Compass Explained: The Next Evolution in Creative Strategy

[00:00:00] Taylor Holiday: Compass, our creative tool is a planning process that begins with what we call the Ultimate Brief.

So think of the Ultimate Brief is a way to instantaneously educate your creative strategists around the key elements of the business to help them accelerate their learning

[00:00:15] 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 as I always am by Taylor, our CEO here at CTC. And as promised in. Last week's episode or the last episode that we put out we're going to be doing a product demo today of the compass product, which again, is our creative strategy tool that we use to automate a lot of the portions of creative strategy that can tend to take a long time and and connects it all to your financial plan.

So, one note for those of you who are listening on the audio feed, this is going to be very much a visual presentation. So pop over to our YouTube channel to check it out, to actually get the full experience, but, so I'm going to just go ahead and turn it over to you, Taylor. And to kind of, walk us through the product and kind of show it, show us 

[00:00:59] Taylor Holiday: Well, so Richard, I just got done doing a webinar with accountants and their energy was, I mean, I'm just wondering if you're going to be able to match the energy of a room full of accountants. All right. We're going to find out, but yeah, if you haven't subscribed to our YouTube channel yet, this is the moment stop right. now, pull it up, watch this along the way, cause we're going visual today.

This is multimedia presentation. Audio only will suffer. I'll do my best.

to sort of play by play it here, but yeah, We are going to show you what we talked about last week, which is compass, our new creative system for helping you plan and execute a media plan that is intimately connected to a financial plan.

So I'm going to share my screen real fast. Boom.

[00:01:42] Richard Gaffin: All right. We got

[00:01:43] Taylor Holiday: All right, so before we jump into Compass, we're actually going to start in StatList because I want to show off where this actually begins and to illustrate the point that the creative system, the creative production plan is connected to the financial plan.

In statless, we have the financial planning section where we build a full P and L level forecast based on three models, a new customer revenue model, a retention model, and what we call event effect model. What this includes is helping us to select the right. media budget and efficiency target based on a model of historical performance and some business objective, we build the marketing calendar to include every moment.

These different moments create various effects on performance and efficiency. We have an MMM that helps us to allocate that media across different channels and ultimately give us an expectation of our media budget. So you can see example, March, 2025, our media budget is 136, 009, six, five. Now that number is really important because it's going to set up the job to be done.

The point though, is that this creative process and compass really begins in the financial planning process. So this is again, unique to CTC and what we think makes this so unique. So now I'm going to jump over here inside of compass. Okay. Compass, our creative tool is a planning process that begins with what We call the ultimate brief.

So think of the ultimate brief as a way to instantaneously educate your creative strategists around the key elements of the business to help them accelerate their learning. So we begin with a classic, a CDC classic, a view of four peaks. And so this allows a creative strategist to begin by understanding The key drivers of moments for a business.

So in this case, you can see bamboo earth has black Friday, cyber Monday. We've got our this is our cactus concentrate sale that comes every August. You can see the little markation there, and then we've got our Valentine's day promotion from 2023. Now we can look at weekly or sorry, 2024. We can look at the revenue for 2025, see where there's been a difference.

And then the tool is going to sort of recommend an area of low seasonality, where you should think about creating a fourth peak, an opportunity to think about marketing calendar design, recognize an area where it.

is low and think about ways. You could go after earth day. You could do a fun April fool's day sale.

You could do a spring product launch. And these are just ideation suggestions that the LLM is doing based on a gap in the revenue. So a pretty cool way to start this foundation of revenue peaks drive, disproportionate value capture. Let's look at where there's gaps in this business. And let's think of a story that you could begin to ideate into those moments.

So a pretty cool visualization. We're going to continue to build the, the, the, the inferred AI support of these different moments to factor in cultural considerations, maybe even get to deeper product recommendations. But this is really, again, to set up a strategist, being able to think through, Ooh, okay, where could the calendar exist? And what opportunities could I create to support those moments? So anything on this Richard?

[00:04:42] Richard Gaffin: No, not particularly. I mean, I think you can dig in maybe into. Unless you kind of already covered it, like, how it determines where the opportunities are.

[00:04:52] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. So what it's looking for is gaps in the size of revenue for a long period of time. So you can see that like. There's an area for bamboo Earth that is very dry between literally from February up until Mother's Day, where there's really nothing that we do that drives a high revenue realization. And so it's looking for the largest gap between 2 peaks.

And so you can see that this area here is the area of opportunity to think about. Okay. In April. If we could come up with something to help drive disproportionate revenue capture, it'd be a good way to augment the marketing calendar. And then it looks at the moments that exist. I think earth day is a good example of one for bamboo earth, because it's such a organic skincare product.

And it sort of infers moments that you could build marketing initiatives around. So this is just like a really cool way to, again, root back to the idea that creative production and creative performance build and begins in the marketing calendar. 

[00:05:50] Richard Gaffin: Right. So that, so that event on 20, the 20th of April under recommended events, that was generated. Essentially 

[00:05:56] Taylor Holiday: an AI generation idea. Now additionally, what's cool is that because we have the marketing calendar integrated in the planning process, not only can we look back and see these revenue peaks, but we can actually understand what caused them. So like for a creative strategist, a lot of times what you'll have to do is you'd have to go pull this report and then you'd have to go interrogate what caused this August 9th moment, because you wouldn't know offhand, just looking in Google analytics or Shopify.

There's no. Qualitative connection to marketing actions. But because one of the first things we do is absorb their marketing calendar, we can now can overlay that with data. And this.

is again, another big part of CDC's database structure that we're building is this connection between qualitative events and quantitative outcomes.

So this visual is just, it's a jumping off point to start to go, okay, what is the rhythm of this business and how does it relate to the impact? And every brand has a different rhythm of sales. That is a creative strategist. You need to understand. 

[00:06:47] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Okay. So kind of the upshot of this then is for the next tab is giving you a sense of how much creative needs to be generated in order to achieve the outcome that it's 

[00:06:56] Taylor Holiday: That's right. So then the second thing we get to is a modeled relationship between spend and add volume. Okay, and this is really important. This is where we really think one of the differentiators of the system exists is it helps you to consider the job to be done for each month. So again, going back to March, I have to spend 136, 000 on Facebook.

You can see that that number is pulled into the creative planning system. And then the modeled number of ads that are required to it with, to achieve this spend with a 95 percent confidence. So what this is saying is that we run a bunch of simulations about the number of ads used and delivered in an ad count in any month.

And 95 percent of the time, if you create 342 ads, you will get through your 136, 000 in spend. Okay. So this is, this is a really important understanding that this math is possible. You can understand how many ads you need to accomplish the various spend budgets. And what I want you to notice is a number of things here.

One is that like that number is so powerful because now we get to think about resourcing appropriately versus just going, how many designers do I have? How many ads can they make? Is that enough? I don't know. This gives you an answer, a starting point. And with all models, the only thing we know for sure is it's going to be wrong, but it gives you the ability to build.

Move directionally with an expectation that you can build a system around. Okay. So, so things I want to notice immense seasonality, right? Most brands, the amount of creative volume that they need changes dramatically throughout the course of the year because their media budget changes dramatically throughout the course of the year.

So bamboo goes from the lowest month, August of 92, 000 to spend to December of almost 200, 000 to spend to January being another peak month. Right. And this is all built from the media plan, Right.

Out of the financial. So the way I would think about resourcing this, if I'm a brand is that I want to make sure that I have the internal capability to produce 230 ads a month.

That is the lowest common denominator across every one of these months. If I can build the internal design resource that every month, somebody, some teams, some people are building 230 ads that I will for sure know that that resourcing will be maximized and utilized. To to full marginal efficacy, but the variation each month has to be flex staffing.

And this is really important. When you think about creative is that the creative requirements of a business are not the same every month. You need to think about the gap between two 30 and six Oh five or two 30 and four 80 as flex staffing. Now, maybe you could flex from 230 to 252. Maybe you could say that the lowest common denominator is closer to 300.

Fine, whatever. But the point is just these peak months are really when you need to lean in with partners, freelancers, networks, to be able to get to that volume. And it helps you now to think about the design of your organization and the timing of resourcing more effectively. 

[00:09:38] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Let me, so let me quickly ask a question about like sort of making verse breaking the model maybe. So if you go back to the four peaks chart, obviously we kind of gone over a little bit, the suggested AI has given you for instance, in April, right? So let's say you want to, Incorporate that into your plan.

How do you affect that number on the creative demand side?

[00:09:57] Taylor Holiday: That's a great question. So let's say we're like, we're in, we're going to do an earth day sale on April 22nd, we're going to go back to the planning section. We're going to go to our calendar and we're going to go into April and we're going to say on April 22nd, we're going to do an earth day sale.

And we're going to we're going to call it a promotion. Sure. There we go. Promotion. We're going to send out an email and an SMS on that day. We're going to save the marketing calendar. And then what we're going to do is we're going to go back to our model of new customer acquisition in April. And because we know something that the model doesn't, okay, about how much spend we could anticipate in that month, we actually think we are using that sale.

We're going to be able to outperform the model by 5%. Okay. That's going to give us an increased budget that we could then save and push into April. Okay. So now when I go into April, I go into my spend. Boom, boom, boom, boom. I'm now going to have 221, 000 on Facebook and that creative demand in theory would get updated.

. So I would add that to the marketing calendar in April. I would update my model because I know something that the model doesn't about a change in my marketing expectation. So I'm gonna set it to per perform, let's say 8% over model, I think can out, can outperform the previous period that's gonna give me an updated budget and I would save it and it would pass through and update my expectation.

I don't wanna change. Bamboo's plan here in real time, but you get the idea. So yes, you, you actually have this effect moving back and forth between the plan, the marketing actions, the expectation of spend, and then an update to the creative performance expectations. 

[00:11:37] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Okay. So let's pop then kind of from the quantitative to the qualitative, 

[00:11:41] Taylor Holiday: Okay. So now we, yeah, so we, now we've got, we've got a plan March, right? We've got 342 ads to make, and that, that sets up the job to be done. Okay. So now we're going to think about, all right, we've got to start to think about Who we're going to advertise to and what we're going to sell. So the other cool thing that, this tool does is it starts to give you a set of, we call them Lego blocks for offer audience angle, right?

So when I think about audience, we absorb all of the brands, historical reviews across the site and build personas. so we divide them into up to seven different personas, possibly they get created by an LLM. So in this case, you can see Bamboo Earth has the hydration devotee. This is a skincare enthusiast who prioritizes intense hydration for dry skin, particularly favoring rich moisturizing products for mature skin needs, values, quality and effectiveness, even at a higher cost, and deeply appreciates the natural, earthy sense and textures that company, their skincare.

These are women 50 to 70. They likely in a dry or climate or cold region. They're retired or semi professional. These are some of their interests, personality traits, and the top products that they care about. So this, and this is like spot on for bamboo work. This is who their customer is, right? Is these are the things that they care about.

And so this is an example of one of the personas. You can see, this is an eco conscious skincare enthusiast, and it tells you a little bit about who she is a little bit more of what they might do, environmental advocate or nature living blogger. And it starts to give you a sense of who you're advertising to.

So now as a creative strategist, I'm thinking about talking to one of these people. And then not only does it give me audience, but then it also shows me the actual benefit statement that these individual people care about. So this is looking at the emotional benefit or the angle. We would call it the why, why does someone care about the product?

And do all of bamboo earth customers care about. But if I break it down by each customer, you'll see that the, the percentage allocation is different based on each customer type. Right? So depending on who the customer is, so as an example, the holistic beauty devotee cares more about social proof. Then does the ego conscious skincare enthusiast who doesn't seem to value social proof as much, doesn't reference it as much when they talk about their motivation for purchase, but they actually care a lot about smell.

Right? So this might actually drive me to now reference the scent of the product more often. And so this helps me to, again, connect the dots between who and what they value using the reviews for these different personas. So again, tools for the strategist to leverage and build on, and we're going to keep 

[00:14:17] Richard Gaffin: Fascinating about that, by the way, is sorry, like the, the eco conscious skincare enthusiast. It's, it's notable that the first two angles that are interesting to that particular demographic are not. The eco conscious aspect of it. It's so quality probably would be what that was the third one down.

But that's it kind of like coming into it. Imagine being a creative strategist without this tool, you come in, you have some understanding that this is an eco conscious type of person. You start messaging eco conscious, whatever to them when actually what they're, they care about is smell. And that's kind of what the qualitative data shows us.

Right.

[00:14:49] Taylor Holiday: That's right. And what I think we often mistake is that just because some, the question is why is somebody environmentally conscious? Like, what is it actually about? And I think there's like a layer deeper when I think about like this idea of the difference between an emotional benefit and a functional benefit and emotional benefit is about how I feel, right?

It's, it's not actually about the like tactical result of my problem going away. That's a functional benefit. My skin gets reduced. Emotional benefit is when I use this, I feel relaxed, peaceful, and like, and so there's something about who this person is that values, that sense, that That, that sensitivity and emotional wellbeing, Right.

And so I think there's this just understanding we can, we can start to infer these like things about each of these groups. And it just, again, these are all just directions to aim you. It's not that you have to like in every case, talk about it in these different ways, but it just helps you to visualize who I might be talking to, who are they and what do they care about in some really cool ways.

And what's awesome is that we're going to keep enriching this data. So we're going to start to feed in. More and more and more social comments demographic data from meta qualitative data off of customer service responses, like anywhere that we can get semantic language for brands, we're going to keep feeding and enriching these angles and benefit statements. 

[00:16:04] Richard Gaffin: Cool. So we got the audience, the angle, but yeah, let's talk about the offer.

[00:16:08] Taylor Holiday: So offers now just allows a a. Create a strategist to begin to understand what the brand products are again. Remember your, imagine you're walking into a brand that you've never interacted with before, right? And you want to start to break apart. What are their best selling products in the time period that I'm going after?

So let's pretend that I'm looking and I'm like, all right, well, I've got to build a plan for March. Let's go back to last March and think about what were the best selling products last March. And I can see, okay, the intense hydration cactus concentrate is easily the best selling product for this business.

I can order it by orders. I can look at different AOVs. So if I wanted to understand the difference between, Ooh, what was the gift? Cause the gift was the best gross sales, but the AOV was way lower. And so depending on what problem you're trying to solve, whether it's orders or margin or AOV, you can see which products generate those outcomes and begin to think about how to design offers accordingly for that period of time.

So it's just an easy way to instantaneously see and we're bringing in right now, it's by product, but we're also gonna be able to do it by collection and other things as well. So you can just get a deep understanding in every period of time, what people are selling, right? And that's all we think of offer.

as is that what do people buy in this moment?

And it helps you to understand the brand and the seasonal impact of the products. So, Again, the ultimate brief, all about giving a creative strategist, the information they need to be effective immediately. Okay. Now we've got a job to do. Okay. So now we've enriched ourselves. Now we have a set of understanding about who the business is and where we're going.

The next thing we need to do to get through the job of what how much 340 ads to make is we have to say what, which campaigns are going to continue spending in the future. In the month of March. So when we build a media plan, that's functionally what a creative production process is, is guy. I've got a bunch of campaigns that are currently running.

I'm planning for March. These are the concepts that are currently live in the ad account. And I might go, okay, well, this one's above target. This one's above target. This one's been good. And this one's good. So I'm going to bring all of these with me. And maybe this best selling one too is like, there's a lot of spend there and what the heck we'll bring this one too.

So these, we're going to keep these seven campaigns on. This is usually done in collaboration with the media buyer. And I submit those and those are now saved as part of my media plan. So that's the next step is which campaigns are going to keep spending in the coming months. Okay. From there, we're going to go and actually now begin to build concepts.

So let's say I'm building my plan for March. You can see it's telling me I need 108 concepts required this month. So I proceed and I get to build concepts in four categories. Okay. So first thing it's going to do is ask me to add moments related to the calendar. So it's going to give me a dropdown and show me, okay, these are the calendar moments that you have upcoming.

So this is again, pulling from the planning section from the marketing calendar, I know international women's day. Okay. We're going to do a collection. We're going to search the collection. We're going to do all products for this. Cause it's a site wide sale. I'm going to do five different concepts. This is a huge moment for bamboo earth.

It's a big promotion and I'm going to do one for each of my audiences. Okay. So this gives me the audience dropdown. And in this case, the angle I'm going after is related to promotion, right? This is a sale moment for this brand. This is not an evergreen offer. This is a promotion. This is a value proposition.

The angle to these individual customers. Is different or is in this case, present off. Boom. I've got five of those. Okay. I save that. Great. So now I've got five of my 108 concepts for the month planned. You with me? 

[00:19:44] Richard Gaffin: Yep.

[00:19:46] Taylor Holiday: And I could go on and do more if I wanted, if there were other moments, I would add those in.

Then I go to iterations. And now I look at and I go, okay, of any of these campaigns, do I want to iterate on any of these ads? And maybe I'm like, well, this one is struggling a little bit on the efficiency side. So we're going to iterate on this aging campaign. Okay. So we're going to do one iteration. This is about the aging.

So I know that that's related to the fatigue grain moisturizer. We're going to, in this case, do the holistic beauty devotee. And we're going to talk about smell, whatever, or let's go back to our eco person and we're going to say, Oh, it's actually aging in this case. So let's think of this as we're going to go emotional benefit reduces anxiety, and we're going to do it for the hydration devotee.

Cause that was my older demographic. And we're going to think about like. We're going to do a message related to aging, whatever. You get the idea of where I'm headed here. So now I've got iterations planned. I've got my marketing moments plan. Then I can go through evergreen again. Same idea. I want to sell the pumpkin oak glow mask.

We're going to sell it to the premium skincare devotee. And we're going to talk about cool planned. Then I can go through my Dabba DPAs. This is, I can select a specific catalog. Let's do it as the skincare catalog. This is, I don't know the names of bamboos catalog, so I can't actually find them There but whatever you get the idea.

Okay. So the point is all these different ways to create concepts. I submit these and I've started the process of building my concept blog. Okay. Now, what you're going to see when we go.

to the concept blog now is we've got the four campaigns that I've already brought with me. Okay. These are the ones from the previous month down here.

Now I've got these campaigns planned. You can see my bamboo earth pumpkin glow to the each eco conscious social proof person here. Right. Oh, that's February. Sorry. Let me go to my March. We did more than that, huh? We did like 12. There we go. Boom. So now I've got 18 concepts brought over. I've got six that are six.

Six previous concepts brought over one marketing moment. All set in here, all the ones that I just built, these campaigns are set. Okay. And you can see it starts to fill out. This is related to a key moment. It's got a funnel position. This is building a consistent syntax. You've got the offer. We've, it automatically pulls a landing page based on the offer that you've chosen.

Okay. Persona audience angle. I can browse for play for inspiration. And now what I can do is I can actually add create an ad. Okay. So now at this individual level, I'm now going to build my ad versions. So I want this to be an image. And whatever, I'm going to show you something cool. I would put the text, the headline, the description, the CTA, the folder URL.

So we can drop a Google drive folder, Dropbox folder, or wherever the assets are. Okay, for this ad, and then I'll just save this for now and show you what this does. So now what I could do too is I can hit this little magic button right here. And it's actually going to write the copy for me. So if I want it to just automatically create it, it's going to take what it knows.

So you can see indulge in our body oil and glow collection. That's the collection luxurious hydration for radiant nourish skin. Again, no knows who it's talking to. It knows the audience knows the angle glow with intense hydration, headline description, feel the glow shop CTA. Now. Okay. I've, I, in theory would have uploaded my assets here.

I click this button. Boom. It's going to generate a brief. And again, if I had uploaded all the images, you would have that there. I can do a description. So this isn't a very rich brief because I didn't fill it all out. This goes into the CTC system, creates a go live date related to the key moment. It links to we would upload a style sheet, those kinds of things.

And now that goes out to a production designer that ultimately fills it out and off you go. And you can now build your actual media plan for each asset. Then the media buyer comes in on this same campaign. Okay. And what they're going to fill out is. All of this information, the margin percent, the breakeven CPA, the cost control bid the minimum daily budget, the budget set on the campaign, the projected daily spend bid strategy, campaign type ASC or conversion.

Is it shops? Yes or no. Is there a catalog optimization goal? And what you're seeing here is that these are all the information that are needed to one click publish this and build it automatically in Meta. So the end result of the system is that once everybody's filled out their part, then you can just click publish and it'll actually launch it in Meta live in real time.

And so now we don't even have to go build in Meta and all the campaigns are set. The go live date is there. And by the time you're done with the concept log. You've got everything published and ready to go. And the the ad team is going to upload back the creative assets and you're ready to rock.

So what I see is like, in this case, I'm obviously, I have an incomplete plan. I have 25 of 108 ads. So I have more work to do. I got to go make more ideas and you're working through all the way until you get to the expectation for that month for those goals. And by the time you're done, voila, you have a campaign.

If you want to play around in ideate, this is really cool. So this is like an AI, I can take a campaign and the information associated with that campaign, the audience offered angle. And I could say write me three headline ideas for this concept. Okay. And again, it knows because. That campaign has a specific set of attributes associated with it.

It's going to pull back from me. I think it does a really good job of writing headlines specifically tailored to it. So you'll see here in a second. Boom. So again, what do we have here? We've got Pumpkin Oat Glow Mask for the Eco conscious Skin Care Disease. Okay. So it tells you, this is what I'm writing a headline for.

Radiant skin, natural shine, eco glow in a pumpkin mask, healthy glow, nature's way, explanation, here's what happened, providing the audience angle and shop, these are the headlines for you, and you can get this right body copy, you can do everything, and it'll know exactly what you're trying to do. Here's the score copy, etc.

And I, I find that these are like, really useful headlines. 

[00:25:55] Richard Gaffin: totally. So I, I wanted to double back on the concept log piece because, so if we recall, like, at the beginning of this, we talked about like, so Bamboo Earth for March and he is 342 ads, but now what we're seeing is like, what we need to develop is 100 X concepts, right? So what's the relationship within this tool, at least between the concept of the ad?

[00:26:16] Taylor Holiday: Yeah.

Right now, our system defines a concept is containing three ads, but this is a thing we're changing because with the recent update to ASEs, we're actually changing our structure a lot, which is that it's going to be a lot more ads in a campaign, and so we're going to change the system to build ads, and you can either assign them to an existing campaign.

Or you can create, excuse me, a net new campaign. So there is an evolution here where what it's doing is it's translating concepts to ads. So it's assuming a certain number of ads related to each concept and that's the expectation of what you would build. That's like the current CTC system is every time we come up with a new concept, we come up with at least three ads to match that concept.

That's sort of changing and the whole thing's going to be built. We're going to change it to the ad log and you're just going to build ads. You're going to build a number of ads and you can either assign them to an

Or you can launch a net new campaign and build as many ads as you want in that individual campaign. So we're breaking apart the relationship between concepts and a specific number of ads, which is a thing that we've historically done. That's more of a BAU world where there wasn't this opportunity to just sort of upload 50 ads into one campaign using the new Andromeda thing that like meta has, and so they're, they're encouraging a lot more ad variation.

So that's a, that's a change in our system as we continue to develop, but where you'll just be able to build ideas for ads that will be assigned to different campaigns 

[00:27:35] Richard Gaffin: Wow. So, I mean, I don't know if this is an accountant's reaction, but as a creative strategist, this is pretty incredible. I mean, like it removes so much of the, like we were talking about last time we chatted about this, it removes so much of the sort of like kind of groping of the dark aspect of the thought work here.

Because if the idea is like, you need to build 300 ads and you need to come up with 300 ad ideas and they need to be spot on this really, if not fully automates it at least gets close to just giving you The tools that you need to come up with a lot of really good ideas really quickly, I 

[00:28:08] Taylor Holiday: and, and look, we are, we are probably weeks away from what actually happening being, you show up with a completely filled out concept log that you edit, like where, what the AI actually does is. Go further. It takes the offers, the dates, the number of ads you need, the concepts and actually builds it so that you get an entirely designed concept log with go live dates, budgets, offers, audiences that all match your financial plan.

And that's like, that's dream state. And then from there you can just edit because it won't get everything right. And there's. Certain things you're going to prioritize and not, but editing work. I think a lot, the way, the way I think about the future is that we're moving from being the production layer to the management layer, like as people.

And so the, the tool, the AI, the agent is going to do the work and we're going to edit it or we're going to give feedback and we're going to tell it how to improve. And like, that's the job of the creative strategist now is to, to absorb the information, to provide feedback, to make sure it's all correct.

And then what's the other thing is like, if we think about this sort of convergence between the media buyer. And the creative strategist as Well,

Like, again, so much of this, a media buyer would then have to take all this information and go manually upload it in the meta, fill out all the campaign details, but we're talking about like one click publish, like, and it's all live.

Right. And in theory, what we've done is we've even removed the need from a bunch of optimization changes because you've launched enough creative that's accounting for the fact that most of it will fail, that you actually could just launch the And the idea would be that you can get to your target doing nothing in the ad account.

And that, that's sort of my dream state is I just think that so much of the work that's done in the ad account of changing optimizations and bids is like so net negative on the impact. And it's all a by product of not having enough creative. So media buyers need some lever. They don't, they don't have more stuff to launch.

So they, they just, their only lever is to change the bid to change and adjust the, the optimization setting. The other thing that's really cool is like, if you interact with the, the meta API, you get a web hook for creative fatigue, which is a data point. That's only available via the API right now. It's not in ads manager. 

Now we have the API feeding us. Every time what happens is every time that an ad begins to fatigue. So this says your ad fatigued from low to medium to address the ad fatigue. Please try to create a new ad with different images or videos under the same campaign.

And so what this is going to do is it's going to feed back a prompt to the concept blog saying, Hey, we need to create a new ad for this campaign because you're experiencing creative fatigue. And so this is a thing that again, right now is, An idea that some human asserts that there's creative fatigue happening.

But again, it's all available. Like there's a data point for that, that should trigger the need to create an additional piece of creative for that campaign. And so that data point is going to fuel into the system as well. And so it's just, there's just so much that we can do here to accelerate what is a very cumbersome process right now. 

[00:30:52] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, that was incredible. Well, I'm excited to see kind of what happens with this and how it develops further. I mean, as I understand, as we talked yesterday, the actual, even the creative development and production part is eventually going to at least have some automated aspect or AI aspect to it as well.

So, at a certain point, what we're looking at is you press a button and 300 ads are launched simultaneously into Facebook. 

[00:31:12] Taylor Holiday: that's right.

[00:31:13] Richard Gaffin: that's

[00:31:14] Taylor Holiday: what we're creating, like what I believe it is, is we call it the Ironman suit, right? Like, which is that there are going to be really highly capable people that understand businesses uniquely that have this hud of at their disposal to just click buttons, build a financial forecast instantly.

Create an entire concept log of ad creative ideas that match to the marketing calendar to suggest new marketing moments and publish them back to the marketing calendar to instantaneously create ads and launch them and then to allocate the budgets perfectly simultaneously. Like that's the future is that this sort of center point, but it all

has to begin in this, this, this.

Process of building a financial plan and the aggregation of all of this information to both build these models and this expectation and then to execute against it. And I think that what CDC is doing is that like we're, we're combining a bunch of unique data sources, which are the data that we have that nobody else has right now is one financial expectation.

So a system's ability to say. Is what's happening good or bad depends on that idea. So the expectation. And then second is the qualitative data points of how marketing moments and actions that are tagged as certain categorical initiatives, how do they affect performance? So it's the qualitative marketing planning data.

It's the financial expectation data overlaid with all of the actual data out of all the systems that is really unique that allow us to build something special. 

[00:32:33] Richard Gaffin: right. Well, I, I feel like what this kind of represents is, is no less than a solution to the most difficult problem in advertising, which is the, the problem of like, how does creative incorporate into this thing that demands so much of it and with compass, like basically we've taken the first steps towards making that solution a reality.

So I will say, if you want to talk to us about this, this is ready to go. We are ready to work with you using compass. A couple of places you can check it out. You can go to our website, comathreadco. com, hit hire us, check it out. You can also go to adcompass. ai uh, and check it out there as well. Get in touch with us.

We would love to build this system for you and take a lot of heartache off of your plate. Um,

[00:33:12] Taylor Holiday: And I'll just say, I'll just say that one of the things that's going to highlight. Is a reality for most of us that we don't have a system to produce the amount of creative that we need. And that's a really important thing to learn is to become aware of that allows you to then deal with it. And so what's the end result here is that the real problem to be solved then becomes creating the creative production pipelines to consistently produce this much volume.

And that's going to be a collaborative effort. That's going to likely include lots of different sources. That's where building a CGC, a customer generated content pipeline, a creator generated content pipeline, your own internal design for statics, other video assets, like. That is really, I think the task of the future is how do organizations build the production capacity to meet these needs at a price that makes sense.

And I think AI is going to play a role in that. But I think that's really what the system's going to help to highlight for you is that there's likely the resourcing that you have right now for the creative problem, right? Is incorrect. And that's what I experienced in most brands is that they don't have a creative production system to meet the needs of the channel.

Especially where meta is just demanding more and more and more creative all the time to drive and giving preference to, like, if you go read. And the update on the creative system meta is giving preference to advertisers who provide a lot of creative options. And the easiest way to solve that is to allow for AI enhancements in the account where they sort of create all those variables for you.

But if you're not comfortable doing that, then you really have to stand in the gap. 

[00:34:32] Richard Gaffin: Makes sense. All right. Well, we will keep you all posted about again, how we start to think about addressing some of those issues. But like I was saying for the time being, come check us out. Come get compass. We would love to help solve that problem for you. All right, folks, appreciate the time. And we'll talk to you again next week.

See ya.