Why Forecasts are Bottlenecked by Creative Diversity

[00:00:00] Richard Gaffin: Hey folks. Welcome back to another episode of the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective, and I'm joined yet again by Mr. Taylor Holiday, our CEO here at Common Thread. Taylor, what's going on, man?

[00:00:13] Taylor Holiday: Not much. It's Monday morning recording.

[00:00:16] Richard Gaffin: That's right, that's right. Another week. Okay. Yeah, so what we wanted to jump in today is like the last couple of episodes we've been talking through are spend and aMER forecasting model. Of course, again, just to remind everybody, we're giving those away for free to select eight and nine figure brands who are interested in getting a little taste of what our system can do for you.

And what we wanted to talk about today is kind of the, the tie in from the build of the forecast. Two, the next few layers down. So not only is there, of course, the assessing what the metrics that you're trying to hit over the course of the year are going to be, as we talked about last time, building a model is less about prediction and more about creating a plan of action.

So what we're talking about today is those set of actions, particularly tying in forecasting to the next level, which is of course, building out the marketing calendar, understanding what moments need to be created in order to build the result that you want. And then. How that all comes together, which generally speaking is through building creative.

So, we're gonna talk about how that all ties together. And then at the end of this podcast, we're gonna have a little chat. I'll have a little conversation with our partner Yosh at ral to talk a little bit about how we actually develop UGC getting to the point where, you know, what creative you wanna build, here's how you actually build it.

So, but let's talk about the steps in between Taylor. So talk to us a little bit about the steps that occur immediately after building out these models and beginning to execute on a plan.

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[00:02:27] Taylor Holiday: So we need to start with understanding what a model is. A model is an extrapolation. Of the past the future, and it's important to understand the input. So if as we think about this, when we, when we run a model and it gives us an output there's two things that are usually happening here. One is that we have some relationship to the output, meaning we like it or we dislike it in some way it is or is not going to produce the business outcome that we desire. So let's set that over here and talk about how we're gonna evaluate that. And then two is we need to gut check the inputs as it relates to the qualitative portion drives the underlying model. So in other words, if I'm modeling September, so we're sitting here in end of August and I'm looking out into September, and the model is giving me a 'cause.

Our models are seasonally weighted. A big piece of of this is going to be what has happened in September's in the past. And the question I must first answer is hold up last September's marketing calendar to this year's September marketing calendar and have some, do some thought work around the distinctions or similarities between those things that might lead to over or under consideration by the model. And so there's this like very human qualitative. Portion related to the modeling. Now we're, we're trying to turn that into a quantitative exercise through the event effect model, but for now in many cases, especially for the listeners, there's just literally like sort of holding them side by side and going, that sale we launched last year, the product release that PR hit, that ins that influencer post whatever it was that drove the results in that period. Are they gonna be replicated? And if yes, great. And it's all the same. And I like the model output. That's the easiest version of it, but it's also the most unlikely scenario. What's likely true is that there are distinctions in the marketing calendar year over year and or I don't like the model output and I'd like to overperform what the model's telling me. And this sets up now the next exercise, which is to start to begin to build a creative production plan that affects the outcome in a way that helps us to drive towards it.

[00:04:36] Richard Gaffin: Okay, well let's speak to that now because one specific aspect I think of our system that's particularly useful is. Notwithstanding the actual even creation of the production of this creative itself. It's developing an understanding of actually how much creative needs to be produced. And we've spoken to it a little bit, this idea that there's some correlation between the amount of spend or, I mean, there's an obvious correlation between the amount of spend you need to push to hit the number that you wanna get, and the amount of just a raw amount of creative that needs to be made.

So talk about that step, kind of coming to understand that.

[00:05:06] Taylor Holiday: this, this is actually really important to that. What you just said may or may not be true.

[00:05:11] Richard Gaffin: Okay.

[00:05:13] Taylor Holiday: Why is because if you're using highest volume, then your spend is just simply related to the budget that you set and

[00:05:20] Richard Gaffin: Right.

[00:05:21] Taylor Holiday: disassociated from creative. Right? It's just a matter of putting the numbers into meta and pressing go, and you'll spend as much money on as few ads as you want.

There's, there's no relationship.

[00:05:32] Richard Gaffin: Mm.

[00:05:32] Taylor Holiday: but in our world, in many cases, there's a constraint related to some sort of cost control mechanism, whether that's target, roas, or. Bid cap, cost cap, whatever that would hold intention the. Efficiency and volume. And in that scenario, we have to begin with this sort of unpacking of the job to be done on the creative side. and that exists in a few different places. One is this question of what is the ad account currently spending? So today's August 25th, and I have some amount of live ads live in the ad account with some amount of predictability. And in our system, we actually have tooling that, that we call our tracker sheets that predicts out the future spend of every campaign that's currently running. And that sort of forms for you a baseline foundation. Assuming these are ever grande campaigns and aren't related to promotion, I can isolate. Okay. What campaigns are coming with me is this phrase we use coming with me into September that's gonna gimme a baseline foundation of spend with some measure of predictability.

I can look back and say, oh, this campaign has been regularly spending $800 a day for 27 straight days. With some level of confidence I can predict out. That future spend, and that's gonna give you sort of this base that you're beginning the month with. then on top of that then is the job to be done.

It's the, it's the gap between the media budget that I desire and the existing base of spend that's already in place. And so I have to figure out how to fill that gap the ways in which we do that. one, we go to the marketing calendar events. So we say, all right, on top of this Evergreen, we have a Labor Day promotion.

On that Labor Day promotion, we're gonna spend, you know, X dollar increase. And so that's gonna be y amount of ads. And so we're gonna sort of use the calendar moments as the next tranche of creative ideation and planning. And this is where depending on whether this is a. promotion or calendar moment.

In other words, has it been run in the past before? It's actually sort of the hardest part of determining the amount of impact this moment has the potential to create. And you'll hear people use these phrases like it's a Tier A launch or a tier B or a tier C. So let's just assume that if you've run the sale before, you're gonna use a historical reference to the amount of impact that it can create and use that to frame up what to do.

So we'll use that, but the harder question is it's a brand new thing I've never done before. And this is where there has to be like usually this is driven by. What do I need it to do? Meaning how much inventory exists for this thing? And therefore, how many units do I need to move? How many are gonna come through paid media?

And so how much spend needs to exist here? And then you're sort of solving for what you need to be true relative to the media and how much creative's gonna support that demand creation. So that's like the next set of things. And then this third thing is usually now incremental. Evergreen for the core SKUs that are underrepresented. And one of the cool things that we're working on right now is we just started building this, like we're sort of like a SKU hq, like a home for all of your product related data about spend and revenue at a category and product level. And one of the things that's intended to help us high. Is we've come up with these sort of tags or labels for different products as like this is a hero sku.

In other words, this is driving a lot of your net new customer acquisition. And we've started to look at revenue by new and returning customer by sku. And then we looked at efficiency of spend versus volume and found some things that are like. Opportunities. They're underrepresented in the media mix where this, they're, you're moving volume on the skew, but you're not advertising it or vice versa.

Maybe you're over advertising and it's inefficient, and so we're trying to find and surface offer opportunities. That's really what that's about is like what are the offers or products Then that on top of this base of evergreen running stuff, marketing, promotional, what's that next traunch of opportunities that we can layer into the ad account plan, those launches. Tie it to a unit a unit of creative production and get set to build the account.

[00:09:28] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. So yeah, so what we're talking about is like an additional couple layers of clarity in a world that generally is pretty ambiguous, right? Like people come in and they have some understanding that they need to make more creative and, but that can kind of mean anything. And a lot of the time it's well, we made 50 creatives.

That does feel like a lot. So that's gotta be a lot. But really what we're seeing is like the numbers are telling us that you need 200. And that's just a different thing, right?

[00:09:52] Taylor Holiday: Well, yeah. And I more and more like I, I used to have this real deep ambition to be able to predict the exact number of ads required. But, but what I want instead is to force people into a thoughtful planning exercise around what they believe is representative of. That more than enough. This is the

[00:10:11] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:12] Taylor Holiday: sometimes, is that I think that if we launch all of these things. would be more than enough,

[00:10:17] Richard Gaffin: Yep.

[00:10:18] Taylor Holiday: because so often what I feel like the problem is, is that there's like an insufficient amount of things. and so you're always desperate. And so the lever you get drawn into is lowering the expectation of efficiency for the sake of getting to your volume.

You, you take worse performance than you want because you just didn't have another option. A media buyer is stuck. They don't have another campaign to launch, so what I want the plan to represent is excess.

[00:10:41] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:42] Taylor Holiday: great would it be to say, you know what, we don't need that campaign. We don't need that email.

We have more than enough. And so when I think about the plan we really want to get down to, and this is, this is where the challenge is, and I think brands have to take on a deeper commitment to creative planning, is that we need to know before the month starts where we expect every dollar to be spent. What day every campaign's gonna be launched is how many ads that campaign's going to contain. And you're gonna have that before you begin the month to the point where you actually have four campaigns in our, what we would call ad log, that you're like, don't plan to launch these,

[00:11:21] Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

[00:11:21] Taylor Holiday: the inevitable happens that one of these doesn't work the way that we think it does, this is where we'll go. Or in the event that one of these outperforms what we want, these will be the first ones next month.

[00:11:32] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:33] Taylor Holiday: so your backlog and creative plan should actually be in excess. Of the need. And I think this a lot of times we like build to the exact expectation as if we know for sure what's going to occur. And what I see instead is that we often need to plan to be wrong. And that's

[00:11:50] Richard Gaffin: Right?

[00:11:50] Taylor Holiday: what great execution this is how you forecast accuracy, is you plan for the inevitable incorrect expectation.

[00:11:56] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm. Right. No, that makes sense. So yeah, so it's not about basically pre predicting, again, not about predicting exactly what's gonna happen, but a getting closer to the mark. Like it's much more likely that you'll need, let's say 200 than you'll need just 50 or whatever. But then on top of that, also planning to overshoot.

Planning for excess, all, all that, that type of thing as well. So there's no scrambling at the end, basically.

[00:12:17] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, so one, if you just go through the work of what is everything I'm gonna launch, how much spend do I have, you're gonna get, you're gonna hone in on a general understanding of the problem, and that is like a really important step. Remember like all, all models are wrong, some models are useful,

[00:12:31] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:32] Taylor Holiday: if we can understand where we are wrong, in course correct.

Follow that framework. All models are wrong, some models are useful. They're useful if they allow us to understand where we are wrong, so we can course correct. understand where you're wrong, you have to have an expectation and an expectation that you can see right from the start. So that on day one, and this is something we ho hone on all the time, should be right about how much spend within a very small margin of hour tomorrow,

[00:12:57] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:58] Taylor Holiday: then the next day should be a little bit harder, and then a week from now should be a little bit harder, and then three weeks until now is probably a lot harder. But the question is on day one. How sure can you be? And then when you go to launch new things, you layer on wider margins of error. And so you need more room for flexing because you're likely to be wrong. But the faster you can see it, the quicker you can reintroduce something new, make an adjustment and fix it.

And so that's that. The plan is to be wrong. That's we're gonna plan to be inaccurate and we're gonna know what we do when we're wrong. And so having this set of campaign ideas. even net new ad refreshes. If we think, Hey, this campaign might fatigue, we're gonna reintroduce new creative on a regular cadence into this thing to help it expand, whatever it might be, allows you to just begin to build the system that there's never this moment, the moment you should look for that signals to you that you have an inefficient campaign and creative production process is the, oh shit, we're underspending We're starting ideation.

[00:13:58] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:59] Taylor Holiday: if you, if you are starting ideation at the moment that you're off course, you're screwed

[00:14:06] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:14:06] Taylor Holiday: that ga that, that, that process just isn't fast enough to close that loop. The second you're off course, you should go, okay, I have this thing ready to go

[00:14:13] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:14] Taylor Holiday: ideated and was being held back for that moment.

[00:14:17] Richard Gaffin: Right. So actually that, that kind of connects nicely to that third point that you made, which is around, I mean, essentially what we used to, or maybe still do, call merchandising the ad account, which is to say choosing the right products to sell. But part of what it strikes me that also enables is just more options, right?

Like in the ideation period that needs to happen, you know, a month out or whatever the case is. If you're kind of running up against a wall about well, what do we advertise here? If you have this set of data that reveals like, actually, this is like a really underserved product right now, there's a huge product opportunity or offer opportunity, then all of a sudden, like you've unlocked this entire other world of ad creative that you can make.

Right?

[00:14:52] Taylor Holiday: of me is yeah, and this is where like to me, one of the missing jobs, like we, we have this obsession with the idea of a creative strategist. So. As this sort of like unicorn person that understands like

[00:15:04] Richard Gaffin: Right.

[00:15:04] Taylor Holiday: demand planning, ad account structure, strategy, psych, human psychology, behavioral psychology and, and it just instead, what I think what is really helpful, and I we think, think about this as like part of the growth strategy, creative strategy distinction in our world is that to me there's somebody who needs to own. and offer universe

[00:15:21] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:21] Taylor Holiday: understand that does take responsibility for merchandising, and I think this is merchandiser is sort of like a theoretical idea of somebody who looks at our products. at the sales velocity across these SKUs. They understand the margin of them, they understand our inventory position, and they surface like, this is what we need to sell. And if I told you what we needed to sell, then a creative strategist could think about to who and why and with what angle. But that process of really like having a clarity. Of the what to focus on given the state of our business. From a product universe standpoint, I think is a really important role. And it can be done with data.

I think this is where, again, the SQ Hqr, this, this sort of product universe thing that we're pushing hard on to try and help brand surface is this. It's like, where is the money currently being spent? How does that overlap with our current inventory position and our margin and our opportunity? What products are showing velocity organically, you know, maybe that we're missing and how could we kind of support and tie in to what is true?

And the broader your skew mix gets, the more important this kind of data is. 'cause no, it's, it's impossible to see all the underlying inputs yourself. And if you're just to service it by asking questions, you'll never get to all the questions correctly because something needs to highlight the unknown unknowns.

[00:16:38] Richard Gaffin: Right. So talk, talk a little bit more then about, the distinction between the creative strategy role and let's say the growth strategy role, or who is the person responsible then for or mean? Yeah. Maybe sketch out the job description of the person responsible for the actual merchandising piece.

And then where does the sort of creative strategist step in, I guess.

[00:16:56] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. So in in this world, I, in our universe, we think of it as the gross judges as sort of responsible for defining, they're gonna, we're interact with the data team around the models to set the budgets, to set the efficiency targets, to define the expectation of the financial goal. And then to surface, again, this offer idea what, what are the things we should be selling and why, and we're trying to help them with that.

'cause I actually think they're actually under resourced for that problem. This is where this product thing comes in is that right now they think primarily about media mix. level distribution and marketing measurement.

[00:17:24] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:24] Taylor Holiday: them to focus a little bit deeper onto the product side. So for us, we're thinking about it as the growth strategist surfacing to a creative strategist who can then think about, okay, in light of this reality, level of efficiency, what then should I say and how?

And they really need to own like the, the two like. Resources that I think each of them that need to own is that like the asset library is owned by the creative strategist. What are all the images, videos, messages, headlines that we have to work with? That's my tool set. The growth strategist is own like sort of the product universe,

[00:17:55] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:56] Taylor Holiday: and so if you think about the overlap between those things of the product universe and the asset universe, like somewhere in there is the. And

[00:18:02] Richard Gaffin: Right.

[00:18:03] Taylor Holiday: think those two things coming together are a good sort of marrying of the roles in a way that allow people to think about the distinction and responsibilities.

[00:18:12] Richard Gaffin: It seems to some level, it's like the growth strategist is responsible for the quantitative elements, and the creative strategist is responsible for the qualitative. Is that a fair or is too simplistic?

[00:18:22] Taylor Holiday: I think there could be still be, still be quantitative work to be done for the growth strategists around which audience and why, which angle and

[00:18:28] Richard Gaffin: Sure.

[00:18:29] Taylor Holiday: which, you know which asset type and why, which, you know, format and why. So that there, there's still is this sort of data loop there. I think it's a little bit fuzzier for sure than we have X units.

Of why skew and therefore are this aged inventory we've got to move. Now that's pretty objective. That's a little easier to get to quantitatively. So I, I think it's a fair to say that they bend in those directions, quantum

[00:18:53] Richard Gaffin: Right.

[00:18:53] Taylor Holiday: but they definitely still share a little bit of each, sometimes.

[00:18:56] Richard Gaffin: Okay, so let's, let's kind of speak to then, then sort of the next level of this. So, determining the offer, determining the number of ads that need to be made determining which products to sell, all that sort of thing. When it comes to the creative production tier of this, how have we been thinking about that at CTC?

'cause I mean, this is, we're talking about volume enablement and a lot, and this is the key to it.

[00:19:15] Taylor Holiday: to

[00:19:16] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:19:16] Taylor Holiday: problem. Problem. So here's, here's a thing I've come to believe is that. There's such an emphasis on this idea of diverse ad creative. I don't think individual people are actually really capable of this.

[00:19:26] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:19:26] Taylor Holiday: I think it's actually counter to the idea of one person diverse thought sort of like, it's counterintuitive and it's, we're so biased by our own experience and worldview.

I don't even just mean our own experience, our own learning set, what we've been taught that one person will produce. I think if you think about the total universe of diversity, they'll provide, provide a slice of

[00:19:47] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:48] Taylor Holiday: one of the things I've really seen that works for the people who do this best, it's not one producing many, it's many producing one. 

[00:19:54] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:19:55] Taylor Holiday: I think this is where the creator thing becomes such a huge unlock is that that is the, a much more powerful mechanism for diversity is to hand your product to a bunch of different people and allow them to create out of their own. You're more likely to get a diverse set of messages than asking one person to try and create a bunch of stories. And so I think what I see the best brands doing is they don't think about trying to build. A single production pipeline. They have many production sources. They have creators, they have an in-house team, they have agency partners, they have partnership ads. They have this like network of people that are contributing to the creative pipeline because produce diversity requires diverse production.

[00:20:30] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:31] Taylor Holiday: think that and so I think that the best brands that I see this doing well are sourcing their net creative from many different production sources.

[00:20:40] Richard Gaffin: Right. So unlike the old model of sort of, you know, we have our stable of three or four graphic designers or whatever who just are cranking things out, we're talking about. It's okay, here's, this is the guy who makes stills that look like this. This is the guy who makes, I don't know, cinemagraphs that look like that.

This other guy makes cinemagraphs that look like this. These creators make UGC and or whatever. So like you're sourcing the different types from various people, essentially, right.

[00:21:01] Taylor Holiday: yeah, like I, I think what I, it's funny I'm, look, I'm trying to decide if a. I'm trying to think about the idea of buying art from my home.

[00:21:09] Richard Gaffin: Sure.

[00:21:10] Taylor Holiday: and I don't I don't know a lot about it, so I'm just trying to learn a

[00:21:12] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:13] Taylor Holiday: and look up artists. And the reality is as you get into this world, when people are free to create and become, to develop like their artistic style, like they develop a. Style that you

[00:21:24] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:21:25] Taylor Holiday: put them all together and go, oh, that's a person X, you know? And, and I don't, I think that's true of designers. Even when they're role playing or coplay as someone else,

[00:21:35] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:21:36] Taylor Holiday: tend to bend towards their perspective.

[00:21:39] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:40] Taylor Holiday: and some probably are better at really this you give me a brief and I can just create whatever you want, but. I still think that you're going to run into that problem, right? And

[00:21:50] Richard Gaffin: Mm.

[00:21:50] Taylor Holiday: and in-house tends to be like same thought. And there, there, there's like power to that create what, what in-house does. It creates consistency. If you want brand consistency, you'll get that out of a same group of people. They're likely to re. So what happens is like somebody finds a designer they really like and they think it's on brand, and that person becomes actually like the sole creator of the same idea

[00:22:11] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:22:11] Taylor Holiday: appealed to, but it, it creates this opposite problem to the diversity idea, which is that it, it's like at conflict with something new and different.

And so you end up in this small band of performance all the time and it's on brand. It's same, but like it's kind of stuck. And so a big unlock from that is diversify the creative production process. And I think that's a more helpful phrase for people than saying, diversify your creative. Output like

[00:22:34] Richard Gaffin: Right.

[00:22:34] Taylor Holiday: it.

So I think this is something like I have a quote coming out from Meta pretty soon. 'cause we were talking about this idea that they talk about this phrase a lot and I think it's really not helpful. I think it is much better to say diverse creative production than it is to say diverse creative. Creative generally.

And so

[00:22:48] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:22:48] Taylor Holiday: the, that's the key to think about

[00:22:50] Richard Gaffin: So as part of what's misleading about that, the idea that, not that yes, the algorithm is looking for diversity, but it just creates this expectation that we should get our, like one guy to make a bunch of different stuff. But, but at the same time, the differentiation is still, is still key, right?

[00:23:07] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, for sure. And I think what it's actually driving, like this underlying market change in the way that creative is sold actually is that

[00:23:12] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:23:13] Taylor Holiday: what, what's happening is that brands are looking for. Like disposing the production risk onto a bunch of different sources where they're, they're willing to pay variable rates on media, I think sometimes for creative because. It allows them to source a lot of different things at a lower initial upfront

[00:23:30] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:30] Taylor Holiday: take advantage of the opportunity of getting diversity in the ad account without having to risk all the upfront, the cost upfront to determine which one will work, which nobody feels confident doing. So it's interesting to watch the way that this dynamic

[00:23:42] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:23:43] Taylor Holiday: out, but it's definitely true that more and more brands have like a multitude of creative sourcing.

[00:23:50] Richard Gaffin: That makes sense. And then one, one other question to draft off what you were saying a little earlier is, is brand consistency a liability now?

[00:23:57] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's an interesting question. I think the question is can you create a through thread

[00:24:06] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:07] Taylor Holiday: can persist even amidst a diverse content And that's a, that's a really, I've been thinking about this with CTC.

[00:24:16] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, for sure.

[00:24:17] Taylor Holiday: we have the DTC hotline. You have the E-Commerce Playbook podcast, you have bridges, you have stat lists.

And we like, the question is if you put them all up on a wall, is there any commonality?

[00:24:28] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:28] Taylor Holiday: there anything that someone would look at and go oh, that's all CTC. And that's a really hard design challenge, right?

[00:24:35] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:24:35] Taylor Holiday: grab a bunch of diverse things produced by different people at different times and go, Ooh, I can see the common thread to borrow the put, right.

[00:24:43] Richard Gaffin: Right.

[00:24:44] Taylor Holiday: but.

[00:24:44] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. I just, I just lost you. Oh, there you go. Okay. Yep.

[00:24:48] Taylor Holiday: that's the grandest ambition is to be able to, a diverse set of things, find some through thread that people could point to. Because

[00:24:57] Richard Gaffin: Interesting.

[00:24:58] Taylor Holiday: it's, it's, what is it? What are you

[00:25:01] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

That's fascinating. Have, have you seen any examples, like glimmers of people doing it, right?

[00:25:07] Taylor Holiday: So I think about something like Liquid Death as a client that we've worked with where their, the commonality is their almost unseriousness, it's or the ridiculousness. So the category is like constantly maximum ridiculousness, but that manifests into all sorts of different things presented by lots of different people. And so I think about that as the banner at which trying to have someone see an ad without a logo and be able to tell you who it might be, you know? And I think that's kind of the idea where it's just, there's, there's some unifying principle that everything pulls on, shows up visually very different

[00:25:50] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Interesting. Okay, let's let's jump really quick then get your 2 cents on, on the role of creator content in this,

[00:26:00] Taylor Holiday: Yeah

sorry,

[00:26:01] Richard Gaffin: go.

[00:26:02] Taylor Holiday: you wanna finish the

[00:26:02] Richard Gaffin: No, no, no. Go ahead.

[00:26:04] Taylor Holiday: I think it's the ultimate way to accomplish what I just

[00:26:06] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:07] Taylor Holiday: that again, it's the one person making many ads or many making one or four, right? And I, I, I actually think that like having 50 people, all who are creators, they speak the native language of the platforms that you're gonna be advertising on. in their unique way, meaning with little limitation of direction from you is going to produce for you best end result. And so I think that that gives you an opportunity to, by definition, create diversity. Now, part of that's like the who you source and how they relate to the general idea of difference.

Whether that's age, gender. Ethnicity. There's a bunch of vectors there that you could go off of as you think about audiences. But I also think it's about creative style. How many of 'em, like what is, are they all, is half of it Get ready with me Content. And then some of it's you know, more like. Fast edit, cool content concept, narrative structure, funny, like these are all different ways of thinking about diversity, but the creator thing feels like why it's so hot right now is 'cause it's the very, it's the most obvious path to the thing that everyone's driving towards, which is this idea of diverse creative is to have a lot of different people make your stuff.

[00:27:18] Richard Gaffin: Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the perfect way to access a bunch of different voices. Like the person, the person who does get ready videos really well, but they love your product or whatever. And this is the person who, I dunno, does X type of TikTok thing and does it really well as well. So, but I think that makes for a perfect segue into my segment with our friend Yosh, a partner at Al.

Al is a, an influencer sourcing platform. So particularly if you're having issues finding the sort of diverse set of creators that you need to make this he's the guy to talk to. So we're gonna cut to that now. Before we do, I just wanna say again. Spend an A MER models, that is the first kind of layer in creating what, essentially what we're describing here, which is a chain reaction of clarity.

Once you get this, spend an MER model thing down, all of a sudden all of these other pieces fall into place as well. So hit us up, comment thread code.com. Hit that hire us button. We would love to chat with you. But yeah, let's let's go to my conversation with Yosh right now. I'm really excited to be talking to Yosh Chavan from ral which many of you will recognize if you've listened to this pod for a while. They've been a partner with us for a long time, and. What we're specifically interested to talk with Yosh today about is just a little bit about influencer marketing.

Now, I know there's been tons of interest in this recently, especially with some discussions we've had on the pod around the absolute importance of sourcing the right kind of UGC for your brand. And we're at a, we talk about how creative is the most important thing all the time, but we. Point now where creative really is the most important thing.

And what Yosh is gonna talk about today is a little bit about his platforms for all and a little bit about kind of how they think through influencer marketing. So welcome Yosh. We're super stoked to have you on the podcast. How you doing?

[00:28:53] Yash Chavan (getsaral: I am such a fan of the podcast and I'm glad that I'm on here for this mini, mini segment with you, Richard. So

[00:29:00] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:29:00] Yash Chavan (getsaral: excited to dive in.

[00:29:02] Richard Gaffin: Cool. We're excited to have you. So let's let's get straight into it then. So why don't you kind of kick us off telling just a little bit more about just about yourself, about ral and, yeah, kind of, kind of what that is.

[00:29:12] Yash Chavan (getsaral: Yeah. I can give a quick intro. So, hi, I'm Yosh. I'm the founder, CEO at sel. Long story short, what we do is we basically help e-commerce brands turn influencer marketing from, oftentimes it feels like a gamble, right? Like you're trying some things and it doesn't work, and maybe you try UGC and you pay some influencer but doesn't really click a lot. So we. Help brands turn it from that gamble or feeling like it's, they're playing roulette to building like this predictable form of influencer marketing that actually does drive incremental sales for your brand. That's what we do. Long story short, and then we've, we've got brands like Ovi Grus solid wave on the platform that are doing really, really well, having communities with thousands of creators promoting them, doing these like engineering, almost like a halo effect around the brand.

So yeah, that's what we do.

[00:30:02] Richard Gaffin: That was awesome. Okay, so, so you mentioned some specific brands that that use ral. So talk to me a little bit about how the brands are using SRL right now. How, so? How does it fit into their overall marketing stack?

[00:30:13] Yash Chavan (getsaral: Yeah. I think what a lot of these brands, and we work with over 200 just like these, and what they realize is that DDC growth has changed, especially over the last five years as you guys keep talking about

[00:30:25] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:25] Yash Chavan (getsaral: podcast so much, is that there used to be a time where, you know, times were simple, right?

The good old days of TDC where you could just run some Facebook ads and just spend more to make more right. But when you try to do that now. Your CAC keeps, keeps going up. Your ROAS is sort of plateauing or you're having to do discounts and you're kind of feel like you're being commoditized. 'cause there's so many competitors doing similar things. You can't just spend more to make more on paid media anymore. And these brands get that. So what they're, they're trying to do, and what I've learned from my conversations with them really

[00:30:56] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:17] Yash Chavan (getsaral: but they also wanna have a brand motion that's taking people that are out of market and moving them in market.

How do you build that brand motion? You sometimes, you know, back in the day, used to build that with PR or with TV ads or something like that. But now where the attention is is on social medias with the creators. So what these brands are doing is they're almost working with these creators, building communities of hundreds of people that actively promote them and generating almost like halo effects around the brand.

So when I take these names like Gros or Obvi or So Wave, you kind of instantly recognize who they are because there's so much social proof around them. And that's sort of the. that Sol helps them manufacture almost through our predictable ways of building influencer programs. So

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

[00:32:01] Yash Chavan (getsaral: some of these brands are thinking of influencer led growth.

[00:32:04] Richard Gaffin: That's interesting. So it's, it's essentially awareness, a version of awareness marketing, but via influencer content.

[00:32:10] Yash Chavan (getsaral: Correct.

[00:32:11] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay. So talk to me then about. So you mentioned some, obviously you mentioned some specific brands, but a lot of the brands that listen to this podcast aren't in necessarily in a posi or rather they're kind of the beginning of their journey with this, or one thing that I hear all the time is they just have a difficult time building the kind of influencer UGC creative flywheel that they need to build in order to get off the ground with, with meta ads, because the amount of creative differentiation and volume that you need, the the demand has become so intense.

So talk to me about how. Brands that you work with and, and maybe how this overall platform specifically helps

[00:32:48] Yash Chavan (getsaral: Yeah,

[00:32:48] Richard Gaffin: brands kind of start their own in-house or start their own influencer marketing efforts.

[00:32:54] Yash Chavan (getsaral: yeah. And UGC generating UGC creative is definitely one of the sort of ROI levers that a lot of brands overlook. 'cause sometimes you would just. Focus on minutely on let's say affiliate revenue or sales, but you ignore all of the amazing content you're getting that you could maybe whitelist or download and reuse it as an ad and so on there.

So there's definitely brands building those creative eye wheels. And I agree, like I think even a couple of years ago, it used to be difficult. We've had brands that have signed up to the platform that. like teams of two or three people spending 30 to 40 hours a week running influencer programs, building these flywheels.

But then now we have the same exact brand. Maybe they've cut the team down to one person spending maybe half their time or even less than that, seven to 10 hours a week on a at scale influencer program. And they're able to do that because. Especially helps them do a lot of their discovery. I know you mentioned finding influencers is one of the, like finding the right partners is one of the key things that you need to crack. We help them do that because our search engine is able to surface the right people for them. They're able to reach out in bulk. They're able to manage everything in a streamlined CRM, so everything is very. easy to, easy to manage, and they can respond to creators fast, and especially in the last month or so.

It makes me excited to say this is we've launched an agent. Now everyone's doing going agent. So we've launched an agent called sia. So it's called ral Influencer Agent. What it does is it does most of this work for you. Now it can find you can. You have to train it a little bit, but it can find the right brand fit influencers, it can craft outreach for them, it can respond to them, answer FAQs, come up with creative briefs, stuff like that.

It's able to do so. We've like trained a custom LLM, not a GPT wrapper, but an actual custom LLM based on all of the data we had over the last three years. I mean, the agent does a lot of the work for you. So a lot of brands are coming now, especially in the last month or so, and they're spinning up programs in. a week especially with the ai. So yeah, it's got, it used to be very hard. It is still, it does take work. It's not a plug and play channel, but it's gotten a lot, lot more simpler in the last couple of years, and especially in the last six months with, with some of the AI stuff that we are building.

So, yeah.

[00:35:05] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it sounds like a, a night and day difference between going on, I dunno, Instagram or whatever, and just kind of randomly searching for influencers to having the a i agent actually trained on kind of like your brand and being able to actually go out and find, and you're saying brief or at least outreach to the

[00:35:22] Yash Chavan (getsaral: Yeah.

[00:35:22] Richard Gaffin: to the influencers itself.

[00:35:23] Yash Chavan (getsaral: It's, it's square. It's quite unique. It's very, we're still tweaking it. We're still learning. It's a little bit of a black box 'cause it's ai but, but it's very interesting what it's able to accomplish even at this sort of nascent stage. So, yeah.

[00:35:35] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. That's awesome. Okay, so then another question that we often get around influencer and UGC and that type of thing is around measurement. So talk to us a little bit about how you guys are tracking and measuring influencers and what's your overall recommendation in terms of actually tracking those, like discount codes, tracking links, or is there more to it?

[00:35:53] Yash Chavan (getsaral: Yeah. Yeah, that, that's a really good question because measurement is so hard. It's like, it's almost the bane of my existence now, because as, as somebody who runs an influencer platform, we wanna show as much ROI as

[00:36:05] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, of course.

[00:36:06] Yash Chavan (getsaral: To our brands. But funnily, like with, for example, when you log into Klaviyo, right, the first thing you see is like, Hey, you made like $15 million or

[00:36:13] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:14] Yash Chavan (getsaral: But then. Is it really Clearview? 'cause it's like double attribution and the lead actually came from Facebook ads and so on. It's that. It's that for us. But the opposite. And generally with influencer marketing measurement is so hard because like you said, yeah you can use links and discount codes to track, but that really only. There are studies around this but they've, they only track around 20 to 25% of the impact that influencers drive because there's so many. How do you track, for example, when five influencers post, people see all the five posts, but use one person's link to buy who really drove the sale? Maybe like on the link attribution, the last person drove the sale, but then the other four generated all of the warmed you up. And so it's very, very tricky. But then Al has some built in sort of full funnel measurement systems. We call it Pulse, that can basically show you, hey, here were the impressions, here's the traffic that. That came from these impressions and here are the sales. And then we can basically show you the correlation between impressions and sales.

So there's some correlation reports that we build, but it's still hard. So we make it a little bit easy. But influencers in general, brands are tracking using other ways. So you can track, let's say the, if your direct, if the direct traffic to your website increases six months after you build an influencer program.

'cause the brand name is so much in the. Sort of the zeitgeist that people just go to like grooms.com and then buy the, buy the product for instance, right? So there's no way to track that. There's no way to say, but then you know, you can correlate. So that's one way to track. Another way is branded search.

Branded search is good. So that's your running Google ads and your branded search volume goes up. Certainly that's a really nice indicator that influencers are driving the awareness and people are searching for the brand name 'cause they just remember it. And the long term, I think the main thing. I think the main sort of deliverable beyond the UGC and the affiliate sales and so on, really on an org level of influencers is your blended CAC reduces, right? So like in six months, nine months from now, because there's so much awareness, you're not having your ads and your performance marketing does not have to work as hard as it did before.

Share blended CAC goes down over time.

[00:38:18] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:38:18] Yash Chavan (getsaral: the important metrics that we advise all of our brands to track whenever they, whenever they onboard with us. So. Ways to track affiliate links and discount codes are definitely one, you should do it, but not, they're not the complete pictures. So also look at like organic traffic, direct traffic, blended CAC and so on.

So,

[00:38:34] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, no, I, I think that's a good, like a good way to summarize it, that ultimately attribution is difficult no matter kind of where you're at. But at the end of the day, like the purpose of. Building this type of influencer network is to bring, bring your blended C down. I, I think that's like a really good way to, to phrase that, that you're building the organic kind of tranche of revenue that group of customers in such a way that you no longer need to rely on Payton quite the same way.

[00:39:00] Yash Chavan (getsaral: Yeah.

[00:39:01] Richard Gaffin: Cool. All right, so then let's kind of wrap it up here. How, where can brands go if they wanna find more found out more about ral.

[00:39:08] Yash Chavan (getsaral: Yeah. I mean, you can go to, if you're listening to this and you've found some of this conversation helpful, you need maybe like how you want to speak with me or my team and you need a consult on how you can reduce your C CAC or how you can build this UGC flywheel, just go to geter.com. I'm sure you, you, you guys will leave a link somewhere in

[00:39:26] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:39:26] Yash Chavan (getsaral: notes, but go to get.com, go to go to is where you can. Just book in a meeting directly with us and we can, we can speak with you tell us that you came from the Common Thread podcast and we will are happy to set you up with like a special offer or something. So yeah, happy to, happy to speak. Just go to the website or just go to the website. We've got some amazing content on influencer marketing.

I know that even Taylor has contributed to some of our resources and eBooks, so if you just need some free content, we have some really good content. How to spin up an influencer program, how to get UGC for free, things like that. So definitely check out our. Academy on our website, so yeah.

[00:40:03] Richard Gaffin: Awesome.

[00:40:03] Yash Chavan (getsaral: Yep.

[00:40:04] Richard Gaffin: Great. Well, appreciate you chatting with us Yosh, and for everybody else out there, obviously this is one of the most important things you could do. It was get sal.com/demo, go check that out. As, as Yosh mentioned, we'll drop that in the show notes as well so you're able to check it out. But appreciate the time Yosh, appreciate you joining us

[00:40:19] Yash Chavan (getsaral: Yeah.

[00:40:19] Richard Gaffin: Take care everyone.