The Tecovas Ad That Broke DTC Twitter (And Why It Worked)

[00:00:00] 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 on this Monday morning as I always am by Taylor Holiday, our CEO here at Common Thread. Taylor, what is going on, man?

[00:00:15] Taylor Holiday: You know, man, back in the saddle. 

We'll stick with that metaphor for as long as we can throughout this.

[00:00:19] Richard Gaffin: you go.

[00:00:20] Taylor Holiday: But yeah, I was in The Bahamas for the last week and turned DTC Twitter into knots from a hammock in the Gulf of America, if you will.

[00:00:27] Richard Gaffin: That's right. Middle of the Gulf of America. Alright. Yeah. Well it's, that's kind of how it seems. All, all the best tweets go, so you sort of like dash them off and then they ignite a firestorm or at least much as, as much of a firestorm as D two C Twitter can generate. So what we're walking through today is another sort of defend that tweet episode here.

So over the this is over the, actually this is a, a week ago now. Huh?

[00:00:49] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, it's been a bit a while. 

[00:00:51] Richard Gaffin: So a week ago you put out a tweet. Saying this is growth marketing, absolute smash from at Kovas. And then you shared an ad from Kovas. Essentially what this looks like is doing is debuting a work boot.

So Kovas of course is a a line of kind of western wear cowboy boots shirts with tassels, whatever, you know, Pearl. Snaps. And kinda what they're debuting here is like, this is a boot that you take from the workplace into like the boot scooting bar so you can go like line dancing afterwards or whatever, right? So the thing about this that I think is interesting is that the actual asset that you shared was sort of a long form. It felt more like a television ad basically that had been cropped. It's a nine by 16 and then thrown on TikTok. And so almost all of the responses that you got to this were people saying like, this isn't growth marketing, this isn't direct response.

This isn't. Basically a good ad to put on social media. So what we wanted to do here is kind of give you an opportunity to unpack a little bit more about what you were thinking with this, because I think the setup here is, again, you said this is growth marketing, and then you present an asset that on paper sort of goes against a lot of the best practices for growth marketing or particularly for D two C direct response.

So we're gonna put a link to the ad itself in the show notes so you can watch along. But I'll throw it over to you to, to you Taylor, maybe kind of explain what you're thinking here.

[00:02:07] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, so, this was a just sort of off the cuff tweet that I put out while on vacation, and it caused a lot of engagement. But I, I think there's really important, some important things that I wanna encourage you all when you engage with my content, to think about the context in which it exists, who I am, and the narrative structure of my content over time.

So, if we think about things that I have repeatedly said, one is. I don't think head of growth is a real role. I think it's nonsense. I think it's a 

phrase that is very damaging to our industry. I think that growth is the organization's responsibility and ultimately the CEO's job, and it's because growth sits at a much higher level than at the individual creative.

Design. Okay, so that's just really important. If I say growth marketing, the question you should first ask yourself is, what do I mean when I 

say that? And if you look at the historical context of what I've said, you would understand that it has nothing to do with the format of the individual ad asset.

So that's, that's the one thing I would encourage you to is contextualize that. Number two is go back to my predictions from the beginning of the year and content that I've been sharing up until now. That was why I, I sort of antagonized people this way or tried to be ative in this way is because. One of my top 25 predictions for this year was that the head of product development is the new head of growth.

And what I'm illustrating for people is that we are reaching a maturity cycle for most of these brands where their next tranche of growth does not come from iterating on the existing set of inputs, meaning taking the same products to the same structures, new hooks, new tests, da, da, da, to deliver to the next challenge of growth.

It comes from product expansion. And that's really the point that I'm making is that growth marketing is product expansion. It's product innovation that leads to the growth for a a, a consumer brand. And in particular, what I love about this Kovas example is that I'll, I'll use me as the, the reason the this provoked me was because whether you think it's direct response or not, I clicked on the ad on TikTok to directly respond and buy, because I've known about Kovas for a long time, but I don't wear cowboy boots.

That's just not a product to wear, but lace up boots, I've actually been thinking about getting a new pair of lace up boots. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. So I went to go buy and they were all sold out. And so this led me down this path. So you can say whatever you want about your own experience of the ad.

Mine was, it was direct response and made me wanna buy because it fit really narrowly into a, a way to expand the brand to people like me that were maybe one degree away who were aware of kovas, but don't wear cowboy boots because cowboy 

boots are a pretty narrow population in terms of the total mass market.

So I saw this as exactly the kind of thing I care about. A brand with a clear identity of itself. It still is. In the ad, you could see who it's for. Whether you think the cowboys look cool or authentic or not, you identified them as cowboys, which exactly like sort of sets the point. You can call them lame cowboys, bad cowboys, good cowboys.

You call it a honky tonk bar, whatever. It's very clear what the setting is, who the people are in. The characters are in the story, and whether you like the story or not, you aren't confused that they're traitors on Wall Street.

So there's identity there, there's, there's clear vision for who the brand is trying to serve and then what the product is, how it might fit into their world.

And it's expansive under a story with a clear branded identity that is great marketing, that is good growth marketing in a way that I think, I'm trying to help people repeatedly illustrate that the problem with your brand is likely not that you need to try a 57000th version of an ad, and more that you need to think a little bit broader about what the story is and what, how the product fits into people's lives.

[00:05:33] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, so I, I'm curious then about. Your response then to the asset itself. So you mentioned again, that this is something that made you click,

but conceivably, like within the framework that you're setting up here, actually the, the best performing ad would probably be like our, our producer was mentioning beforehand just like a DPA with the boot on it saying, or, or just like a simple image asset that just says now tokos work boots now available, or something like that.

[00:05:57] Taylor Holiday: Well, yeah, 

[00:05:58] Richard Gaffin: is there is there any 

[00:05:59] Taylor Holiday: I also, I I, I push back on, I would, I would just say I'm not in the business of predicting which ads work. This is like 

a, a default position of mine is that I think what I would do if I was on the Go team, and I've actually interacted with this because I've seen a bunch more of their ads for this product, is they have lots of versions of the ad for this boot.

Like,

again, it has so little to do with this individual asset, even though I individually liked it. 

I'm probably not the only person in the world. But anecdote aside, like I, I don't care. I'm saying make a bunch of ads about the work boot. The growth comes from the creation of the work boot,

not of the asset itself.

And it, there's clearly a product roadmap that you could see being built through. We have a brand identity. We know who we are and what we care about. We know who the customer is and what they care, what kind of products that they would use. And then out of that we'll develop new products. And then from there the stories will flow.

And then from there, the distribution happens. And then from there, the media buying strategy. And it cascades in that sequence. And if you go, look, here's what I would encourage you to do. When someone pushes back on me in the comments, go look at what their job is. And then when someone 

supports me in the comments, go look at what their job is and what you'll see.

And I'll just use the two to the bigger ones that made a big fuss. Barry is a creative strategist. Cody Ker is a CEO. And and what I'll say is they're gonna see growth through different lenses. Not 'cause either of them are wrong, they're both smart people. But the point is, if you're a creative strategist, you don't get control of brand.

You don't get control of product development, you don't get control. Of distribution. So, so you are limited to thinking about growth through the area of the aperture of your control, whereas Cody Plager at Jones Road Beauty is sitting in his brand, matured for a very long time on a single product and, and it's now going, you know what the goal is for our growth in the next year, product development and more ads like, and it's because when you have authority over that part of.

The business directive, what you think about is growth is gonna be distinct from when you only have control over changing the asset type.

[00:07:56] Richard Gaffin: I was gonna say like, there's this, it's interesting that certain responses coming that are actually supportive of you actually also feel like, in a sense that they're missing the point, which is to say like, oh, actually you know, your, your shitty comparison ads are nothing compared to like, incredible storytelling.

Like what exists in this video, which of course also maybe feels like it's missing your main point as well, because the point again, is not. Necessarily that this asset is inherently good, but it's that it can, like you're saying, there's a, a product release

[00:08:26] Taylor Holiday: I, so I, what, what I'll say though is that I do think that there's, there's this combination where when I think about launch and, and the next, I went through and I did one about Sitka too. 

And then I tweeted the skims thing, and I'm just gonna keep doing this to illustrate, I've talked about the bear example a ton.

Is that in the ideal scenario, okay. There is a powerful story that compliments the product's existence. In a way that does drive its reach and word of mouth. Because ultimately what you want is a story that spreads independent, you being obligated to pay for each individual dollar or each individual impression 

because the impressions get spread.

So Adam is, sorry from Instagram, just like did a post the other day talking about what drives reach on, what drives reach for in organic posts on and one of them is like the like rate and the share or like the send rate they call it. And, and it's just to illustrate that the like great content spreads and so good stories do spread.

Now, I don't think that this story was like that novel that it was compared to, you know, the bear example of paying off $5 million in veteran medical debt. But I do think that the best case scenario for growth marketing is novel product that expands your tam, a unique value proposition and innovation in the product category, and some corresponding story that moves people to share it organically.

Like that's the trifecta, right? Like so I. So maybe we could say that Nike Skims brand launch is that got everybody talking. We don't even know what the product is yet. So it's not even, it's not even about yet the product. It's all about story and brand, right? It's 

all about Kim Kardashian is the new Michael Jordan brand.

This is like, and it's PR and newsworthy and exciting. And first like, so the question is just what is that? What is the best? So ideally you have all of those traits, but if, if not just having a new product, like if you go to tacos right now, if you look on their homepage, the, the new arrivals, okay. The, the number one product is the men's blue.

When I say number one, I mean the first one I see on the page is the men's blueberry Cayman cowboy boot. Okay? This is a blue alligator belly skin boot. Okay? That is limited edition. That is also sold out in seven sizes. So again, all you people that think that, that's not an indication of demand, I dunno what to tell you.

They bought some boots, they sold more than they thought. Whatever. Maybe their supply chain team, you think they suck? I think they're probably smart humans. But, but the point is, is that limited edition of runs of novel products in clear and compelling ways drive excitement and engagement from people who love your brand.

And so if you do that, they'll like it. If you go all the way back to the Aria example that I gave when this to start, the year was about the, the, the the stocking in the shape of a 

baseball sliding mit, it's all product and story. Like that's what this is. We're in that business. And so I think it's just, that's what I'm gonna keep illustrating.

You guys can argue about asset format type. It's actually the least interesting part of the conversation to me. 

It it, and, and I'm really thinking a lot about how CDC actually participates higher up the spectrum. I was DMing with some founders about that this week of just like, what, what role could we play in supporting you in thinking about product development and story in a way that would be helpful?

How are you thinking about this? What are your concerns? So,

[00:11:36] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:11:37] Taylor Holiday: Yeah.

[00:11:38] Richard Gaffin: I wanna push back a little bit on the idea of the asset being, if not irrelevant to the conversation, but sort of like a second or third order point of discussion. I. So actually let's say format aside, the fact that it's on TikTok, at least it seems to me that there is something about, if part of what we're talking about is its product and then in certain circumstances it needs to be product plus story. It's like the story can only be carried by a certain type of asset or certain type of. Like whether it's an ad product or something on the website or whatever. So in that sense, it's like them actually taking the time to produce something like this becomes an important part of building a brand story that then they can iterate off of and do, I dunno, better assets out of or whatever. I mean, for instance, like the guy from this this ad is on. The kind of collection page for those boots, for instance. So you recognize 'em, you understand that this is kind of exactly what you were looking for. So is, is there anything about the creative itself or its placement or the way the story's being told that you think is Im important or exceptional?

[00:12:37] Taylor Holiday: Well, so what I'll say is that yes, I, I, I think that matter first, right? So this is, this is 

where I think about this, is that we're baking a cake and we want the world to want our cake. And first and foremost to me, are the ingredients. If I'm gonna build an amazing cake, I want amazing ingredients.

So I actually have to go make an amazing product. It actually has to be beautiful and compelling and made from the best stuff on earth and priced correctly and all of those things. 

And, and then it's about like the the, the brand identity and aesthetic that I choose to, to represent in the visuals.

And those are like the composition of the ingredients of what I'm now going to produce. Right now. From there, I wanna think about how those ingredients show up in the places. So now I get to sort of thinking about distribution. Where am I gonna create assets for? So where does my customer live? And if tiktoks one of those places, or Instagram's one of those places, then I'm thinking about short form, vertical video.

And now we can have a debate about whether this short form, vertical video. Was effective at accomplishing its objective and we could sort of put that in two categories. And if you said driving organic views through posting on social, like I'll concede, like that's not the outcome as an ad to be determined.

We're trying to get the Kovas team on to come and share with us 

some of the impact about those so we can answer that question. It worked on me, that's all I know. But, tBD. But again, I think what you're getting at though is that when I think about doing a shoot like this, and if I was a brand, I always want to like try to compound the value of every investment I make, including production.

So in this, at this video shoot, if I was running the Kovas video shoot, I would end up with hundreds of versions of assets, both static and video. Right. And then one of the things that Covid does well, and I I've, I've started to like, gather a bunch of this. 'cause I just like, I know this conversation's gonna keep coming up is like, if you go on TikTok, one of the things you'll see a ton of is they do a lot of like third party UGC, they have a bunch of reviews from like.

Industry experts of the products, like all the tactical social assets are there that support this campaign. And you should do it, you should seed it to influencers and you should get creators to make assets for it. And you should get PR reviews and you should do static images, and you should come up with great hooks and you should do a thousand ads.

You should still apply the volume playbook on top of the brand story. Then you should take that, that video, big video production you did, and maybe you have that hero story. And if you make one for YouTube, make it a 32nd, 16 or nine by 16, 16 by nine, whatever it is for that medium. Like you should do all of those things tactically, excellently.

It just doesn't matter to me quite as much as the ingredients of the story and the ingredients of the story, I think are where most of the time I'm looking like I'm having this conversation with like, I'll just an example, like if you're solo stove. Okay. And we, we, we worked with solo stove for a long time, including through the era where they ran the Snoop Dogg campaign and other 

things and other sort of big blow up on, on T two C, Twitter about whether that's efficacious or not, and.

What I'll tell you is that the problem with the, this product is that it's a, it's a non-recurring revenue, hard goods object that's been sold. Hundreds of millions of times, a hundreds of millions of dollars worth into a market that for this distribution channel, meaning the.com like the next marginal customer acquired on that SKU, is just gonna be substantially less efficient and probably is close to out beyond the marginal frontier.

Regardless of what the ad is. It's just like you have, you've moved out the customer curve, 

you've acquired all the lowest hanging fruit, and the next person to acquire. You might have little pockets of wins that you create off of different ads, but the idea that you're going to produce 10 to 20 to 50% growth on the base of revenue that exists profitably is just not real.

It's just not possible. You're at a different point in the maturity cycle for that product or skew. So it's like the products don't have infinite horizons of like marginal demand capture. That's just not real. Everyone has a different Tim, and like, I think one of the things that often gets overplayed, this is a big issue I have with Andrew.

Andrew. Andrew likes to represent like that the e-commerce I. Tam is like infinite. And I actually think it's really not. It's like 

really small. So like, if you think about like, men's t-shirts, I heard him on his most recent podcast. He was talking about this like, the online tam for men's t-shirts.

Being 70 teen percent of retail like is actually finite. It's not infinite. And because e-commerce is still such a small part of, total retail, like it, it's a subset of a market that is finite. 

And then if you think about how many competitors there are in this space, now you're talking about a, a highly competitive landscape for a finite amount of purchases that are not growing that quickly.

Like it's just not. And so I think that that's the tension in a lot of these categories is that the supply of competition is many cases outpacing the market growth. And so you're now fighting over market share, which tends to be. More expensive and competitive than other places. 'cause there are some brands that can afford to pay more than you can for the acquisition.

[00:17:42] Richard Gaffin: Right. No, I mean that's just reflecting all what you're just saying now. It's like interesting to think about it. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that e-commerce is, sort of, is infinite, but given kind of like our experience during Covid or whatever. And like the idea is actually for certain, particularly certain products, verticals, it's like shopping for them online. Is still kind of a niche behavior. So the idea that like you could, you could grow forever there just kind of doesn't make sense given the, the way people behave when they're purchasing, I suppose. 

[00:18:10] Taylor Holiday: Like, so, so I'll just give you, let's be really practical about that. Like 

men's t-shirts in the United States this is from chatt. BT is estimated to be approximately $5.5 billion. Okay. So if we assume that retail is like. Or that e-commerce is whatever, 17, 19% of retail. So if we say $5.3 billion times 0.17, that's like $940 million.

That, that, that's like, that's, that's, actually a very, very finite amount of online purchases of men's t-shirts and men's t-shirts run a, like, that's not even talking about a subset of like. Blank t-shirts, right? Like this is like, like, it's actually such a finite thing. And this actually says that the men's t-shirt category is expected to grow 3% over the next four years.

[00:19:00] Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

[00:19:01] Taylor Holiday: Like so. So if you're in the men's t-shirt category, and meanwhile, every day a new brand is starting in a category, selling T-shirts, like I promise you, the supply of brands is gonna be greater than 3% in that time. I 

think it's just like, this is where I just go like, no, no, no. Some of these brands, and they're big enough now like, like e-commerce business.

There are, there are men's t-shirt brands in the US that sell hundreds of millions of dollars like there are now that exists. And so, so we're talking about the next tranche of growth needing to come from somewhere else. 

And I think, again, we're, we're talking about like men's apparel is a huge category, let alone like outdoor fire pits.

Like what are we talking about? Like these are actually very finite markets.

[00:19:41] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay. So I, one thing I want to hit here is I think would be interesting to kind of tease out is like what are the elements when we talk about story, we talk about product. When we talk about product. Okay. That kind of makes sense. You come up with something new to address, to kind of widen your tam as you're saying. But I think what this ad does a very, really good job of to bring it back to CO as is kind of illustrating what a good story looks like. Now you can make an argument about whether this particular ad tells it the best, but the idea here is like these, these are work boots. That you can wear into the, like the honky tonk basically and be accepted. This is very explicit in the ad to be accepted by the people who are wearing snakeskin boots and you guys can be standing next to each other because this type of work boot is kind of, is part and parcel of being, of this sort of like cowboy, kind of western marble romance sort of like, thing that they're pushing.

Right? So I think that's kind of like what I, I'm curious like your take on, on the elements of this that feel compelling. As a

story, as maybe an example to think about when, when our listeners are trying to do this for themselves.

[00:20:42] Taylor Holiday: So I think this is, this is where I actually think Kovas knows itself so well. And, and, and what you see in the comments is a bunch of like actual blue collar workers being like, these aren't red wings. Like the, and it's like. No, no shit 

that, that's, that's not who they're selling to. 

Like, you don't get it.

Like you don't get it. It's me. I, I'm a 40-year-old man in Southern California that thinks it might be cool to put on a pair of good looking work boots. I'm not on the ranch. I. I'm not actually, that's not who they're trying to say. If you go watch their video, they do like, it's like sorority sisters buying pink boots and putting heart brands onto the back of the boots into covas.

This is 

fashion like, and, and I think what they're illustrating with like a very small percentage of the ad actually being. On the ranch, it's like, it's almost the end of it. It's 

not oil rigor workers like, like they're clearly not trying to illustrate that the value proposition is the actual durability of the boot.

It's steel toe. Like this isn't, they're not on a ca like I think that's intentional because again, they're trying to sell to frat bros. And like men who wanna see themselves as like, who are growing beards. Like, it's 

just like, it's just not the same thing. And so I think that even, even like this, like there's this crowd.

That talks about like, authenticity of the cowboy, and it's like, yeah, that they're not, that's not really what they're trying to do here because, and that would be because that market's even smaller. You wanna talk about like, really small tams? It's like they're trying to be more broadly appeal to fashion and, and, and get more into the mainstream of the market. So I think that that's like another thing that, like for me, I. When I see them go into the, the, the bar, what I think they're illustrating to is that if you think about the, the percentage allocation, and this, I think is just my, my perception of it. It's like small amount of work, large amount of dancing.

There's a, there's a story there that I think's important 

for the people that are gonna be using the product.

[00:22:38] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. No, ultimately, yeah. Yeah. I think they do a really good job of the, what The thing I was thinking about is like, these are, these are maybe boots for somebody who played Red Dead Redemption and then was talking like Arthur for like the week afterwards or something like

[00:22:49] Taylor Holiday: That's right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

[00:22:51] Richard Gaffin: it's about an image rather than like what an actual cowboy would wear is like, probably something you wouldn't wanna wear casually at all. Right. But.

[00:22:58] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, so I, I, and look, I, again, I'm hopeful that we can get the team to come on and chat about it. But what I hope people see in these examples, and go back and look at 'em. Go look at the Aria example. Go look at the born primitive example. Go look at the Sitka example. Go look at the skims Nike example.

And I'm gonna keep tweeting these because I just wanna continue to illustrate. The point is growth marketing is an exercise in product innovation and product development, and ideally under a banner of a cohesive story that can connect the dots for the consumer between these things. And that's what I think I, my hope is that people will take from it.

[00:23:32] Richard Gaffin: Cool. All right, well, I think we we'll wrap it up there. Again, folks, thanks for listening. And of course, if you wanna check us out, common thread co.com, hit that hire us button if you wanna have a conversation about how we can continue to build things like this type of story with you. All right, folks,

We will see y'all next week.