The Best & Worst Creative Demand Scores We’ve Seen for Brands

[00:00:00] Luke Austin: this brand that has the highest creative score in our dataset, still needs to grade a hundred ads in October to hit the spend goal.

The top percentile brands that we see in terms of , the brand's ability to scale while holding volume and, ultimately lead to the growth for the business.

Have thousands of ads running at any given time period and are, and are launching several hundred new ads every month at minimum. The conversation here around creative demand isn't around, do I need 20 ads or do I need 60 ads? For most brands, it's do you need 200 ads or do you need 400 ads for, for next month?

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[00:01:19] Richard Gaffin: Hey everyone. Welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, the Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective, and I'm joined today by a very special guest who's been on a lot of podcasts with us recently, but of course, it's Luke Austin, who's our VP of Ecommerce Strategy here at Common Thread.

Luke is what is going on today, ma'am.

[00:01:37] Luke Austin: We are in the lead up to Q4 and

[00:01:40] Richard Gaffin: Yep.

[00:01:41] Luke Austin: amount of conversations around what's necessary to hit the Q4 that we all want to have are I think we're all, we're all deep in those. But I'm excited, I'm excited for today's. I hope it, it's been helpful for us to get clarity in conversations specifically around creative demand and how much creative output is actually necessary for the back, for the, for the last quarter of the year, and heading into BFCM.

So I hope that we all leave with feeling a little more peace and clarity around this topic that can be stressful during an anxious time of year.

[00:02:11] Richard Gaffin: Th That's right. So, yeah, let's, let's get straight into it then. So, as you guys know, if you've been listening to the pod, we've been talking for the last several weeks about our spend an A MER forecasting models. And essentially

[00:02:22] Luke Austin: Is that.

[00:02:22] Richard Gaffin: just to recap for those who haven't heard or just kind of tuning in, are spend an A MER models essentially give you a sense of how much you will need to spend on a month by month basis in order to hit.

Very specific goals, and once we get that sense of exactly how much, particularly in this case, new revenue you're going to need to get over the next several months, then we can kind of break that down into a series of metrics that allow you to track on a day-to-day basis whether you're doing what you need to do. To get to that number. Now, we've talked kind of a few times about sort of these cascading levels of clarity. If you have this level of clarity about what you need to spend to get where you need to go, all of a sudden it opens up other ways that we can create clarity for your business on exactly what you need to go do.

And that is where this creative demand model comes in. Because what this does is it gives you the basic number that you need in order to execute on this forecast, which is how much creative do you need to make? much new creative needs to be put into meta in order for meta to get to the spend levels you need to get to. And now obviously we, if for those who are watching on YouTube,

we have pulled up kind of our data or rather a dashboard here. what we've done is break this into what we're calling a creative score. And so, Luke, let me have you kind of to us a little bit about what we're seeing here and how that kind of relates to this idea of creative demand planning.

[00:03:38] Luke Austin: Yeah, great. So what we're actually gonna do here is we're gonna show the brand that we have seen with the highest creative score so far, and the brand with the lowest creative score based on a creative demand model model in our, in our data set. And as well as one sort of middle of the road brand.

But we're gonna get to the lowest score ever and the highest score ever that we, that we've seen which I, which I think will in the con context of that conversation help us to understand. What are some of the main things that we look at? How are we approaching this problem of, of quantifying what creative demand and what creative output is necessary to hit, to hit the business goals?

And, and Richard, like you mentioned tying this to the spend, aim UR model, that's step one. And then that and then this helps to sort of decompose the necessary. Creative output to achieve that budget allocation. This is one of four models within our profit system. I think it's worth, worth noting in these conversations that the, the core thing that we do at CTC is our profit system, the spay name, your model is one of the core models that starts in that process.

And then we build out a core based retention forecast. We build out an event, event effect model, which is tied to the marketing calendar impact, and we, we develop out then this. Creative demand model, which is the creative output necessary to be able to achieve those business targets. So what we're gonna talk through here again, is three different outputs of the creative demand model for three different brands.

One sort of right in the middle, one, which is the worst score we've ever seen. One, which is the best score that we have seen so far in the process of this creative demand model. What we've done in this in the build out of this model is we've identified five of the main metrics that are indicative of what the creative demand is necessary to be able to achieve the forecast for the coming month.

And so what we're gonna start there with sort of sharing each of these metrics, the definition of each and how they. Then build into this aggregate creative score output that we're looking at for each brand. And we'll just, we'll just kinda start going down the line here. So the first metric that we look at in building out the creative demand model is what we call zero spend rate.

This is the percentage of active ads that had zero spend, so didn't spend any money during the measurement period. High values indicate many ads aren't getting budget allocation. So. Zero spin rate is if this is a higher, has a higher score on this, the scale. So for this brand that we're looking at which is in the footwear category, their zero spin rate has a percentile 66 percentile score.

So above, above average. Which means that the spin is getting spread across more, more ads. There, there isn't a very large number of ads that are getting, that are getting zero spend which helps to sort of identify. What risk is exists in the creative composition of the ad account in terms of where the spend is being allocated to the next metric.

So zero spin rate. Second metric is ad concentration. So this, this is the percentage of total ad spend concentrated in the top five performing ads. High values indicate over reliance on a few ads, creating risk if those ads fail. And what, what this really indicates is for particularly a brand like this and brands that are, are heavily reliant on new product drops, new moments to be able to drive the demand in any given time period at any given point, there can be really, you know, 2, 3, 4, 5 ads that are, that are taking up the majority of the ad account span.

80% of the span going to go into that subset of ads, which means. Once the hype around that moment or that launch or that product category starts to die down, it just creates reliance that you need to launch more ads to be able to keep the momentum back up. So that's what ad concentration is looking at in this process.

The third MA metric is ROAS degradation, the change. So this is the change in ROAS over the initial launch week. Positive values mean ROAS improved over time. Negative values mean it declined after launch. So does the ROAS on the batch of ads improve after the initial launch week, or does it degrade after the initial launch week?

Similarly, the fourth metric is spin degradation. So this is change in daily ad spend after the initial launch week. Positive values indicate successful spin scaling negative values indicate spend dropped after launch. So do I get more volume on these ads over time or does it drop off very quickly after that initial launch week?

And then evergreen Share the percentage of ads that have been running consistently for 30 plus days. These are your evergreen ads that provide stable, sustained performance over time. This is the bedrock foundation of your ad account. And if you have a higher percentage in that metric it is just more evergreen baseline to build on top of.

And each of these five creative metrics then culminate in the creative score, which. What the creative score is looking at is these are all graded on a percentile outcome. And so if your creative score is higher than 50, in the case of this brand, their creative score is a 61. So if your creative score is higher than 50, that means you're gonna need to create less ads than you would've in a similar historical time period.

Your creative health is actually improving as a result of one or more of these metrics. So over 50, I'm going to need less creative output than I would have in a similar time period based on the seasonality impact. So November of this year, compared to November last year, likely in this case based on a 61 creative score, they're going to, they're going to need less ads than last year.

Not a lot less, but, but, but less. Below 50, similarly, below 50. Creative score means you are going to need to create more ads to just get to the same spend baseline at the same efficiency expectation as before. So even just to get back to zero, back to the baseline of where you were in a historical time period.

If your score is below 50, you are gonna need more ads just to get to that baseline and then quite a bit more if you're trying to improve against that historical baseline number as well.

[00:09:43] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. So essentially what this gives, I mean beyond kind of, I mean we'll get into the sort of meta ads, creative versus optim creation piece next. But for these kinda like five factors, what at least that gives maybe directionally gives you some sense of like what specifically you need to work on within your creative. Mix or whatever in order

[00:10:02] Luke Austin: Yes.

[00:10:02] Richard Gaffin: some of these scores. So for this particular brand, let's see, their lowest percentile pieces, ROAS degradation. Now, it doesn't seem like the rose degradation is that much, however, it does seem like they're ROAS tails off over time.

[00:10:15] Luke Austin: Yes.

[00:10:15] Richard Gaffin: Share the share percentage of ads, like 27% of their ads. Have been running consistently for over 30 days. They could potentially improve that figure. Now what act set of actions would you take based on those types of things? I.

[00:10:30] Luke Austin: Yeah, so the, the, in terms of troubleshooting it, it becomes a more challenging question, but I do think to your point, this is in our experience, this is a most more helpful framework in looking about troubleshooting creative performance than what a common framework might be. Of the CTRs on my ads are lower week, over week, or.

The cpm, ct, RC, pc, sort of these leading indicators are the things that I have to go and troubleshoot. I have to look at the hook rate and my hook rate on my videos within the first two seconds is lower than it was last month, so maybe I have to go and proof hook rate are in the analysis that we've done those metrics.

Are very loosely correlated to the ROAS outcome or the business outcome for, for, for the brand. And looking at how the CTR over time impacts that, the hook rate impacts that, and troubleshooting those metrics in isolation is similar to troubleshooting for conversion rate and isolation of traffic.

Right? Like. You wanna increase conversion rate in isolation? Well, it just stop spinning on meta and like your sideway conversion rate's gonna go up, right? And no one's gonna do something that, that simple in terms of that pursuit. But when any of these metrics are looked at, looked at in isolation, it just creates another problem in another area for the business typically.

[00:11:41] Richard Gaffin: All right.

[00:11:42] Luke Austin: And so, to your point, looking at these creative metrics in this way it has been a more helpful framework for us in, in troubleshooting what the creative performance looks like now. The specifics around it? Yes. For this brand, what we see is ROAS degradation and evergreen share are the lowest percentile outcome.

Their ad concentration is a strength area for them, so we don't have a lot of concentration in terms of, in terms of where the spin's being allocated, zero spin rate and spend degradation are above average. They're pretty good. But ROAS degradation and evergreen share is what i'd, what I'd go after the ROAS degradation and evergreen share.

Each of these things, again, are connected and knowing what we do about this brand. Which is that they are pretty heavily reliant on drops, specifically new new skew or new collection drops in terms of their, their revenue output. Then it becomes pretty clear what needs to happen here, which is the ROAS degradation.

To improve that, what's happening is we're launching a new category of collection that's a limited skew in some colorway or collection, and then. After a week or two, it gets sold through in the inventory, and then the row has degrades, right? Because there's, there's no sizes available for the core for the majority of customers.

Similarly, the evergreen share is really low because when those things launch, most of the spin goes to them because they it has the highest performance around these new, these new skews. But then after a week or two, they drop down. And so the evergreen share isn't, there's just not a consistent enough baseline for this business of consistently performing.

Evergreen ads that aren't relying on these collection and drops. And then it becomes really clear that we need to identify sort of core or bestselling skews or categories in terms of the creative output. And then step two get to the creative output numbers necessary, which is for this upcoming month in October, the recommended ad output is 161 ads in terms of the amount of ads that are necessary based on the creative demand model to hit.

The, the business goal. And so the, the focus is as we go into October, we have to create 161 ads and we should focus as many of those around core bestselling and evergreen SKUs as possible to be able to create this foundation for this brand, especially as we head into November, which is an even higher ad output recommendation.

[00:13:55] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's an interesting kind of combination of things, right? Like you, what this allows you to do is understand. The volume. But then it also helps you understand sort of directionally the strategic kind of bent you need to take with that volume. So it's not just create 160 ads for this particular brand, creating 160 ads that help kind of counteract these sort of let's say the ROAS degradation or the kind of evergreen share.

Those, those relatively low scores, like you have some understanding that strategically overall, that's the direction you need to take with at least like the product that you're choosing. Cool. So let's I mean, actually anything else on the, on the actual, like meta ads created versus optimal piece here?

[00:14:39] Luke Austin: I don't, I don't think so. Outside of the, outside of the point that we can see the historical output of actual ads created versus optimal for each of these, for each of these time periods. And then we can also see we can also see the. Ad spend and efficiency for each of those time periods and see if we over or under-delivered against the expectation in terms of ad output created.

So it's helpful in terms of like, let's look back at this year. Let's see some of our best and worst months. Let's see what the ad output looked like against what the optimal recommendation was to take that into context for for the future, but. Anecdotally, without sharing the brand specifics and the numbers, it's, it's very clear.

We can look back here and like, and, and be able to see June, June was a tough month for the brand. January's a tough month for the brand. And we can sort of like tie the performance we were seeing during those time periods too. Well, if we would've had the creative demand model I think we could have gotten ahead of of some of this.

June could have been better than it, than it was and we overdeliver the expectation without having clarity on what the. Without having clarity on what the, what the optimal ad demand output was.

[00:15:48] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. And there's also like the, the kind of readout below this, the meta ads, creative versus optimal gives a sense of like what that performance was

[00:15:57] Luke Austin: Yes,

[00:15:57] Richard Gaffin: Ba against like obviously actual ads created versus last year, but then also spend target spend to kind of give a sense of like where there are potential misses there as well.

[00:16:07] Luke Austin: yes. Exactly,

[00:16:09] Richard Gaffin: okay. Cool. Let's so that was our sort of middle of the road score. Let's jump now to our next one, which is, I believe our worst.

[00:16:16] Luke Austin: yes. This is this is the worst score that we have seen in the creative demand model. We, we built this, this out for across our, our dataset. So hundreds, hundreds of brands that we're able to see this creative demand model on. So the creative score for this brand is 27. So for reference, what we just looked at, the brand prior was a 61.

This is a 27. A 50th percentile outcome is you are basically holding your creative health consistent. If you have a number above that you're improving number below that you're going to need to create a lot more ads than you would have historically, just for the same, just to achieve the same outcome.

So a creative score of 27, the things that jump out immediately in terms of the creative metric and the opportunities is. One, the evergreen share is top percentile. It's 89 percentile. Probably one of the strongest in the data set in terms of the evergreen share for this brand, which is, which is helpful, a really consistent base of of evergreen ads running the account to build upon that is really the only strength area.

It, it goes down from there. Zero spin rate and add concentration are sort of middle, middle of the pack 50th percentile outcomes. The biggest pain points are ROAS degradation, and. And spend degradation ROS degradation of 15 percentile outcome, and then spend degradation at 31, which means after ads launch after the first week, the ROAS and the spend both degrade drastically for this business.

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[00:18:35] Richard Gaffin: Interesting. So, but it kind of shows as like in, although our previous brand had a. evergreen share. There's that actually, that was one of their weak, sorry, their two kinda like weak metrics for evergreen share and ROAS degradation. But that was the case for like the RO degradation below being low is for a different reason. Whereas be, you can see, or rather what I'm trying to say here is this brand has a great evergreen share. Right. You know, 43% or whatever.

[00:19:02] Luke Austin: yes.

[00:19:02] Richard Gaffin: be indicative of the fact that like actually only a smaller percentage of ads are actually successful. Most ads that get dropped in here just kind of fall off immediately.

They don't, aren't seeing a ton of efficiency outside of like a small group of best performers maybe.

[00:19:17] Luke Austin: yes, that, that's exactly right. And what, what it indicates is. The evergreen share being so high is that there, there are just a number of winning ads that have been winning ads forever. In this ad account that have just carried the ad account and mo many, many of the folks listening could probably identify for them like the five ads that over the past five years, if they didn't have them, they would've been able to spend a fifth of what they had in meta.

Like they've just carried the ad account, right. For this brand. The catalog, the Daba and catalog ads is a ist is one of those a as it is for many, but it just means there's, there are a subset of ads. They're just a consistent foundation for the brand and have been over a long period of time.

But it is really hard to find one of those winners.

[00:20:03] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:03] Luke Austin: it is really hard to find. Another top performing ad that can be carried over longer than a 30 day period and spend in the account for this brand. And so the recommendation here, we kind of have it in the, in the qualitative output as well, which is to prioritize rapid creative testing and launch new ad variation.

It like the way to get after this is we have to go and find more of these winning ads that we can carry with us into the future. And we don't know what those are going to be. So we need to launch a high volume of creative and a high diversity within those creatives as well to be able to add 1, 2, 3, 4 more of these winner ads to this baseline.

For, for the, for the business.

[00:20:50] Richard Gaffin: Right. Yeah. The, the sort of over concentration of performance in a certain of ads just is like a key indicator that what you really, that volume is, is. Is necessary, right? So,

[00:21:03] Luke Austin: Yes.

[00:21:04] Richard Gaffin: is another kind of reason for this. Such a low creative score. Obviously the low creative score indicating the amount of ads you would need to make and against the next year, and that kind of looks like it's borne out, at least in the kind of optimal ad creation or, or the amount of optimal ads that are going to be required over these next four months, September, October, November.

[00:21:21] Luke Austin: Yes.

[00:21:22] Richard Gaffin: it's a peak season, but it does seem like a pretty significant kind of boost over the beginning of the year.

[00:21:27] Luke Austin: Yeah. And to that point, what's fascinating is the, so the ad concentration metric isn't, isn't, isn't great, but it's not.

[00:21:34] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:35] Luke Austin: It's not

[00:21:35] Richard Gaffin: not the

[00:21:35] Luke Austin: horrific. Yeah, exactly. So the, an ad concentration, again, the definition is percentage of total ad spend concentrated in the top five performing ads. So the ad concentration could be worse.

Raw degradation and spend degradation are are the things that are the, the main trouble areas for the business. And those metrics are the change in daily spend and daily roas after the initial launch week. So what, what that, what that means is that we have in any 30 day period, 'cause the evergreen share is looking at like past this 30 day window.

We don't, we don't have a lot of ad concentration, but we have a really heavy turnover of ads.

[00:22:16] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:17] Luke Austin: heavy turnover in a tighter timeframe that every week we like get stuff in there. It starts to, it gets some spin, right? Like the new stuff we're launching gets some spin. That's why our ad concentration isn't as bad as it as it could be.

But then after a week or two, it dies off really quick. Necessitating launching new stuff. And just like on that, on that hamster wheel of performance. And so the, yeah, again, the real focus being how do we get, how do we find. Ads based on the audience, offer an angle overlap of those that allow us to, for those ads to continue past the initial week, past the initial two weeks and into the 30 days.

Otherwise this row and spend degradation, if this continues it, it is just gonna continue to make it necessary to, okay, we launched a big batch of ads that did get some spend the first week, and then they tapered off really quickly and we know that need another big batch of ads. How do we get one or two of each of those batches of ads to be one?

Ones that stick with us in a longer period of time.

[00:23:16] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. okay. I, I think if, unless there's something else you wanna hit on this, I think let's jump to our best creative score.

[00:23:23] Luke Austin: Yeah, so our best creative score is a 75. So 61 was the first one we looked at. 27 was the worst. And then 75 is the best creative score. Which as a side note isn't, isn't great. I mean, it's like 75th percentile, like there, there's a lot of upside to this creative score still. And I would love to see some other brands in here that we could see if we can beat this beat, the 75 but for this 75 creative score.

For this business every metric is really strong outside of a ad concentration. So zero spend rate, 70 second percentile row degradation, 93rd percentile, spend degradation, 85th percentile evergreen share, 76 percentile. So the, this is really the inverse of the other brand. We saw where ROAS and spend degradation are the strong, are the strong suits, are the strength areas for this.

For this brand after the initial launch week, ads are getting more spend and performing at a higher ROAS for this brand which is the inverse of what was happening for the previous brand. Whereas the, the challenge area ad concentration is the one metric that's really bringing down the overall for, for this business.

29th percentile outcome for ad concentration. And which just means there is a there is a large concentration of spend within. Five ads within the ad account, really five ads or less that are carrying a large majority of the spend. And and testing, just getting more ads into the ad account in general, being able to add to that number so there's less concentration is is the main, main focus for this business.

[00:25:03] Richard Gaffin: So this is let's do a little kind of analysis here

[00:25:06] Luke Austin: Yeah.

[00:25:07] Richard Gaffin: of an addition. So this is a, a basics brand, essentially, right? And so what this is indicating to me is like, if I had to guess, these top five performing ads would be sort of maybe catalog ads are very simple ads showing like a set of kind of their bestsellers

[00:25:23] Luke Austin: Mm. Mm-hmm.

[00:25:25] Richard Gaffin: Of their spend, all of their spend is concentrated on those five, but those

[00:25:28] Luke Austin: Yeah.

[00:25:28] Richard Gaffin: really, really well because it's a good

[00:25:30] Luke Austin: Yeah.

[00:25:30] Richard Gaffin: et cetera, et cetera. How close am I there? And if, like, what are, are you kind of seeing from these numbers in terms of like the DNA of this brand?

[00:25:38] Luke Austin: Yeah, so the, the thing for me that's like the, the biggest flag here is all the other metrics looked really good. Raw degradation, spend, degradation. So new ads that are getting, let me lemme say this a different way. If Ross and spin degradation weren't two of the strongest metrics for this business, then I think there would be other layers for us to unfold.

But since those metrics are so strong, what does indicate that is that new ads that are getting launched are improving after the initial launch week. It's not like we're seeing a lot of stuff just not hit and die off. Evergreen shares strong, zero spin rate strong, but really those two metrics indicate to me that because the ad concentration is where we're struggling.

We just need to launch a lot more ads than we are currently because the stuff we're launching is, is, is working. It's improving actually after the first after its first week, we already have that strong evergreen share. The ad concentration, that metric is going to improve as a function of just higher ad output volume than we have been in recent months.

Because if the raw degradation spend, degradation hold. Those new ads that we launched, that higher volume of ads, we're just gonna find more winners in there and we're just gonna become less concentrated than we're currently.

[00:26:52] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Okay, so I mean, I guess like one thing that is maybe indicative of like the creative scores sorry. How good the creative score is relatively

[00:27:03] Luke Austin: Yeah.

[00:27:04] Richard Gaffin: is that it appears to be that there's just less ads they're going to need to create optimally according to the forecast over the next. Three, four months. And despite what you're saying about, of course, everybody still needs to create lots of ads. The burden on them is significantly less than it was on the previous brand that we

[00:27:19] Luke Austin: Yes,

[00:27:19] Richard Gaffin: where they're requiring a monumental amount. Like the forecast is calling for 250, 280 ads

[00:27:24] Luke Austin: yes.

[00:27:25] Richard Gaffin: of the next couple months, whereas this is calling for like one 70, maybe a tops, and then 70, 80 in other months. Yeah. Talk, talk a little bit about that relationship.

[00:27:34] Luke Austin: So yeah, it's a good, it's a good point. Which is let's, let's talk about ad volume and what's a high number and not real quick because I think this is, this is an important piece of discussion. The, the. The top percentile brands that we see in terms of the, the brand's ability to scale while holding volume and, and ultimately lead to the growth for the business.

Our launching ha have thousands of ads running at any given time period and are, and are launching a few hundred, at several to several hundred new ads every month at minimum. This, the, the conversation here around creative demand isn't around, do I need 20 ads or do I need 60 ads? For most brands, it's do you need 200 ads or do you need 400 ads for, for next month?

As indicated by this brand that has the highest creative score in our dataset, still needs to grade a hundred ads in October to hit the spin goal. And a hundred ads. It's a pretty low number in our dataset. Like you, you'll be hard pressed to find a much lower number than. A hundred for a month, like October in particular.

We'll give a couple other examples. The, the brand that's lowest needs 261 ads in October. They also have a high A OV, which is like anyway, that, that number we've seen a lot higher. And the brand, we looked at previous needs 161 in October, and then 2 38 in November. But the creative output and demand necessity exists in this range of conversation of do I need 150 ads or do I need 500 ads next month?

As being like the band of this range and what's required not in the double digits of ad output, even for some of the highest performing brands and the ones that are leading the pack and really pushing. And pushing the envelope on the business performance are thinking about it. And exponentially higher than that as well, where we want 2000 active ads in our ad account at any given time.

And you can see some of these businesses in, in the Meta Ads library and what they have active. You have 2000, 3000, 4,000 active ads in the ad library at any given time, and we are going to churn out. 200 new ads a week to continue to fuel this this fire. So I think for us, like the creative demand model, it's helpful one in quantifying a concept that we all that all of us would agree with, which is my efficiency to grades at different points in time, at different levels of scale.

And I know I'm going to need more creative output. But that, that number should be quantified and should be specific. Do you need 20 ads or do you need 200 ads? It's a very different thing. But then the brands that we see have an impact on improving their creative score substantially over time.

Look at this as the minimum obligation, right? I need, I need a hundred ads in October. That's the minimum obligation. If I'm trying to really improve the trajectory of the business, we should create a plan to, to to create 150 or 200 ads in October.

[00:30:28] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Okay. Well that seems like a good point then to segue into something else we wanted to talk about, at least touch on briefly, which is the question kind of on everybody's mind and the question that's raised by this entire conversation, which is how the help you get to 400 ads, 200 ads a week. And so what we want to kind of, go through here is like a little bit of like the type of creative that works and maybe we can talk a little bit about

[00:30:49] Luke Austin: Yep.

[00:30:49] Richard Gaffin: the volume enablement piece of this as well.

[00:30:51] Luke Austin: Yeah. So what we're most focused on in terms of building out service offerings and capabilities around for our customers is. Creator, creator content or lo-fi social native video creative. And then AI enabled still in motion graphics. Those, the, those two sort of buckets of creative output for, for two main reasons.

One, based on what we see performing best across our portfolio of brands and the creative necessary to be able to achieve the business goal. And two, the offering needed to be able to achieve this level of creative output in terms of the volume in a way that's not cost prohibitive to, to customers as well.

And so creator content, I think we're, we're all pretty familiar with what that, what that looks like. But this is going to be sourcing. Creators that have a specific sort of talking points and align with the demographic and the audience of the customer base, getting net new raw content from those customers and then creating ads out out of those assets.

And I think one, one thing we could talk through in this point that could be helpful in this conversation is we've, we've seen consistent themes in top performing creator content. Which are what we utilize in our in our output, and then what we recommend for anyone doing creator content in-house or with another partner to make sure that all of these things are, are checked.

And so just kind of going down that line quickly what we see is that most top, top performers are voiceovers, not musical only. Most top performing creator content ads have a headline and captions. Top performers focus on a single product and drive to a PDP or have a very narrow focus in terms of the offer to say it another way.

Top performers use native to feed fonts, colors, emojis, not branded fonts. Top performing creator content always request unlimited access for one time payment for the single reel. If you wanna discuss whitelisting, you should ne negotiate that s separately. That's how we approach it for ourselves, which is you get writes in perpetuity.

The content's yours, you can post on your organic channels as well, which is helpful. For the whole thing, always request a voiceover reel from your creator. Then have your editing team turn that into at least three additional variations with different intro clips and headlines so that it gives you the most amount of sort of variation, capacity and output.

Always test on all potential channels. We've seen these before on Meta YouTube shorts, Pinterest Snap App Loving. We, we create the creator content and then we, the distribution is magnified across social channels. And then use your learnings to consistently update your brief with new hooks, angles, and guidelines.

So for. In terms of the top performing ad content type and format creator content is absolutely one of those. It's lo-fi social native video creative. And those are, those are some of the themes that are critical for this content to be able to perform the best that it can

Since like.

[00:33:41] Richard Gaffin: and, but this also touches on a little bit, is something that we've discussed. On both, I think the DC hotline and SIL on this podcast, which is that diversifying the sources of your creative is like a really key point around enabling creative volume, right? And that, and UGC is just sort of fundamentally does that for you.

Like you're sourcing a different piece from a different person every single time. And that helps kind of like develop at least a wider and more diverse set of

[00:34:05] Luke Austin: But, so,

[00:34:06] Richard Gaffin: literally. And then also a greater number of them as well.

[00:34:09] Luke Austin: Yes,

That's exactly, that's exactly right.

[00:34:13] Richard Gaffin: Okay. Anything you wanna dig into in terms of like examples here?

[00:34:16] Luke Austin: I, I don't think so. If anyone's interested in seeing examples we have some, we have some on our site, and then we have a CTC UGC TikTok page. So if you wanna cruise around and see some examples, go to TikTok. Go to TikTok. Handle is at Creator Collective. At creator underscore collective. You can see some of the actual output of what these, what these ads look like.

And that's, and that's creator, creator content in some of what the, what the themes look like. And then to touch on for, for one minute here, the other sort of bucket of creative output that we are interested, that we, that we have developed to, to enable is what we're calling AI enabled ad creative.

And so AI enabled ad creative is, we're leveraging. AI in the production process. One to make the production as efficient and low cost as possible. So leveraging tools to be able to tag assets in the in in customer's dam to be able to understand what products and people tie those to our compass ultimate brief audience offer an angle.

It's very easy for us to be able to find assets that then complement what. Compass and the created demand model are recommending. So leveraging tools like that in the production process. And then also leveraging AI elements within the actual creative ad output. So for those watch in, we have some examples of what AI enabled ad creative looks like on the screen.

This is a mix of ads that have AI elements integrated and ads that don't have any AI elements create integrated, so ads that only use. The existing library of assets. This this next slide that we're talking into here is highlighting. Of this broader output, which ads have, have AI enabled elements integrated.

So you can see the floating highlighted baseball above the iPhone, the bag of oranges that the product is sitting on. All of these things are AI enabled elements that are integrated into the ads, which ultimately allow us to expand the asset library outside of what, what exists currently without the need for a photo shoot or a big, big production.

We can integrate elements to expand on the existing ad library test new concepts. I think a really good example of this that we'll pull up on the screen too is an example of an ad. That we made for a customer win reality. And it's an ad of a baseball player underwater. And this is something that you, you cannot get through a, a sort of typical production output, right?

But it highlights something about. This product, which is VR enabled training for baseball speci specifically, and and a part of the feeling and the value prop that you can just express through this. And what we can do now is we can test different variations of let's test someone swinging a bat underwater with a stingray floating by let's do underwater in The Bahamas versus underwater in the deep blue ocean.

Like there's just so many, so many things you can expand on. It just allows us to expand. The existing library of assets outside of what exists for the customer and enable really high output at a really low production cost as well to help them complement creator content which is net new content from creators directly lo-fi, so to sort of social native.

And, and those are, those are two of the things that we're seeing move, move the needle the most in terms of performance and actually being able to get us to these numbers of the creative demand output necessary.

[00:37:42] Richard Gaffin: Awesome. Yeah, so if anybody out there, if you wanna talk to us about this, both kind of getting the forecasting down, creating the goals, and then building out the system that you need to actually execute on them, specifically vis-a-vis creative like we've talked

[00:37:54] Luke Austin: Yeah.

[00:37:55] Richard Gaffin: You know where to find us. thread code.com, hit that high risk button. We're, as far as I know, still doing our spin and a MER models for free. So if you're an eight and nine figure business, please hit us up about that. Let us know that you're interested. We would love to talk to you. There's no reason not to do it. And again, just to shout out that TikTok channel that you mentioned, so you can see some examples of our creative that is at creator underscore. Collective at Creator Collective. We'll throw that up in the in the show notes as well, so you can click a link to it. But alright folks, I think that's gonna do it for us. Until next time we'll talk to you later. Luke, thanks for being here and we'll see you all later. Bye.

[00:38:31] Luke Austin: Go create some ads.

[00:38:32] Richard Gaffin: That's right.