CMOs: Stop Measuring, Start Creating Moments

[00:00:00] Taylor Holiday: Welcome back to the another episode of the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. It's a solo mission. Today we're doing a quick one with it being Memorial Day, most of the crew out of office. But I did wanna jump in, stick with our weekly cadence, and I was inspired this weekend by one of the amazing brands that we get to work with and their CMO who's a close friend.

[00:00:20] This is George at Cozy Earth. George, you're gonna love this. Shout out, man, pocket this 'cause you're not getting a ton more compliments, but, jor, we've been working with Cozy Earth for, for a while now, and they're one of the brands. It's a large business with a complex media mix where we've spent a bunch of time and energy working towards clarity around.

[00:00:40] Channel impact and measurement and incrementality. And they've had a bunch of conflicting reads from various partners and it's been hard to sort out and it's beginning to feel quagmire where you start to feel like every new piece of information just causes further confusion in the pot. And this is for anybody that's been deep down the attribution, incrementality, measurement.

[00:01:04] Rabbit trail. There is sort of this journey that everybody must go on to eventually reach a really important conclusion, which is that there is no answer and that we aren't actually in pursuit of, right? There is no way to know or to ever establish definitive objective, right? What we can do is be thoughtful about establishing.

[00:01:27] A system that I like to call your best available truth, which is to say we have a commitment to a progressive idea. What the impact is in each channel informed by a clear testing roadmap, good test design in a way that allows us to continually build a growing stack of knowledge. But that's not even enough because once that knowledge exists, it's very easy to poke holes and undermine and constantly build a lack of confidence in then operationalizing that knowledge.

[00:02:04] And so instead, what George and I had a conversation with on the golf course in Las Vegas recently was that for him in particular as the CMO, the amount of energy and time and brain space that was being occupied by this quagmire, I. Was actually causing an impact and impairing him from going and doing the only thing that he could do inside of an organization, which is to come up with the ideas that are high risk, that have a chance to break you out of a local maxima to disproportionately generate return beyond the day-to-day.

[00:02:38] And so what I, we sort of collaborated on was what would, how could we and your team. They have an awesome team at Cozy Earth get to a level of trust where he recognizes that even though there's moments where we will be wrong, we have a system for establishing best available truth. We can act on it for a period of time.

[00:02:56] We can assess the impact and the delta is gonna be small enough. There are healthy, good business that he can leave us with that decision making and allow himself to go and work on the big ideas to free his brain from that quagmire. And so this was a dialogue that we were happening, and he left there and he did it.

[00:03:14] He took and built himself a large list and took his brain out of that day-to-day measurement. Slog and created space for him to think bigger, to go occupy the place that only he can as the leader. And this weekend I saw some of the, the fruit of that and I wanna just shout it out. And I think it's important to illustrate these kinds of actions.

[00:03:34] You know, we care a lot about peaks and moments and generation here, but, this weekend I was scrolling TikTok. I didn't even know this was gonna happen, but I saw inside of the Cozy Earth hq, they were doing a challenge and they were like, their account was live on TikTok. And so I looked, and it was the bed Rott challenge where they had sort of taken a page out of maybe the Mr.

[00:03:55] Beast playbook a little and created a challenge for five of their employees to see who could be the last to get out of bed. They brought these beds into their office. Co cozier sells bedsheets and pajamas, so they're all in branded product. Their CEO's there, George is there on the mic, and over the course of five days, these people still might be in bed.

[00:04:15] It's Monday right now. I don't, not totally sure, but I texted him, I said, Hey man, I, I keep seeing this come up in my feed, thousands of comments. They're actually running some paid promotion behind it. And I said, well, how, how is this going? Is this working? And he shared with me that over the course of the weekend, they've generated 10 million impressions.

[00:04:34] And this is not a brand that generally has a massive social following right off the bat, but they've generated 10 million views. They had 200,000 people on the live at various points in time. So a massive amount of impressions and awareness on what was functionally a very easy thing to pull off with their own people inside of their own office, with their own product and the sales impact.

[00:04:57] We're still measuring, we're checking it out, but regardless, what I love is. This is an outta the box way to create to understand social native behavior for a brand in a way that highlights products, builds community and relationship with your organization, humanizes the brand even. I've seen a lot of this kind of content lately where there's ads that there's a, there's a brand, I don't, I don't know.

[00:05:21] I wish I could shot them out specifically that's doing ad content where it's their employees. Like two women will go, Hey, we're gonna dress up Mikey today and style him. I mean, Mikey's an employee and they'll, it's a men's apparel brand, and two women will actually use their clothes to style Mikey for a barbecue or whatever, and it's like.

[00:05:37] It's so natural and authentic that it builds connection. It also allows a really cool way for guys, guys watching fashion content is always a little weird, right? Like, here's a guy doing UGCI. It's not really the kind of content that I think is necessarily natural for men to consume, but this idea of two women styling a guy and that their impression and reaction to it, there's something about that that's really compelling.

[00:05:56] So, they also picked up, you know, five digits in followers. So perpetual relationship with customers. And I just loved it. I loved it as an outta the box idea, to take a shot, to build relationship, to go do the thing that CMOs are uniquely positioned to do, to create the kinds of moments that nobody in the organization is really incentivized in many ways to take those kinds of chances.

[00:06:17] Their job is to sort of deliver against the target, and they're always gonna sort of map their behavior. As big as the expectation you give them and you wanna be fair and set realistic goals. And so oftentimes one of the problems is we have this like, this goal mechanism that doesn't actually incentivize that kind of thinking.

[00:06:33] And so you get stuck with this behavioral pattern of just trying to slightly improve. So there's this trust that we can develop in relationship, and this is often what I experience in the best partnerships that we have with CTC. I've talked about this with bg, with born primitive, with others, where they recognize their role in the relationship is to go and do those kinds of things inside of their organization to design the next product, to build the big next moment, and to trust us with the distribution and measurement along the way, and hold us accountable to the expectation and let us drive towards it.

[00:07:01] And so it's a progressive thing. We're working through this, but. There's two keys that I wanna leave you with on this Memorial Day, and I'm glad this, hopefully this is a quick one. You're by the pool, hopefully enjoying a drink, and your day off is one. There is freedom in the idea of the best available truth.

[00:07:15] This terminology gives you permission to understand that. One, you may be wrong, in fact, you probably are wrong, but two, you're allowed to change your mind in the future. You can update your priors, you can improve the information. And it's a never ending quest for knowledge. We're building a progressively developing stack of information.

[00:07:33] And that's, that's really important. And if you can instill that idea, it's gonna give people freedom to act, to say, Hey, we ran a test. We, it was thoughtful. We did it with good design, we did it the experiment correctly. We executed, we got a result, and for a period of time we're gonna act on that 'cause it's the best available information we have.

[00:07:50] What we're not gonna do is undermine all the reasons why it might not be perfect. I. That's a grand temptation. And in fairness, you may be right in its imperfection, but the alternative also is subject to the same amount of scrutiny. So we decided on this path, we're gonna act on it, we're gonna operationalize it for a period of time.

[00:08:06] We can update it, we could build the next test, we can add to our growing knowledge base, but that's freedom. And we're not going to undermine ourselves all the time, every day by second guessing the process, execute the process, assess the impact on a wider horizon, and then change and constantly add knowledge to it.

[00:08:22] Then from there, marketing leaders, CMOs, CEOs and I, I say this to myself very much, I recognize this in my own leaders, is that I need, I often am the only one that possesses the capacity to go do things that don't actually, I. Logically add up to a very specific outcome to try to break the pattern. And these kinds of actions are worth pointing out whether they drive disproportionate revenue on day one or not.

[00:08:48] They're the kinds of actions that build an organization towards doing really cool things that will get noticed, that will get attention, that do break, cut through the feed and don't look like everything else. So. George Memorial Day. Cheers to you. Keep it up. And for everyone else, amidst all of the challenge of trying to sort out the exact right attribution model, build a system of measurement that you believe is thoughtful, execute against that premise for a period of time, reassess and release perfection in measurement.

[00:09:17] Release the idea of being right. Subscribe to a best available truth, and then go take your brain and try and do something fricking awesome this week. Hope you all have a great day. Thanks for stopping by on Monday.