How One Methodology Runs 170+ Brands

[00:00:00] Taylor: it would be my dream that we would start with a brand, and they would hand us a bunch of markdown files that describe their brand guidelines, their personas, their design principles, the, the essence of who they are, right? A soul.md style file about the brand, legal dos and don'ts about claims, any strategic learnings, historical sets of tests that they've run of incrementality or otherwise, in a way that would allow us to instantly absorb their canon and pair alongside ours.

[00:00:36] And so this idea of like passing back these skill files to one another

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[00:01:41] Welcome back to another episode of the Ecommerce Playbook podcast. I am sitting here today holding in my hands the Canon, which is the physical manifestation of CTC's decade of methodology development in how we grow ecommerce brands, broken down into seven specific categories from technology to forecasting and modeling to marketing measurement to meta advertising, Google advertising, email strategy and creative strategy.

[00:02:10] If you listened to our last episode, you heard me talk through the development of this document and how it impacts our client work and our interaction with AI and how it is raising the floor on our service function across CTC. I'm not gonna rehash all of that for you today. I would encourage you to go listen to that episode.

[00:02:32] It is the address at the opening of our client summit that I gave last week, and I think will give you a really cool sense of how AI is changing the way that service businesses work and interact with customers, and could likely spark a lot of ideas about how you could deploy some of these tactics for your brand or agency as well.

[00:02:53] And today is a little bit... I wanna take and build on this idea. I'm not gonna go through it all and rehash each section. We're gonna h- over the next week or two or four, we're gonna have episodes where we're breaking down the methodology in each section. So we're gonna tell you a little bit about what our current operating premise is for Meta and for Google and for email and for creative strategy and for marketing measurement and all of those things.

[00:03:17] So we're gonna go through those in depth, and it will also be live on the website soon which I think will make us, as far as I know, the only agency that will have its complete sort of methodology published and available for critique and evaluation, which I think is actually a huge competitive advantage because that scrutiny and refinement allows us to continually improve and find errors in our own work, which is part of what gives us evolutionary strength, which is the constant evaluation and critique of what we intend to do from lots of smart people.

[00:03:53] Gives us the opportunity to enhance and improve what is a very dynamic document, which will be constantly changing and ever-evolving in really cool ways that are underpinned by tests that are ongoing all the time across our organization. Just this morning, before I got on this call, I was working with Claude and Steve Recook, our director of data here, to analyze the halo effect of TikTok shops on Amazon and dot-com for one of our customers in a way that is informing our TikTok shops methodology that will be added to the canon here shortly.

[00:04:26] And those kinds of... That kind of research and data-driven analysis is what forms the foundation of strategy that then gets deployed across our customer base in really cool ways. But today, what I wanted to talk about is some cool conversations that I had with our customers coming out of the client summit as it relates to the canon in ways that they were thinking about AI in their own business.

[00:04:48] And I think there's some learnings here that can set up how we think about the future of interactions between brands and vendor partners, or also just your own people in ways in which every business has this core responsibility to provide a foundational context for who they are and how they do what they do.

[00:05:10] And that is really what we are trying to lean into, is to do the hard work of moving out of tribal knowledge ins-into documented institutional knowledge in a way that can be turned into application through AI in the form of skills and other loops and iterations that we can use these tools to enhance the quality of our work on behalf of our partners.

[00:05:35] And immediately after I gave this presentation, one of my customers came to me and said, "Hey, I've been, I've been working on a similar idea for our brand that attempts to canonize or codify All of the tenets of who we are as a business. Things like as simple as logo usage and fonts and colors in a traditional brand style guide, down to personas and use cases and identity around customer bases and product attributes.

[00:06:08] Things like organizationally, how do we describe the ingredients of our products? Where are they manufactured? What are their gross margins by SKU? To things like revenue definitions inside of the organization. When we say revenue, do we mean gross revenue, gross revenue minus discounts? What are the assumptions that underpin the way that we communicate about information inside of our organization?

[00:06:28] And what that same idea allows for is the transfer of what is often so difficult to pass between partners or even as an institution, you and your new employees. It's this idea that anytime someone begins to work on a new business, whether it's the normal brand or Skullcandy or anyone else, they have to be brought up to speed on the history of the business, the do's and don'ts, the legal limitations of claims or anything else that exist.

[00:07:00] And then from that space, they have to create often new things, whether that's approaches to business or could be net new creative specifically.

[00:07:10] Taylor: So in order for them to be effective, you need to give them a robust set of context for them to execute their role, whether that's an internal employee or an external partner. And this is going to be the defining attribute of businesses that compound in value and efficacy with their people and partners over time, and those who continue to persist in this sort of legacy tribal attempt at passing down diluted information from person to person.

[00:07:41] And I'll give you an example of how I think this is very directly affecting how brands are approaching interactions right now. Just this past week, we were in a deal conversation with a potential partner, and they enacted which is-- what is a very normal Part of the historical evaluation process for agencies.

[00:08:08] They asked to meet the team that was doing the work. And the specific resource that was assigned to that opportunity was a newer employee of CTC. And they went and looked on his LinkedIn and saw that he had only been at CTC for a little while, and felt like that was an indication that they would not be able to effectively deliver the work of CTC.

[00:08:34] And this evaluation criteria, I think, is a proxy from a previous way and era of working where the quality and dependency of the output was really predicated on the primary skills of the individual and their institutional knowledge of the system. And in this case, because the person had, was newer to our system, they made the assumption that they would not be effective at delivering the work.

[00:09:04] And what I would say is that brands should now move to a different set of evaluation, where they're asking to evaluate the methodology. They're asking to evaluate the skills that sit on top of the AI instance, the context for how their work happens, and to ask about the process. Because in all cases, people are insufficient for the delivery of the system.

[00:09:31] And I said this in my speech is that even I, Taylor, who've started, founded, and have been at CTC every day in its existence, do not possess all of the experiential knowledge of every interaction with customers. And today, more than ever, I'm further from any individual interaction ever, where if somebody called me and asked for me for an opinion on their individual account, I would have to g-go gather a lot of context.

[00:09:52] And then even then, I wouldn't be very effective or nearly as effective as the person who was working in the seat despite the tenure of their time at CTC or vice versa.

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[00:10:57] Taylor: So this idea that, that organizations are now this sort of context, this context layer, this institutional knowledge codified and deployed in interaction with AI to enable the computational power of a Giant large language model deployed through the lens of your process and systems with an intimate understanding of what brings our work to life, and then contributing to the enhancement of that methodology over time is the key to success.

[00:11:31] And this is true for brands too, where it would be my dream that we would start with a brand, and they would hand us a bunch of markdown files that describe their brand guidelines, their personas, their design principles, the, the essence of who they are, right? A soul.md style file about the brand, legal dos and don'ts about claims, any strategic learnings, historical sets of tests that they've run of incrementality or otherwise, in a way that would allow us to instantly absorb their canon and pair alongside ours.

[00:12:11] And so this idea of like passing back these skill files to one another is going to be an important part of interactions in the future. And, and for us, I think this, this all begins with this like really clear database layer that organizes these things for a company. And so we're, we're helping brands in many cases to build that and then deploy it through our MCP, a model context protocol that just simply connects a set of information to an AI tool like a Claude or a Codex or whatever instance you're running and allows for that model to have clean access to a s- contextual set of data as well as then pass through a lens of analysis that has a consideration for how you want to speak as a business.

[00:12:58] And then you want a recursive loop whereby everybody's work improves the core system. So I'll give you an example where we have this idea of incrementality benchmarks, which are the starting point that we would use for a brand independent, their own individually deployed tests in a channel like let's say Apple Appen.

[00:13:28] Whereby every day we are deploying incrementality tests across our hundreds of customers, and every time we get a result back, the canon is updated in real time because the dispersion of plotted results, and therefore the median and mean and modal result for that channel are updated. They update the benchmark that affects our brand reporting as we go.

[00:13:53] And so that's an example of where an individual deployed tests updates the aggregate data set that affects the canon methodology. Another example is right now we're trying to decide how to handle something like incremental attribution optimization in Meta. And so we have a hypothesis, a testing ground of accounts that are sort of operating outside of the core canon structure of Meta to include this hypo- hypothetical opportunity.

[00:14:27] We're assessing the impact, and then on a monthly rhythm, we will determine if we are going to canonize that as a default part of our operating structure. And this is important for us to have these kinds of, novel frontier edge cases of our work all the time. On creative strategy right now, a lot of it has to do with affiliate creative content and how you interact with the TikTok shops and tribes of the world, and how that becomes a part of it.

[00:14:56] Another huge area of emphasis right now is catalog. How do we ensure that we leverage video for catalog as well as have full enriched catalog deployed for every brand? And how do we assess the percentage of spend that should be existing on catalog? How do we think about that? The catalog's role in creative diversity, knowing that each product inside a catalog creates a net new entity ID and M-Meta's point of future emphasis.

[00:15:30] And so if you were to go through each section of the canon you could, you could identify areas that are frontier evolution to the core idea that will update back to the root principle in time, and then that has to update the core skill that affects the analysis across the organization so that every time somebody asks Claude to analyze their Meta account or build an email plan for the future or to determine how many ads a brand needs to make, that it's informed by this institutional knowledge.

[00:16:07] And this is the work of the modern agency is to force itself into a structural description That I believe should be available to scrutiny for you as a brand so that you aren't just picking the person that is working on your account. That should be the least of what you are attempting to do. Like, a-agency is not a hiring process in terms of trying to find humans.

[00:16:38] If you want that, you should hire a recruiter, and you should go get a person to work on your behalf, and you could assess people. But with an agency, you should be assessing a methodology, a way of working, an opinion, an aggregate institutional set of knowledge deployed on your behalf. And then you should scrutinize their integrity with that idea as you work together.

[00:16:58] And you should ask for that. And then if the-- and then you should evaluate the output of that work for your individual business. And that the agency's job and my job as a founder is to ensure that every person that we put in front of a customer, we believe has the capacity to deploy this, not, not to share with you their own individual ideas.

[00:17:16] And, and in fact, I say this all the time to people at CDCs, like, "You're actually not here to express your individual opinion. If you wanna do that, go work, go start your own agency and express your own ideas. We want you to contribute and contend with our ideas alongside yours and to bring ways in which we improve the root material together."

[00:17:34] But in your client work, you aren't expressing individual ideas. You're expressing collective knowledge, Common Thread collective. You're expressing that institutionalized information. And so I think that is the opportunity. And then brands what I desire is that as you come to us, you bring with you the things that we couldn't know about you.

[00:17:56] All of the bits of magic that make you what you are, all of your learnings over the many years you've been running your business about what has worked, who resonates with the product what has gone into building who you are, what you care about seeing in yourself visually, where there's areas for openness and where there's rigidity.

[00:18:15] What are the ways in which you can codify that and provide it to a partner like us? So that that just becomes a layer that all of our design gets pressed through so that we don't have to go through this really tedious, agonizing process of creating through tribal verbal description of what you want, pass it back to you, subjective feedback, hard interpretation, long cycles of development.

[00:18:42] Versus a skill that is your branding style guide that gets passed through to us, that everything that we do could simply be evaluated through that lens. That's really powerful if you can develop that and to provide it. And so my hope with the canon and the series that we're doing is, one, that you get to evaluate CTC.

[00:19:01] You get to scrutinize our opinions and hopefully press back on them so that we can refine them and improve ourselves. But also that it would inspire you to consider what needs to be written down, what needs to exist in a markdown file in this new world for your organization, what makes you unique in a way that you could communicate to future employees and future partners such that they could help you become more you.

[00:19:28] And then within that, and this is another part I think about all the time, what what undefined is still open to be interpreted? Where is there actually a malleable opinion of our present state? What is actually something where we want to not predefine the output, and we want to allow for discovery to happen, and that is a big part of this as well, that we want to have the opportunity to discover new ways of doing things all the time while also being accountable to a process that we believe is rooted in good research and data and experience so that we can raise the floor and increase the likelihood of success for our partners.

[00:20:15] And that's really what this is, is it's an attempt at being right more often. There is no-- A lot of times people will dismiss the idea of best practices or playbooks as they are useless if they do not apply in every circumstance. And that is not at all the goal of material like this. It's about being right most often and raising the starting point of activation while you discover individual learning.

[00:20:45] And That is a, a really, really important and valuable exercise. If you can think about any large-scale probabilistic distribution of outcomes, whether it's investing, whether it's playing poker, whether it's educational work, the goal is not to get to a hundred percent perfection of success. But in the agency world, if we can move to from sixty to sixty-seven to seventy-two percent success across the portfolio of business, it transforms my business.

[00:21:17] And if we can increase the efficiency of your media outcomes in small percentage gains over time, and if there are strategies that are, work fifty-eight percent of the time versus some that work forty-two percent of the time, that distinction in value over the course of many, many efforts is worth a lot of money to our partners, and that's our goal.

[00:21:40] So I hope you come with us on this journey over the next six, seven weeks as we share a little bit about our canon. Then I'd love to h- see what some of you are doing in this pursuit. What have you begun to institutionalize and write down and document in a way that's allowing for AI to do the, the powerful computational work and output through the lens of the experience that you've already gained individually in your business?

[00:22:04] And then how could this change how you evaluate people in our space versus just how many years has the person on LinkedIn worked in a business? Asking the question of: Where does the institutional knowledge of your organization live, and how is it deployed on behalf of my brand in an era of AI?

[00:22:21] Because that changes everything in terms of its capacity to work for you. And having structured data, a clear MCP that you can engage with, institutional knowledge in the form of skills that are activating and constantly monitoring and assessing for the integrity of the ideas in deployment should all be table stakes for the customer or for the agencies and partners that you're working with, and really for employees too.

[00:22:48] The reality is they should have, You hire people, whether it's a director of retention or an agency for retention, for a point of view on retention. And so I think that resumes are going to be, also just be replaced by sets of skills and outputs and data in a way that just says, like, "When I run email, this is what I do and how I do it," and it's written down and codified, and, "Here's how I would deploy it on your behalf and, and ensure that it gets implemented specifically.

[00:23:12] And then here's the areas where I would go to explore your brand uniquely," to combine this sort of like aggregate knowledge with your specific knowledge into this really powerful system. And so whether that's a service business or a person, I think the expectation remains the same. To be able to communicate with clarity what it is you believe and why, and how you're going to do it on my behalf with consistency and how the system is de-designed to accomplish it.

[00:23:37] So excited to share with you over the next six weeks. Would love to see what some of you are building, and happy to share more about how we're doing this work. I would encourage you to listen to my Client Summit speech. And if you're interested in a copy of the Canon, let me know. I'd ha-- be happy to mail one out to you.

[00:23:50] And it will be live on our website soon. So, it's a pleasure as always. Thanks for tuning in. Talk soon.

[00:23:58]