks in the one valley in mapping media, our media team will actually take that and put it into a day by day media plan that considers all of these inputs

and considers like, how do we jog our way around the election stuff as best as possible?

[00:39:46] Richard Gaffin: So let's well, let's get our final piece here, which is in contrast to the calendar campaign to some extent which is evergreen campaigns. And of course the old, like the thing that we've been saying for the last three or four years, which has probably held true is that your evergreen campaigns or your evergreen messaging tends to be the best performers over holiday season.

Because oftentimes it sort of expresses what your product is the most straightforwardly. But so let's talk about like, is, are there any nuances to that? Is that just kind of how we're just continuing? Or 

[00:40:14] Tony Chopp: Well, I think the nuance to it is, I think the nuances One of the, one of the reasons why that can be, that can be true often is because that those evergreen campaigns have a ton of historical data,

right?

And so when we have campaigns that have a long history of historical data, Meaning campaigns that have spent a meaningful amount, they typically have the most ability to scale up into moments based on that historical data.

So the nuance to this point is if you launched a quote unquote evergreen campaign on November 15th you should not expect that that likely wouldn't be the best performing campaign in, in an account in that sense. So in like the, the time is now. And this connects back to our our sort of idea about like the CTC media principle of building the way you get to high performing evergreen campaigns is you build your way there every month.

And generally speaking, if I were to give you a rough number, a really simple rough number, I would say that for most accounts, Let's call it 25%, 25 percent of the things we launch will actually deliver at the financial targets that we set. The way you get to having a stable of evergreen campaigns that can deliver the outcome you're looking for is through the iterative process of launching and building up those blocks of evergreen campaign, right? So, now for CTC clients. We've been working on this all year and sometimes for for a bunch of years, for for those, Folks we've been working with for a long time. For anyone that's listening to this now, my encouragement to you would be don't, it's going to be a general theme of the holiday.

Don't wait start building stuff now in preparation so that you have quote unquote, evergreen campaigns that have some history by the time you get to the house and they, they likely will be a really core part of what delivers for you.

[00:42:18] Richard Gaffin: So it's a simple way to phrase this. Maybe that like your historical winners are going to be the winners. Over holiday as well.

[00:42:25] Tony Chopp: Yeah, pretty, pretty, there's a pretty good chance that that'll be true.

[00:42:29] Richard Gaffin: Interesting. Well, so I was going to ask sort of my last question for you would be to sort of wrap it all up. If you could give everybody one piece of advice, although it sounds like that is the piece of advice, which is start everything now, even though Q3 is hell here in e commerce, but getting kind of ahead of the curve.

But if there's one way you could sort of summarize this or one thing that you could maybe leave our listeners with in terms of how to approach media buying over this holiday season what would it be?

[00:42:54] Tony Chopp: Build. Yeah. Be a, be a maker. Be a maker. And, and like, this is what we like culturally at CTC. This is what we this has been the most important sort of rooting in our, in our mindset is let hold the, hold the algorithm, hold the machines to the highest possible standard using cost control and click only and all that stuff. And build, build stuff.

[00:43:20] Richard Gaffin: That's right. Just do it. As they say. Cool, man. Well, Tony, appreciate you joining us. And for those of you who leading into this, the Q3 doldrums into the Q4 season are looking for this level of attention to your accounts. Obviously you can get in touch with us, commonthreatco. com. Hit that high res button.

Let us know you'd like to chat and we would love to talk to you, but yeah, Tony, great to have you, man. And for all those out there listening, take care. We'll see you next time.