How our Prophit System Forecasts Creative Volume

[00:00:00] Adrianne Barkley: Most successful brands at CTC producing the right amount of creative volume and the diversity needed to achieve the creative results they're looking for.

Work with at least three creative vendors, an internal team of designers. Us for UGC and branded ads and a third vendor and many work with a fourth vendor, right? And so that asking your internal team and your external partners to produce volume of creative against the same evergreen core SKUs every month is what's gonna give you di diversity to fuel a strong evergreen account structure.

[00:00:41] Richard Gaffin: Hey folks. Welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective, and I'm joined today by Adrian Barkley, who is our VP of Performance Creative here at Common Thread Collective. Now, I'll say for the folks out there, I've gotten that wrong like five times, so we'll see how producer Corey cuts around it. Now it comes out at the end. But anyway, Adrian is joining us here today to talk about something that we, I mentioned, or or rather, Taylor mentioned on the podcast last week when I was talking to him, which was about this idea that.

Creative strategy is dead. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that creative strategy is truly dead, but the creative strategist in the old sense of the word is kind of, is no longer the paradigm or whatever that we want to think through when we think about creative. But what we do wanna think through is something fresh and new.

Which is what Adrian is bringing to the table here. So we're gonna have her jump into a deck that she's gonna share with us, which talks a little bit about how creative strategy is baked into our profit system so that when you come to us for a forecast to build out your marketing calendar, to get a sense of what you think the next 24 months should look like or whatever.

What we're also including in that is a full creative plan. And so Adrian's gonna walk us through that right now. So I will turn it over to you. Without further ado, Adrian.

[00:01:54] Adrianne Barkley: Yeah. Thanks Richard. I'm excited to chat through this. I'm actually gonna use a real client that we just completed a prop system for. They started with the Prophit System, now they're working with us in multiple areas at CTC. On an ongoing basis, and what many of our customers do not realize is that when you purchase a profit system at CTC, yes, you get the whole nine yards.

You get a 12 month forecast, you get all of the channel audits, everything that you, you know, would think you would get. What, what many people don't realize is that we deliver a fully operationalized creative forecast as well to match those. Spend targets that your profit engineer sets for you in the profit system process.

So we talked through your current creative state and creative scoring key gaps. Our demand model, which we've built. And I'm gonna show you guys what, which tells you your ad volume needed in any given month against your 2026 forecast. How we think about creative production strategy in a very operationalized way that's like, easy to chew instead of just like, okay, we need more ads.

We need more ads, like. I don't know how many of, you're so tired of people telling you you need more ads and not having a follow up plan. Right. So ad types, formats needed every month. How we think about taking production against your core SKUs and really really briefing those ads against a persona and pain point approach to make sure that meta has specific customer. Creative types that we're speaking to. And then ultimately operationalizing your production pipeline for 2026. So that's actually actionable every month in a way that matches not just guesswork. And your growth lead should be able to do this. This is, this is not a separate role that we believe should exist at e-commerce brands. This. The capabilities and the reason why we built them into STA is so that anyone working on the day-to-day growth of the business can have visibility and accountability into. Monthly creative volume and have not just a a what, but like a, so what a next step, right? So that they can actually produce the outcome needed to hit their, their spend goals in the most effective way. So I'm gonna walk through a real presentation for our recent processis and client what it looked like, what, what you get when you, work with us for our profit system at CTC and how you can take that plan and ultimately run with it no matter what creative vendors you work with. Most successful brands at CTC producing the right amount of creative volume and the diversity needed to achieve the creative results they're looking for.

Work with at least three creative vendors, an internal team of designers. Us for UGC and branded ads and a third vendor and many work with a fourth vendor, right? And so that asking your internal team and your external partners to produce volume of creative against the same evergreen core SKUs every month is what's gonna give you di diversity to

fuel a, a strong evergreen account structure. It's not ad hoc batches of like, oh shoot, this isn't working, so we need, let's go make 50 of these ads. Or, oh, shoot, like, performance is down. Let's run a sale and go make a bunch of ads for the sale. It's, it's not that at all. It's a diverse set of vendors delivering consistent creative on a monthly basis against your Evergreen SKUs. And so this plan will get you there no matter who does it. It'll show you the numbers of how many so that you can go tell everyone what to do. Right.

[00:05:28] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:05:28] Adrianne Barkley: Cool. I'll move on to the first slide in our prop system is going over the creative demand model, specifically the creative score. Okay. So for this brand they spent 20% more year over year and saw ROAS drop by 20%. And you know, while some of that is normal, obviously higher scale leads. Usually directly to a higher cac. That is a pretty dramatic drop in bro oas. And it, and it, it's not sustainable for them. Now, the creative score here, it shows that they are actually in a pretty good spot. They're, they're scoring an overall 60 here for a couple of reasons.

So what this, what this score does is it takes five sub scores, your evergreen share, which is the percentage of ads that have been running consistently for 30 plus days. Your ROAS and your spend degradation, which is the change in spend in ROAS after the initial launch week. Does it go up? Does it go down?

Does it remain consistent? That's really important because if you launch ads and seven days later they die, your degradation is going to demand a higher level of ads every month. Ad concentration, which is the percentage of total ad spend concentrated in the top five performing ads, and then zero revenue rate.

The percentage of active ads that had zero spend during the measurement period. Totally normal to have ads that don't spend. Don't worry about it. I'm really tired of people

kind of like force or finding ways to try and force spend to ads that don't spend. If you have a healthy account set up on cost controls and you're delivering a consistent pipeline of new ads every month, meta will find new winner. Zero revenue rate is totally normal but obviously within reason, right? So this brand has an incredible score for many of these metrics. However, evergreen ads only represent 4.6 of their portfolio, which places their metric in the 20th percentile. So increasing long running ads could improve stability here and ultimately. A consistent pipeline of diverse creative could add incremental scale and improve efficiency for this brand, especially as they're trying to grow this year. So, the reason why they had a lack of evergreen ads last year was because they launched. Very few ads. 

So this chart on the next slide then shows a hindsight of 2025 by month.

And the blue. The dark blue is how many ads you launched, and the light blue is how many ads should you have launched. And you can see here that in, for example, January, 2025, they launched five ads, but the model was asking them for 31 ads.

So what could have been the outcome if they simply designed 31 ads instead of five? It looks like they spent kind of relatively flat year over year for that month, right. However their efficiency degraded and the model was asking for more output. They only produce five ads. And so you don't ever wanna be stuck in that place. You don't want to be like, what could have happened if we

did what the model was telling us? You want to be like, we ruled this out. Cool. We made the 30 ads. still didn't hit our forecast. It must be something else. That's how forecasting works too, is process of elimination of your core issues.

And so when you're looking, when you're finally getting a data back model like this, following the recommendation is the easiest way to chip away at the the what ifs, right? What if it could be this? So, and this is a really attainable model. The average amount of ads needed last year was 30 to 40 ads each month.

Okay?

[00:09:16] Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

[00:09:18] Adrianne Barkley: Now some months they launched five, some months they launched 20. They never hit, they never hit the desired outcome until December. You can see that in the chart. So then we built them a forecast for 2026 going into this year and they have higher spend targets this year. Which means they need a higher amount of ads naturally, and their efficiency has been poor.

The, the run rate for their efficiency over the last six months has not been consistent or it, it's degraded over time. Right? They're, they're, they're seeing a CAC rise and they're wanting to spend more, so that's gonna require higher production volume. There's just no way around it. So with the spend forecast we set for them for 2026, the model then tells us. Here's how many ads you need every month to have this 12 months in advance and be able to execute your production pipeline against a forecast that that is this specific, you cannot get that anywhere else. Maybe some sort of manual sheet that people spin up, I'm sure. I find their own ways of like achieving a creative volume necessity. But this, this is right there in status, and if you were to change your target for February, your amount of ads would change too, right? So spend changes, amount of ads change, but at least at a high level for 2026, they understand here that they need about 50 to 60 unique ads a month to hit their spend most effectively with November peaking at 99 ads. So, and and it shows you your progress too. So it tells you January, 2026. So far we have made 10 ads. We need to make 50. There's a delta of 40 who's making them A profit engineer on their weekly call is gonna be like, I need 40 more ads. Where are they? Who's gonna make 'em for us? Right. And if, and if the, and if they can't Right.

Then it's, it's easy. Solves right. CTC branded can step, step in with branded ads that we produce. C-T-C-U-G-C can step in with UGC ads that we source. So, this is all directly in sta I can also share my screen there so that you could see the same view kind of in an active an active like in, or an interactive way.

But this tells you in your dashboard, right, your creative dashboard, SCTC. In your store, your creative score, the target for the month. There's no like core moments this month in terms of like calendar moments that's, that are happening on their marketing calendar. So all of these 50 ads need to be evergreen. And then you can also assign these evergreen ad planning to the producers. So the client, is the client gonna make 'em? Is C-T-C-U-G-C gonna make 'em? Is CTC brand gonna make 'em? How many of those are gonna be video? How many of those are gonna be images? Boom. You commit to the plan, you execute against it.

You rinse and repeat every month. So it's right there in stats. So

[00:12:08] Richard Gaffin: I was gonna just cut in real quick and say like, I'm sure we'll get at some point get into what the actual process, once you've selected C-T-C-U-G-C-C-T-C branded or whatever, like what that looks like. One thing that I did wanna. Mention too, is that like a lot of the struggles that we've had in the past with creative strategy have to do with, oh, we need to make X amount of ads and we need to make 'em right now.

And that's kind of the amount of runway we have. But one thing that's worthwhile to point out, which you already did, is that like, because you have a 12 month plan here,

[00:12:37] Adrianne Barkley: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:38] Richard Gaffin: you have some sense of like, oh, actually I'm gonna need 60 ads in June, not just, I'm gonna need 60 ads right now. So that provides, I think it maybe gives some.

A little bit of like a view into how we're able to actually produce for those upcoming months. There will be some fluctuation, right? Like if June goes terribly or whatever, then July's gonna need to look a little bit different. But at the very base. Things kind of, it's business as usual. We know that July will require 60 ads or whatever, so we can be preparing for that in previous months or even right now, right?

[00:13:11] Adrianne Barkley: Yep, exactly. And if you're not, like, if you realize the gap's early and you're like, okay, we're just not, we're not able to produce this amount of ads on a monthly basis. How can we plan for that to happen in Q2?

Start having those vendor discussions start. If it's a, if it's an internal hire, start having those interviews, getting that, because you have the plan all the way through the end of the year. Getting that resource or resources in in place so that next quarter you can be producing against the outcome.

[00:13:44] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:44] Adrianne Barkley: It shouldn't have to be just an L every month.

[00:13:48] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Right. Okay. Let's let's, let's keep keep rolling on here.

[00:13:52] Adrianne Barkley: Cool. Okay. So we've answered the question of how many ads do you need? The volume is clear now we talk about what should the ads be. Because telling, telling you 50 ads is not enough to go produce those, right? So, look at a very high level. First at asset breakdown, which this is a really easy report.

You can pull in motion and it tells you. Of your total ad spend, what percent were videos, what percent were still images, and what can we take away from this media mix? So in this account, videos received 69% of account spend, and they were at, they, they delivered a higher roas and a higher a OV, similar click to purchase ratio. To, to video, but images saw a slightly lower cost per click and a higher CTR. So image are actually driving a higher upper funnel engagement metrics, CPC and CTR being stronger. However, the image ads that this brand has launched historically have been almost entirely sale or offer based. So there's no really. Persona strategy going into their

image ads. Meta is loving their video and their UGC because it's a clear target customer, whereas the image, A image ads are just driving a high because of the price. Okay? So what we are recommending for this brand moving forward is keeping this 70 30 split between video and static. But shifting a very intentional persona strategy into their UGC into, sorry, into their branded ads, their static branded images, because we believe that the images could get more scale if they were designed more intentionally.

[00:15:38] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:15:38] Adrianne Barkley: Okay. And then the third asset type that's missing from their media mix is UGC statics which are super overlooked. So they have good amount of UGC videos flowing in every month. They don't have UGC statics. And that is a really easy lift if you're able to just ask your creators to not just send you the video, but also send you an image. It's the easiest ad type in my

opinion. You add a text overlay, you add a headline, it's an ad. So then we dive one layer deeper. We know that about 70% of their asset breakdown should be videos, 30% should be stills. And we also want them to be more intentional with their still production, to be more persona based, not just offer ads. Now we've, we look a layer

deeper here and. We actually see that their top performing UGC videos are music only. So even with just kind of like a very low lift, like these UGC videos have no voiceover. They're music only. There's no text overlay, there's no captions. Even with that, they're receiving the majority of the spend and they're scaling more effectively than statics. So if they were to start adding voiceovers and. Captions onto their, their creator briefs. They could unlock a ton more volume here with UGC. So there's just opportunity across the board for these asset types. So we talk through asset we talk through volume, we talk through asset types, then we talk through merchandising your production pipeline. This is the same approach we have to ad account structure at CTC. We think about merchandising your ad account structure. You should be making ads to fuel those exact campaigns. So, you look at top products and this, this brand specifically should be producing their ads according to the revenue that's being driven by their core products.

So 60 per 62% of their ads they produce every month should be for wraps, which drive the majority of their revenue. 10% should be women's sleep sets, 9% should be nursing covers, 5% should be baby sleep sets. And then they have kind of these other sub products carriers, swaddles and crib sheets. And when I was doing this presentation, what I uncovered was, or the que a good question I got, which I, I don't have this context.

So this is why this conversation with the client is so helpful.

Right. A good question I got was. Okay. We understand producing creative against our core revenue drivers, but what if we want a new product to be a core revenue driver? And it's not yet. And it, it, as for this brand is as easy as creating a dedicated campaign for that product and starting to produce a dedicated amount of creative for that product every month.

[00:18:35] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:36] Adrianne Barkley: And unlocking new incremental revenue behind it with a consistent pipeline of ads. 

So, that was really helpful for them. The, the next phase that we go into is talking more through what do we really mean by persona focused branded ads. UGC ads that's for a specific persona is an, is an obvious no-brainer, right?

You have the new mom, she's wearing her baby in a wrap. She's talking about why it's so comfortable. She loves the color. Meta defines the target customer because. The talent in the UGC looks like the target customer.

Now with static ads, branded ads, this can be more challenging, but it comes down actually to the asset you use mixed with the co, the messaging, the on, on the actual ad.

So we developed three different personas for moms who are. Potential net new customers for the wrap. Okay, so you have the overstimulated first time mom, the sleep deprived contact nap survivor, and the thoughtful gift giver. Okay, so you could go, you could do 10, 20 personas for every Evergreen product.

We started with three as just an example of how we think through this. But if you're not calling out your persona. On your creative in a very specific way, it makes it more challenging for meta to go find your target customer. 

So because all of these ads are going into new customer acquisition campaigns we want them speaking to all types of different pain points in the, in a mom's journey saying, mom isn't enough saying, does your baby only contact n?

Is way more specific.

Okay? So again, like this ad, like if you're watching or viewing with us, it, this is just so solid, right? First time mamas, it's not a, it's not moms with multiples. It's not a mom who's on her fourth kid. It's, it's a new mom, right? And the copy on here says, feeling overwhelmed, touched out, and unsure if you're doing it right.

So immediately it speaks to her. Potential lack of confidence in her approach to motherhood, which we know can be a very real problem for first time moms. So was made for moms because we get it right, and then you move on to this next one, the sleep deprived contact nap survivor. This ad says POV. Your baby only sleeps while being held, so you decided to make the most of the short season. It turns her pain into an immediate solution that we can solve, like make the most of it. Wear her all day, right? It's a short season. It won't last forever. And then lastly, like the gift. This gift angle is a huge persona in and of itself. It shows the mom wearing the baby, and it says, babies can wear clothes for max two months, right?

That's, that's probably generous.

[00:21:47] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:48] Adrianne Barkley: can be used with babies eight to 25 pounds. So give the new mama in your life a gift She'll use again and again. Don't give her clothes. She has plenty of clothes. Her baby's gonna wear them for two weeks. Give her a gift she'll use again and again. Right. So these different personas are gonna unlock new customers in meta and therefore drive incremental new customer revenue.

[00:22:08] Richard Gaffin: I wanna pause here real quick because I, one thing that's interesting about these three slides is like this in, in a sense, is the sort of old version of creative strategy or whatever that I was talking about earlier, which is like, you're actually briefing out very specific, not necessarily specific ads on, on the kind of at the end note or whatever, but you are doing.

Creative strategy in, in sort of the sense that we've used to talk about it. Right. And so talk, walk us through a little bit like how you develop these personas, because my reaction to this as not a first time mama is this seems really spot on. Like, you know, what you're talking about and I know you specifically do, but generally speaking, if you, let's say, don't, how are you kind of, sort of, gathering this information and putting these personas together?

[00:22:54] Adrianne Barkley: I use ai. We, we use AI. Yeah.

And if you're not, you're wasting your time.

Like, honestly, like if I, I, I could put an hour of my time into developing these three personas and writing up their. Core pain points and writing out different headline options. And you know, that might be an hour of my time to dedicate to a couple of in-depth personas, or it is 10 minutes through our AI system giving you a myriad of options,

[00:23:26] Richard Gaffin: So you feed, so what information, I guess, do you feed into the, the AI to get this thing back?

[00:23:31] Adrianne Barkley: Yeah, so, so I feed it the product page. I feed it just a simple question that asks, Hey, like, against this product, develop five or how many of our personas, I'm looking for five personas for paid social ad concepts that include clear pain points clear, like desires, a life snapshot and why this product matters in their life. Additionally pair a bunch of headlines with this that could be used across page, paid social, creative and then you'll, you'll get plenty to work with.

[00:24:06] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, well what of time to be alive? But I mean, I think that that's like such a good point that AI is capable of doing that sort of deep research very, very quickly and you can crank things like these, these out and even if it's off or whatever, you'll spend, spend money against these. Personas and discover pretty quickly what's right and what's wrong, which allows you to move, move pretty fast.

But okay. I was just curious about your process there, but we can keep rolling here.

[00:24:32] Adrianne Barkley: Cool. So we, we engage in a similar process from a UGC standpoint. So all of our UGC briefs have like personas that we ask creators to lean into deeply, rather than just speaking to the value props or the USPS of the product that aren't gonna necessarily land with. The way that Metas algorithm has is it really thrives. And so what we're asking your creators for against that specific sku, when we, when we send them the product, we're asking for one video and one still. And we take that one video and that one still, and we develop it into four ads. And every ad has a unique intro and unique headline and really a specific hook that allows you to get volume out of UGC and. And like maximize that investment too. This asset type is generally more expensive than a branded static produced by a designer. And so you want more volume out of it. And so this is an example for a backpack brand that we kind of spoke through that approach because we wanted this brand during the profit system.

We really wanted them to. Understand how to, how to level up their UGC, like their, their UGC foundation is actually not poor.

But there's just so many ways they could be maximizing it and leveraging it even more effectively. So we use this adjacent brand as an example in the profit system.

[00:25:52] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:25:54] Adrianne Barkley: Okay, so something to not sleep onto.

Obviously what status and what the creative demand model are doing is you, it's. Making the recommendation for volume of ads needed against your meta spend targets. Okay? Now, you also, so many brands right now are prioritizing channel expansion, whether it's app loving, Snapchat, TikTok shops Pinterest, TikTok, what, whatever channel they have in mind, right? what what you need to be understanding is that when you're investing in a consistent pipeline of. Creative on a monthly basis, you're building an arsenal of units for channel expansion, and if you're not cross utilizing creative across channels to to explore channel expansion paired with incrementality, you are not getting the most out of those assets.

So most of our clients that work with C-T-C-U-G-C have a backlog of hundreds of UGC ads. And now as they're testing the waters with channels like App 11, they're able to use every single one of those videos because the way we source UGC is that when we deliver the ads and the raw content to our brands, they have no usage limitations or restrictions or maximum runtime. So it allows you to take that UGC asset and cross utilize it when you're, when you're expanding onto other channels so that your pipeline of creative isn't just serving. Meta.

[00:27:30] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:27:31] Adrianne Barkley: So ensuring that when you're asking creators for UGC, you are getting unlimited runtimes whenever possible is, is critical.

Because so many of the brands we work with, the way they're gonna unlock growth this year is actually through channel expansion efforts.

[00:27:50] Richard Gaffin: So one thing I think like. Well, a couple things that I think worth calling out here is if you go back one slide this is something that we did, we did a workshop on together last year, which is the product brief. So this is also something that's AI generated, but has a very specific template that you use.

And what that does is it solicits the exact thing that you want out of the EGC Creator. So there's no where, where all the clarity is. So they're given, let's say, creative, some creative license to. Speak to the a or to the product in, in the way that is sort of native to them. But what you're also giving them is some pretty strict guidelines about what to produce so that you have like a clear understanding of what's gonna come out of it.

So obviously the, the stipulation that it be, you know, you could use it whenever and wherever is like sort of part of that. But are there any other like specific like boundaries that you set with u GC creators?

[00:28:43] Adrianne Barkley: It depends on the brand, the it,

the boundaries, like Yeah, the boundaries come down to how we want them to speak about the product in very like persona specific ways.

[00:28:57] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:28:58] Adrianne Barkley: That's our boundaries. And then any other boundaries that get introduced into the brief are usually because of brand pre.

[00:29:04] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:05] Adrianne Barkley: You know, like internally with the clients, so.

[00:29:08] Richard Gaffin: And then the other question that everybody always asks. That. I know I've asked you before, but I will have to ask again, which is like, how do you find all these people?

[00:29:19] Adrianne Barkley: Yeah, so we've built over the last couple years, like an entirely from scratch network. And that's really how this program got started. And we also partner with platforms who can help expand our reach, especially like internationally. So, yeah, it's a mix of both.

[00:29:38] Richard Gaffin: So well, that's another way of saying sign up for this with us and then we'll find it for you.

[00:29:44] Adrianne Barkley: Well, yeah,

we'll always find 'em for you. However, we do work with brands who already have a strong, you know, internal list of ambassadors or creators that they wanna keep using, but they're not leveraging them well enough, and so they actually just hand that list over to us. And we brief them and we manage the comms and we manage the payments and everything.

So again, do both ways Source net new or utilize your existing brand affiliates. 

[00:30:15] Richard Gaffin: Cool. All right. Let's let's keep rolling on talking about asset 

[00:30:17] Adrianne Barkley: so, so we talked about 50 ads needed across the products for this brand to hit their 2026 spend plan, right? And then this little family tree breaks it down into the product selection and the amount of specific ads per. Asset types. So like 18 UGC videos for wraps and three UGC stills for wraps and six branded stills for wraps, and three branded motion videos for wraps. And if you're checking those boxes and you're operationalizing this plan across your internal design team, your CTC creative team and your other vendor or vendors that you work with, that's the best way to ensure, like I said, you're getting a consistent pipeline of ads. That are diverse in their approach and their messaging, because I promise you, the same designer making these 50 ads every month, you're gonna hit walls, you're gonna hit like entity ID walls, you're gonna hit diversity walls. Like you're just, it just, there's limitations, right? To the amount of unique ideas that people can individually come up with.

So that that kind of cross vendor approach is one of our favorites.

[00:31:21] Richard Gaffin: So how many individual creators or vendors are producing these 50 ads that we're looking at here?

[00:31:27] Adrianne Barkley: Right now there's two for this brand. 

[00:31:29] Richard Gaffin: Okay,

[00:31:30] Adrianne Barkley: Yeah, yeah.

[00:31:31] Richard Gaffin: so that's two. So there's only two UGC creators

[00:31:35] Adrianne Barkley: No, no, no. 

[00:31:35] Richard Gaffin: one UGC creator and 

[00:31:36] Adrianne Barkley: Two vendors. They have like an internal, yeah, they have like an internal design team, and then they, and they have a UGC partner.

[00:31:42] Richard Gaffin: Okay. Well then in terms of like creators total, like how,

[00:31:45] Adrianne Barkley: Oh. Oh. I don't know. Oh, this, this. Four creators a month, you can get what you need. 

[00:31:53] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, no, I, I was just like curious about like the resource cost to, or, or like the resource allocation to producing something at volume like this.

[00:32:04] Adrianne Barkley: Yeah, totally. If we, the way we resource that CTC, if we were to do all 50 of these ads for this brand, right, we would recommend they do four creators a month with CTC, and then about 30 branded ads a month was CTC. To get that 50. 

[00:32:20] Richard Gaffin: Once this is all made,

[00:32:22] Adrianne Barkley: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:23] Richard Gaffin: what's the feedback loop into producing, like seeing performance in the, and then reevaluating the next month's plan.

[00:32:32] Adrianne Barkley: Yeah, so, so, okay, so after the profit system is complete, right? It's all about, okay, what's next? And so usually our brands talk internally. They figure out which of our services they wanna engage in. Is it just the profit engineer? Is it the profit engineer plus Google? Is it the profit engineer plus Google plus creative?

If it's creative, how many odds is CTC making? Right. But on a monthly basis, their profit engineer walks through this process with them. The creative demand plan and status, how many ads you need, evergreen ver versus moment of those ads, how many are for evergreen SKUs versus your marketing calendar moments, the asset type breakdown.

So stills versus images versus UG Cs. Operationalizing those across your vendors. Who makes them? Who's making what? Let's make sure, let's get after it. And then executing and delivering, launching them in the ad account, getting learnings. And rinsing and repeat that full cycle. And, and that's what obviously building the, the creative demand model into status has enabled all of our profit engineers to do without the help of a creative strategist.

[00:33:34] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Alright. Well, I mean, I think that's like, yeah, we can, we can end it there. I, I think it's like a pretty clear that in summary there's like a couple things going on. One is like the connection of the creative workflow to a very specific forecast. And a very specific, well, actually, sorry. One thing that I should mention here, just to clarify for everybody listening is this is everything that we're talking about here is evergreen.

Yeah. So do we not, we don't touch marketing calendar moments.

[00:34:00] Adrianne Barkley: no, We do. We'll design for your for your marketing calendar at moments. Those really t typically should be incremental on top of your evergreen production pipeline. It should never take away from core revenue drivers.

[00:34:14] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. What's, so what's like a healthy percentage of Evergreen too? Of evergreen? As, as a percentage of the total account?

[00:34:20] Adrianne Barkley: It's different for every brand.

You can't Yeah. There's just no benchmark. 

[00:34:25] Richard Gaffin: what would be healthy? for this brand? Because they're 4.6, they need to be higher.

[00:34:30] Adrianne Barkley: Yeah. I would say for this brand, they've leaned so offer focused historically on their ad creative that. 90% evergreen and 10% marketing calendar is what they should be aiming for.

They don't, they just don't need, they just don't need marketing calendar or offer based statics.

They need to find ways to unlock revenue on a more consistent basis.

[00:34:56] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. All right. So, well, I mean to then to go back to what I was saying then, like the, the two, two elements here are connecting the creative strategy. The volume production expectation to these very specific objective truths is one part of the puzzle. So like everybody understands what's expected. And then the other piece of it seems to kind of be like, basically use AI to do your creative research at the very least and give you a sense of like what the personas that you need to target are.

And then I think that's also like an important thing to call out. Last time we talked on the podcast, I think you mentioned something that really struck me, which is that a lot of the times when you are. When you're split testing hooks, a lot of the times the hooks are actually calling out a persona explicitly.

And you can kind of see that in that one ad where it says First time mamas in it. Obviously that's not UGC, but it's a similar example where what you're saying is like the, the, the hook should be like, Hey, are you this person? And then the rest of the ad kind of flows off from there.

Is that accurate or am I misremembering that?

[00:35:57] Adrianne Barkley: Oh yeah, that, that it should serve as like the foundation, right? Like put your own context, product context, creative juices into it. But like use it as a foundation. You'll get, you'll, yeah, you'll maximize your efforts.

[00:36:13] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. All right, so focusing on personas, really being thoughtful about that, and then letting AI do the work in terms of fleshing out what the creative kind of execution of that should be. So I think, and then obviously the third thing is if you want us to do this for you, you know where to find us, common thread code.com.

Hit the hire us button, let us know that you wanna work with us on creative specifically, and we would love to move forward with that. So thank you again for joining us, Adrian. I'm sure we're gonna have you on soon as this is something that's on everybody's minds right now. But until next time, everybody, thanks for listening.

Take care and we'll see you next time.

[00:36:46] Adrianne Barkley: Thanks y’all.