2X eCommerce Podcast

Kunle Campbell:
Hey Blake, hey Tori, welcome to the 2X Ecommerce Podcast!

Torii Rowe:
Hey,

Blake Pinsker:
Nice

Torii Rowe:
thanks

Blake Pinsker:
to

Torii Rowe:
for

Blake Pinsker:
meet

Torii Rowe:
having

Blake Pinsker:
you.

Torii Rowe:
us.

Kunle Campbell:
I've been looking forward to this one. I read both your resumes and I was like, okay, we haven't done a media buying, particularly a paid social episode in a long time. And here's the reason why we need to do it now, right now. So a pleasure having you both. Where are you each dialing in from?

Torii Rowe:
I'm in Denver, Colorado.

Kunle Campbell:
Okay, that's Tory

Blake Pinsker:
in New York.

Kunle Campbell:
and Blake. Okay. All right. So who do I start with? I probably will start with Blake. Blake, please give me your Genesis story and how it sort of connects to what you're doing now. Just connect the dots as

Blake Pinsker:
Yes.

Kunle Campbell:
far back or as near as you can. I'd just like to get some context as to who- who you are, like who you are.

Blake Pinsker:
Sure thing, I'll give you a brief overview of my journey. So my journey started actually back in college. I became insanely passionate about consumer behavior, marketing and branding. And that was around the start of the e-commerce wave. And I actually tried to start a few companies, failed miserably, pre-Facebook ads, pre-influencer marketing. And I decided to get a real job in real estate. And so there in real estate, I quickly discovered that I didn't care about doing real estate because I was more passionate about marketing. So I started working on the side for a little-known company called Movement right after they had crowdfunded. I was the first employee at a company called Movement. Right place, right time, Movement obviously caught that e-commerce tidal wave. My sole responsibilities there were mainly running social media. I was also, when I came in, the first thing I did was build the brand identity and content strategy for movement. Once we started to tinker with paid ads on Facebook, our lives changed forever. We became an early advertiser on Facebook. I think some of our biggest days we were spending upwards of three million on paid ads on a variety of channels. Yeah, it was crazy, crazy times. And we learned the ins and outs. We learned what works and what doesn't on everything from Facebook. We built a huge influencer marketing channel. We were working with thousands of influencers a year. We scaled TV, we scaled, obviously we're running Google ads. TikTok wasn't really around yet, but we were starting to dive into that once TikTok did come out. But the backbone of the business was really meta ads.

Kunle Campbell:
Hmm.

Blake Pinsker:
And we scaled the company from zero to a hundred million in five years, which it went by. in the blink of an eye. But around that time, I really wanted to share what we learned with other people that I knew. And I went to college with the founder of Cuts Clothing, my good friend Stephen. So started to work with him and advise him at an early stage. And obviously, Cuts turns into a huge success story. We're also close with other brands such as Liquid IV, Manscape, Truff. And we saw those brands start to blow up. really following the same playbook in the same strategies. And so after we'd sold the company and decided my next move was to take that playbook and rinse and repeat what we did at MVMT. And so now we're working with startups anywhere from people who are just starting to eight figure brands that we're trying to get to nine figures now. And so our main core competencies at Dream Labs are paid ads. We do media buying for all paid social channels. and then also do creative. And I'll let

Kunle Campbell:
Uh,

Blake Pinsker:
Tori, yeah,

Kunle Campbell:
yeah,

Blake Pinsker:
go ahead.

Kunle Campbell:
a dreamland, a dreamland. Yeah. Tori, please go for it.

Torii Rowe:
Yeah, I'm the exact opposite of Blake here. Blake was making $100 million companies and I was fighting crime as a police officer.

Kunle Campbell:
Nice.

Torii Rowe:
Yeah, so I was a police officer in Arizona for four and a half years. And, you know, after a few years, I kind of realized like I didn't have the passion to do this for 30 years. Just long time wasn't for me. And, you know, wanted to kind of like keep expanding, keep learning and things like that. So my best friend and I for us in 2017, ended up founding a company called Mansion. It's Men's Premium Jewelry. We took that company zero to eight figures in three years. Along the way we needed someone to run social media ads and we didn't have anyone to do that It was quite expensive and me just quitting my job as a police officer We didn't you know have a bunch of money. We weren't we were bootstrapped there. So I Put myself back in college and went to YouTube University And ended up watching YouTube videos every day and trying to figure out how to do this from some of the some of the top guys out there And then I started looking at jobs on Indeed. So I was looking on Indeed before remote work was really like remote. I started reaching out to people who needed media buyers and I'd say, hey, I'll do this for 30% of the cost if I can do it from Denver, Colorado. And a lot of people were like, yeah, we'll take it. So it gave me the opportunity to jump into other companies and learn using their dollars while I was getting paid to figure out how to build our brand. So. Along that way, I met Blake as we needed someone to do creative for Mansion. And Blake's name was the guy who kept popping up of like, you got to talk to this guy, you got to talk to him. And I was like, all right. So we started working with Blake. And along that way, Blake had a media buyer who was doing our media buying at the time. Blake was like, hey listen, you're one of the best media buyers I know like he's like I'm gonna be honest You're probably better than the guy who's running your ads. You should probably just run these ads and I was like, oh sweet I appreciate that saved me some dollars And so I started running ads and so since then I've ran ads for some of the largest companies in the world ADT, Clover, some of the largest solar companies in the world, largest credit card processing companies. I've spent close to half a billion on Metta, and now I'm the head of growth over here at Dream Labs.

Kunle Campbell:
Okay, okay. Makes sense. Illustrious, you know, backstories and an experience, essentially an experience. So just so I get it right, Tori, you handle media buying, you know, that structure, and then Blake, your brand guy, creatives.

Blake Pinsker:
Well, I'm a brand guy at heart.

Kunle Campbell:
Okay,

Blake Pinsker:
Don't

Kunle Campbell:
okay,

Blake Pinsker:
get me wrong. I

Kunle Campbell:
okay.

Blake Pinsker:
love brand. Built the movement, brand identity,

Kunle Campbell:
Mm-hmm.

Blake Pinsker:
content strategy, the real backbone of what you see on organic social for movement. However, as we know, brand is a long game. Brand is how you position, how you differentiate in a market, but you don't necessarily see results overnight. And as an agency, I wanna see results immediately. If you're investing in us as an agency, I wanna be able to one, prove that our work is going to good use and we're making you a return on your investment. And two, I just wanna be able to measure what we're doing. And with brand, you often can't. And so although brand is my backbone, I know the backbone of what really drives sales, at least in the short term for businesses is paid ads. And so that's where we focus. Obviously, at MVMT, I had my hands on a little bit of everything, including paid creative and paid ads. Before we brought it in-house, I managed our paid team. So I know paid extremely well. And at MVMT, I had the gift of being able to really learn the ins and outs of paid acquisition as well. So as an agency, that's where we wanted to focus, because we felt like that's where people were most impacted. And I want to play that game rather than the one where We do a bunch of work and we can't really show you proof if it's working or not.

Kunle Campbell:
Hmm. Makes makes a lot of sense. So it's taken really still a brand led approach to towards, you know, your performance towards actually getting returns to what you do. Okay.

Blake Pinsker:
Yeah, I think it's like all everything we do is very direct response focus.

Kunle Campbell:
Okay, very direct response, okay.

Blake Pinsker:
Everything is direct response. We understand brand. So I think that's the difference also between other agencies. We, I've worked with a lot of paid creative agencies and paid media buying agencies. If they don't understand brand, there's oftentimes conflict in your butt heads, we're still going to produce creative that we know is going to convert often very direct response focus. However, we understand that you as brand owner or you as a CMO or director of brand, that's your baby. So when you have guidelines or when you have a spectrum of styles of content or tone of voice that you can't speak on, we try to do our best to follow within those lines and we get it, right? We're not gonna fight you over something that's subjective that you feel very strongly about with your brand. So I think that's the big difference is we get brand. but we're still trying to really drive sales at the end of the day with direct response, creative.

Kunle Campbell:
I got it. I really, really get that. And I like that very much. So because the parameters you need to sort of operate within for brand, even if you apply to performance or direct response.

Blake Pinsker:
Mm-hmm.

Kunle Campbell:
Question I have is what have been the essentials from a brand very much ready, prepared for scale on the direct response end, particularly in digital channels such as Meta. What do your best clients do really well from a brand perspective to get your work to

Blake Pinsker:
Mm-hmm.

Kunle Campbell:
really deliver the ROI they seek?

Blake Pinsker:
Yeah, so I'll split those two out and then I'll let Tory share his insights as well. So from a brand perspective, I think brand is one, are you communicating with a large enough or niche enough target market where the way you're speaking is resonating with them? The way you're carrying the brand, the identity of the brand, does it resonate with that market? Can you build a community on the backbone of that? That's what brand is in its core. And I think... any DTC company needs to be focused on having that. Otherwise, you can't differentiate in the market. And the second a competitor pops up with a similar product or tries to sell something for cheaper, you're going to be knocked off. I think a good example of this is Athletic Greens. There's 100 different products that are selling a very similar thing to Athletic Greens. But nobody branded it as well as Athletic Greens. And that's why they own the market, even though there's 100 different products, just like Athletic Greens that you can go get at Whole Foods. goodbye on Amazon, but a lot of people just want athletic greens because that brand experience, right? The way they make you feel. However, when it comes to actual direct response marketing and athletic greens, when they're advertising on Facebook, how they're really driving people to the site, it's largely through good direct response marketing. And that's everything from high-end content that's super product-focused to UGC. And so that's where we focus. That is what's working best on the platform right now. It's a handful of creative in the creative mix, different brands see different stuff work, which we'll maybe dive into a little bit later in the call. But I'll let Tory share some context on what he feels as well.

Torii Rowe:
Yeah, I think kind of hit the nail on the head. I think the biggest thing for brand is like how you make people feel. Um, I think a lot of companies can, can get someone to buy one time. Uh, a lot of, a lot of good websites out there and stuff like that. But like, when you first get that packaging and you unwrap it of like how that makes you feel, or like, you know, when you get a, a t-shirt or when you're. you know, you get a brand new watch or necklace or whatever, that the way you carry yourself and how it makes you feel, that's what I feel like brand is. And I feel like brand is a huge retention effort as well. A lot of people have that first time good purchase, but like you ever had that package you're so excited for and you unwrap it and it's just not what you expected. You're so disappointed. You're like, gosh, this is terrible. Like I was so excited for that. That's the other side of the coin of that lack of brand, that lack of feeling that you were looking for. Sometimes the product's kind of what you expected, but the rest of it, the packaging, the thank you note,

Kunle Campbell:
Yeah.

Torii Rowe:
all that little extra stuff is what really solidifies, like Blake said, when that next competitor does come around. Do I stick with this brand? Like we said earlier, it cuts clothing. You know, they make you feel like this is the nicest t-shirt out there. There's a lot of t-shirt companies, but Borelli and the team over there has done such a good job of like, you get it and you're like, wow, this is worth the money. This is what I expected. Uh, and if not beyond what I expected, and this is why I'm going to continue to come back.

Kunle Campbell:
Yeah. I was, I was, I had a rant, um, about a service I was delivering with my, um, with my co-founder this morning. I'm not going to mention the service. And I just said, um, the reason I use the service essentially is just out of convenience, um, because I'm out in the countryside in the UK, they're not many of those of that particular service, but their service is crap. So the moment a competitor comes, I'll be the first to try, um, that competitor. in order to just let go of this crap service I know I'm getting. And it's the same thing with DTC experiences. And I cannot disagree with you enough on the point you just made about that brand experience, you said brand is a retention effort. It's how it makes you feel to trigger another sort of purchase, which is brilliant. Speaking on brand, because I'm very brand first, we're very brand first in this company, so in this podcast series, so we'll talk a lot about brand. This is a question to you, Blake. What was the process like? Two questions. What was the process like building out the brand identity for movement? So a lot for movement watches, there were lots of moving parts at the time that were the army of influencers. You said, you had thousands of influencers who were working basis. And then there was a brand itself. How did you

Blake Pinsker:
Mm-hmm.

Kunle Campbell:
get that tone, tone of voice, that core, that soul? I equate brand to giving, to breathing soul to something, to a concept that people start to feel. And then, yeah, those are the questions I have.

Blake Pinsker:
Sure, sure. Yeah, so I had the luxury of coming on the movement right after their Kickstarter campaign. So I started as an outsider. I watched that whole campaign go down. I grew up with Jake, the founder, so I knew Jake extremely

Kunle Campbell:
Okay.

Blake Pinsker:
well. Outside looking in, I thought there was something missing for movement to differentiate in the long term. And that was an identity for the brand that, for me, was aspirational. And so when I came in, the first thing I did was I sat down and said, okay, if we're going to be really good at this Instagram thing that just launched, we're going to need to one be aspirational to be inspirational. And it's got to be consistent. Right. And at the time we only had men's products. And so we sat down, me, Jake Spencer, we thought about what are the facets of a lifestyle that we want to live? What is. the type of person that we want to hang out with. Who do we want to dress like? And now how do we now package that all into one identity? And so we built that identity, one based on what was trending on Instagram. We noticed that a lot of people our age, they wanted to travel and they were inspired by travel. And what's the one thing that you take with you everywhere you go, your watch. We made travel a big part of the brand. We made chasing your dreams and working hard and hustling hard a big part of the brand. We made good fashion a big part of the brand, right? And so that was really the backbone of what we built. We started with a brand Bible where we went over, here's the tone of voice, here's how we speak, here's how we don't speak. Here are the types of people we work with in terms of influencers and creators.

Kunle Campbell:
Mm-hmm.

Blake Pinsker:
Here are the different facets of the brand, whether it be adventure, hustle, fashion, here are all the components. And then we obviously built out personas too, right? And so we knew no matter who we hired or how big the team got, how big the company got, we could always refer back to this Bible or this document where we could say, listen, everybody's gonna have their own opinion, but this is movement. This is the movement voice and this is the movement brand. And that's what allows you to keep a consistent brand that people can become familiar with, a consistent brand that can make people feel a certain way. And that seemed to work quite well.

Kunle Campbell:
Mm-hmm.

Blake Pinsker:
We built, I think we went from obviously zero to a few million followers on just Instagram or Instagram and other platforms. We've got over 5 million, excuse me, 5 million. followers on channels cumulatively. And that was largely built off just sharing content that people really enjoyed at the time. I think times have changed a little bit in terms of like what content is hitting now. I think people wanna see behind the brand a little bit more,

Kunle Campbell:
Mm-hmm.

Blake Pinsker:
the people behind the brand, with Instagram stories and channels like that. And so we started to lean into that more too at the end of my time there.

Kunle Campbell:
Super, super, super insightful. Thanks for sharing that. So now at Dream Labs, do you mandate all your clients to have a brand Bible or do you assist them towards finalizing or rounding up their missing elements in their brand Bible so you can advertise effectively or buy media for them effectively?

Blake Pinsker:
It's a great question. So a lot of the brands we've invested in, that's one of the things we help them with at an early stage if they have not already established that. We show them examples and we kind of walk them through the steps of, hey, here's how you set the identity of the brand at an early stage. So no matter who you hire or what partners you work with, they will understand how to see the brand through your lens. And so one of the first things we ask for, no matter who we work with, is if they already have one of those. Some brands, they want that help and they want to build it. Others don't. And so sometimes what we do end up helping people with, we help them write their first value prop. We help establish that tone of voice. We identify who their target market is. So some of those things within that process, we're certainly helping people with, some are more hands-on than others. And yeah, that's definitely a big part of what we do, especially on the... creative side.

Kunle Campbell:
Yeah, yeah, makes a ton of sense. I like the fact that you assist you know, them to what you're really getting that, you know, that core. Yeah, yeah, good stuff. Good stuff. Good stuff there. Okay, so big question. Big, big question is We're in 2023 today now. How does media buying, particularly on meta, compared to the pre-COVID days? COVID was crazy. Over the pandemic, obviously, consumer behavior had to shift. It was forced to shift. And so people were seeing crazy results in, you know, was it 2019, 2022? And I forget the time. But prior to the pandemic, Facebook was pretty reliable. There was no iOS update. So how's the landscape sort of change? You guys have been around, you know, the block for a bit of time. How, how you, and how you adapt into, to the changes in Meta, particularly from a data perspective, which is the baseline for performance marketing, right? Customer data.

Blake Pinsker:
Mm-hmm.

Torii Rowe:
Yeah, I would say so pre pandemic it was kind of like, so it was basically we had a couple updates. We had iOS 14.5 and iOS 16.4 which actually came out this year. Both had like a tremendous impact on the media buying landscape. Pre pandemic it was all about just like it was basically put as much money in you like as you can into the platform as long as you had like a good business structure. You basically would come out profit. for the most part. It wasn't about like account structure and things like that. Interest-based targeting lookalikes, like it felt like whatever you would do, it would work on the platform. And you were just like, some things would work more than others, but everything worked to some degree. And now I think there's a few things that have changed. Consumer behavior has changed, even like so during the pandemic, I think everyone got, you know, more accustomed to having to shop online. And during that time, they also got more accustomed to the ads and getting hit with ads everywhere you go, from emails to every social media platform, everywhere you look, there's advertising now. So I think Meta's also internally slowed down of like, hey, we can't just deliver this all the time, like as many... purchases that we used to because people aren't purchasing at the frequency they were before and there's too many advertisers now. Like there's way too many people there. If they were delivering those results for everyone, they'd run out of that. People like there's just not that. you know, degree of purchases that people used to do. And the next thing is, is you have to be way more consolidated and way more data driven than you ever were before. And that comes from like retention all the way to like creative iterations. And so now like you can't just go out there and pump into, you know, 25 interest-based audiences and think you're gonna have massive success with like a carousel ad or a single image ad. A lot of this is like, hey, this worked as creative A, take Creative A and make it into Creative A1, A2, A3, A4, and make iterations. That's something our creative team's great at on our side. So it's so much more about the creatives now than it ever was before, and it's so much more about the account structure, the testing structure. And there's a lot of little things, like seven day click versus one day click. The events manager

Kunle Campbell:
Mm-hmm.

Torii Rowe:
scores on the back, and there's so much more data. But holistically as well, Metta's trying to make it easier for the average person who wants to come in and spend $100 a day, make it easier for them to be able to set up a campaign. So I think they're starting to take away the audiences and things like that. So to answer it after this long-winded answer, I think the majority of it is it comes down now to more account structure. apps on top of that and like, you know, tech stacks, and then creative iterations and creative improvements.

Kunle Campbell:
Thank you, Tori. Thank you for the insights there. Now, just to follow on that, on that really detailed answer, what is an ideal account structure and... What horror stories have you had with the cult structures when you inherited

Torii Rowe:
Yeah.

Kunle Campbell:
an account? You know, yeah, I'd like to really know that.

Torii Rowe:
Yeah, we all laugh at you saying, you know, the horror stories because we've all seen those accounts. It's different. The structure at every level has to change a little bit. And we tell our clients this all the time. We'd get someone from, you know... five figures to six figures a day, and six to seven figures a year, and seven to eight, eight to nine, those all change. And the business structure changes. And I think something that Blake and I both are really good at since we both come from our own companies is we understand the holistic view. So we understand that meta is gonna drive a lot of things. So the account structure isn't necessarily like, hey, this is the, like, people look at it and be like, hey, this might not be. I guess like, for example, a subscription business is gonna run different than a non-subscription business. We might break even row as why for a subscription for mass customer acquisition compared to maybe a one-time purchase like a couch or a rug or something like that. So everything's kind of different structure-wise, but I can tell you across the board, they're all consolidated. You cannot have this massive interest-based targeting across the entire account. We have companies come into us spending, you know, eight figures a year and they just have, you know. 10,000 plus ads that are running like every 30, 60 days, because they're all about this creative testing. So it's, you want a creative test, but everything's about like spend allocation and account structure and keeping things consolidated. People have to realize it's a giant algorithm on the back end that's trying to learn and the more you throw at this algorithm, the more difficult it becomes for it to get the desired results that you want to achieve.

Kunle Campbell:
And what are your thoughts on like the advantage plus structure, account simplification? Facebook has been pushing since 2018. It seems to be getting simpler. Should people pay attention to that a lot? And then you also mentioned just the attribution window, one click versus seven days and then there's view counts, the views to factor into that. Yeah. Would love your thoughts, please.

Torii Rowe:
Yeah, so ASC is an interesting one. I think everyone's still kind of learning about advantage shopping. So I've worked with the beta team directly at Facebook on these campaigns, which is kind of cool. So I get some insight. What we've kind of ended up realizing is ASC is basically retargeting now. Whether people think it is or not, it's a different algorithm that is basically retargeting. This comes directly from Meta themselves. And so one thing is ASC has always been one of our best performers in most of our accounts. But there needs to be this... direct correlation between still running your interest-based audiences or your broad audiences with creative testing, and then having an ASC campaign. I've yet to get to an account that just single structure ASC campaign only. It's usually like we have an ABO one-day click setup, and we're doing some creative testing and scaling those. And then we have an ASC on the side. They might run 50-50 or 70-30 top of funnel to the ASC campaign. But that's kind of what we've seen work best for us. And then everybody's messing with this existing customer budget cap as well, from 0% to 30%, et cetera. I feel like it's changed on every campaign I've done, but I can tell you the best performer for us, and I recommend to everyone is... Your Klaviyo customers or however ESP is, we directly tie in all of our customers to the back end. And you'd be shocked like how many companies don't even have an audience tied into that.

Kunle Campbell:
Yeah,

Torii Rowe:
We get into

Kunle Campbell:
it's

Torii Rowe:
a lot

Kunle Campbell:
true.

Torii Rowe:
of accounts and they don't even have an audience tied into the ASC. And that's the whole point of it is to leverage your customer base from an external source to continue

Kunle Campbell:
Mm-hmm.

Torii Rowe:
to improve, which is not just the Pixel.

Kunle Campbell:
And what are your thoughts on lookalikes? So based on that customer core, for instance, back in the days again, you'd have lookalikes based on your top on CLV. You know, Facebook had a feature for that. You could target like, look, if you had the data, lookalikes of your top 1000 customers and Facebook would spit out lookalikes and they would work. You know, you do 1% to 10% in different of ad sets and all of that stuff. So how reliable are lookalike audiences now on Facebook or on Meta?

Torii Rowe:
Yeah, so this is a hit or miss because, so I feel like lookalikes are still there, especially like that mid-range level, like those companies sitting right around seven figures, that mid-range, it feels like they still work, but they don't have the scale capacity that they used to have. So you might be able to get some good, fast purchases out of a lookalike audience, but it seems like they failed pretty quickly after that. They don't optimize like they used to. And a lot of that is because if the lookalike's a pixel-based with Facebook, we know that a lot of those pixels aren't getting the data that they used get since iOS 14.5.

Kunle Campbell:
Mm-hmm.

Torii Rowe:
So there's not as many events and stuff coming in to fire those. So you need like this massive amount of data which costs some people too much money for their customer acquisition costs. They don't have the... you know, the margin in there to be able to spend to make those lookalikes profitable. So they can be there, but they're not the scale that they used to be. Where like you said, a 1%, a 3%, 5%, things like that. I do think they still work. I actually know they still work because I also use them in lead generation. And I can tell you that

Kunle Campbell:
Mm-hmm.

Torii Rowe:
the lookalikes in lead generation have a higher sales percentage than interest-based. I know this is e-commerce, but I can tell you that the quality can still be there, but it's just not at this. scale that you're going to find with a broad-based audience.

Kunle Campbell:
Mason Hickman Now this question I'm about to ask is towards both of you, Blake and Tory. And it has to do with the fact that you mentioned the importance of testing across the board, particularly within campaigns and the one bit of the entire system of the account management system you mentioned. was obviously creative testing. Question is, are the other critical testing points, like media buyers or brand owners or operators listening to this episode should be, should just pay attention to one? And within the creative testing, what are you doing? Is it like you're saying, okay, the first three seconds, let's change it, this transition, let's change, how? Where, where is the detail in, in creative testing or do you just swap complete creatives, you know, the way knowing that one has worked. Okay. We leave that you create a slight variation. So what are your variation points to understand that, um, you know, there, there is, um, there gains to have efficiency gains to have. Sorry. Another sort of hamburger question, just bolt it up with the question and question.

Blake Pinsker:
Cory actually just made a few videos on this topic, so I'll let him take the mic.

Kunle Campbell:
Okay, let's do it.

Torii Rowe:
Yeah, you're good. So like that's probably our bread and butter over here at Dream Labs. Like this is what we do best I feel like is Mediavine and Creative have to work closer and closer together than ever before. And I think that's like what we do really well. So with Creative Testing, you have your testing campaigns and everything is graduating up. We know that like graduating to your scale campaigns. That's kind of how we run things, but. Yeah, basically what we're gonna do is we're gonna come back and analyze your top two, three, four performing creatives and we're gonna go back to our team, which is Blake and the guys, and we're gonna say, hey, listen, this is what we're looking at, this video or this image performed best. We need remixes or iterations of this. There's a lot of ways to dice this up. This can be the thumb stop ratio, which is three second video views divided by impressions. So that's how many people stopped while scrolling through Instagram or Facebook and actually watch that video for three seconds. If that's low, let's say 15% of people are stopped and watching it, that's going to be the creative focus for us right now. We're going to come in and say, hey, we

Kunle Campbell:
Hmm.

Torii Rowe:
want to try to get this to 30 to 50% because it's just like you analyze your funnel top down. We do the exact same thing from the creative standpoint. From front to back, we have to analyze it. Trying to fix the click through rate in the middle or get new UVPs in there, it's not gonna work if only 15% of the people are stopping. We need to get a higher percentage of people to stop. So that's kinda how we do things. I'll let Blake kinda go into kinda how they break that down on the creative side and what those changes might be and things like that.

Blake Pinsker:
Yeah, yeah, to Tori's point, a lot of it is iteration. We'll come in and they have a home run ad, but we'll notice that the thumb stop or the click through rate is low. And so we don't want to try to reinvent the wheel in this case. We want to first try to improve the performance of something that's already winning. And so we'll chop that up. Let's say at first they show someone face the camera. Well, maybe we try the product. in somebody's hand first, or we try a better hook where we have a text to speech app or we have that creator give a hook that's going to get people to stop in the feed better than him just diving straight into a testimonial, right?

Kunle Campbell:
Mm-hmm.

Blake Pinsker:
Him or her. So that's definitely one way. The other things we're doing over here that we're finding a lot of success with is we often will start with a messaging test, you know, whether it be us or the brand. There's often difference of opinion on what messages are going to hit. And we could sit here in a meeting and talk all day about what we think is best or what our opinion is. Then the day it doesn't matter. And oftentimes what everybody thinks is going to be the winner isn't. And so we don't even waste time. We say, okay, let's put 10 messages on paper. Let's use the same creative, roll those 10 messages out over the same creative. And just see which one. performs the best. Let's see which one has the highest click-through rate. And that will then give us an idea of where we wanna focus a lot of the copy and the messaging in the future. So those are some of the things we do on our end. Another thing that we do as well is we make, let's say like a UGC or testimonial type video modular. We'll write out a batch of hooks, we'll write the middle, a few different bodies, and then we'll write the end. And depending on how those metrics are adding up, we'll then re-slice that ad to continue to try to iterate and improve on what may have been the best version of that. And that seems to work really well for Facebook. And you get more bang for your buck. You spend all this money to create the creative, you might as well try to make it better and better just so you see a bigger return on your investment.

Kunle Campbell:
Yeah. And it doesn't hurt to run nine variations side by side. So my takeaway from that is you're probably on an ABO, um, setup rather than a CBO because with CBO you're restricted, right? ABO. Yeah.

Torii Rowe:
100%.

Kunle Campbell:
Is that the case? Sorry. DCA, the dynamic, dynamic creative ads that allow you upload, you know, a ton of creatives in there and very difficult to track performance. So,

Torii Rowe:
Yeah, so DCT's...

Kunle Campbell:
so are your ads, are your ads set up manually or?

Torii Rowe:
Yeah, so I usually do ABO setups. So like we're gonna, for example, let's say Blake's doing that messaging test. We take those 10 images with the 10 headlines. I might set that into one ABO with enough budget behind it, just because we're not measuring for ROAS, we're measuring for click-through rate on that. We're trying to see, okay,

Kunle Campbell:
Right,

Torii Rowe:
which one's

Kunle Campbell:
right.

Torii Rowe:
actually getting the most clicks here. So that's one way, but if we're doing like normal testing, I might take, you know, Blake might give me, you know, three to four variations of one type of ad. We'll put all of those inside of one AVO, or one ad set, and continue to kind of do that. And then we'll just graduate via post-IEG up to our main scale campaigns.

Kunle Campbell:
Okay, makes sense, makes sense, makes sense. Okay, then exclusions and prospecting. I was gonna ask you this earlier on, but it skipped my mind. So with top of funnel prospecting campaigns, where you're essentially trying to get new eyeballs, new impressions, what's your structure like? Is it still, is there some element of retargeting there or do you just purely focus on new eyeballs?

Torii Rowe:
Yeah, I don't do any exclusions. I don't do any retargeting directly or anything like that. ASC, we know, like we said earlier, kind of already does that retargeting. So if that's living inside of it, it'll be there. But for the most part, everything is just a broad-based audience. Even if it isn't interest-based, it's extremely broad. We're trying to get the largest audiences out there, and we focus on creative testing. The only time

Kunle Campbell:
Okay.

Torii Rowe:
we really start busting out audiences is when we're really trying to horizontally scale a client. It's super difficult to spend $150,000 on a single ad set

Kunle Campbell:
Mm-hmm.

Torii Rowe:
in a day, so we'll start busting out other audiences to try to capture more eyeballs.

Kunle Campbell:
Okay. So zooming into creatives, again, creatives testing, do people still read ad text? How relevant is ad text? What about the headline and the description? Do you pay attention to all those elements or is it really just the creatives, the video content or the image content?

Torii Rowe:
Yeah, I think the ad copy still comes and play a little bit, but you're, you have more bang for your buck testing creatives faster. Like what's going to make a bigger difference, the ad copy or the image, the image a hundred times over because you know, that's what's going to be seen. So for us at Dreamlabs, we can move fast enough that we're just busting out new images and new videos all the time, new iterations. We'd rather focus on that. But yeah, if we have like a really big top winner that we just can't seem to be, we might go test ad copy on that. But for the most part, yeah, it's just always going to be about the creative.

Kunle Campbell:
One of the biggest challenges for brands is just their ability to be content creators. So the ability to deliver creatives as fast as the agencies want them to. So working with Dream Labs, is it a completely hands off thing from a creative standpoint? Obviously, they've given you a brand Bible. They've given you initial creatives. they've had, you have your do's and don'ts from a tone of voice perspective and messaging perspective. So you just take it and go with it or is it still a collaboration with the brand owners?

Blake Pinsker:
Yeah, so content, as you know, is a never-ending flywheel. And so what we don't do is content specifically for other channels outside of paid. We have. We've shot TV ads. We've shot social content. We've actually stopped that just because it had been a bit of a distraction from what we were trying to do on the paid side of things. And so we're solely focusing on paid creative and we do everything from high end content shot on a red camera to UGC shot on an iPhone. And we'll really just go all in on whatever's working the best. Continue to test new things like 80% what's working, 20% trying new things. But we're really just trying to get a feel for what's working in the account. But a lot of brands we notice they're still creating a lot of creative on their end. And that for us. is great because that's more we can add to our arsenal. And so it's typically pretty collaborative. Some brands, they don't do creative on their end. And so we'll do the load of it. We could do 360 everything, like I said. But a lot of them still want to create that content for their site and for the socials that we might not be creating. And so we end up using that and remixing that for ads as well. So to answer your question, it's a little bit of both. Typically it's a lot of creative just because of the sheer amount of content that these brands need to create for their daily channels and their daily marketing anyways. But yeah, it's a mix. It depends on the package and who we're working with.

Kunle Campbell:
Okay, make sense, make sense, make sense. So the content is here is it really should be optimized for collaboration rather than silos. Okay.

Blake Pinsker:
Yeah, I think silo when it comes to creative, especially when you're, the more minds you can have giving new ideas, the more inspiration you could source from other people. I know you wanna talk a little bit about AI today, but it's almost like, would you rather have AI where AI is pulling data from multiple sources to come up and generate answers for you? And that's where collaboration, I think, really benefits you. Because I only see X amount of ads. I only get so much inspiration. I only have a certain amount of ideas. But now when we bring a whole team into that and their team, we all have different set of eyes. And I think that really helps the end product when we're able to have all of our minds put together to build this one machine to create all the creatives that we're creating.

Kunle Campbell:
I love all this, you speaking my language. And there was something I wanted to mention, when you talked about the brand Bible at MVMT or Movement Watches, which really was more around the fact that, your brand Bible systems, there are a set of systems essentially, and a lot of brand owners don't appreciate that. And once you understand that, The system's actually set the tone for many other, you know, sorry, my flash just

Blake Pinsker:
No

Kunle Campbell:
dropped.

Blake Pinsker:
worries.

Kunle Campbell:
For many, many other activities such as performance marketing, whether you're gonna even be doing TV advertising, whatever, it's that baseline

Blake Pinsker:
Right.

Kunle Campbell:
system, you know. So I just wanted to mention that. Yeah.

Blake Pinsker:
Yeah, you can't expect anybody to be a mind reader, whether it's a new employee or a third party partner, agency, you can't expect someone to read your mind or your vision on what the brand should be like, right? And the ultimate goal for everybody is to delegate and move on or even move out for some people. Right, and so if you ultimately wanna delegate and you want other people to think like you, like you said, you have to set up those processes. in order for that to happen. Otherwise,

Kunle Campbell:
Mm-hmm.

Blake Pinsker:
you're gonna be let down time and time again.

Kunle Campbell:
Absolutely. So going to AI. Yeah, we can't not have a conversation about media buying in 2023 and not, you know, speak about the 800 pound gorilla in the room, which is AI. How has AI, more specifically generative, you know, AI, how has AI approach creatives that

Blake Pinsker:
Yep.

Kunle Campbell:
last mile. Would

Blake Pinsker:
Yes,

Kunle Campbell:
just love to know.

Blake Pinsker:
I'll touch on that. So we're fortunate to have a creative team who is obsessed with learning about AI. And so they're using and constantly experimenting with ChatGPT and some of the platforms out there to, one, generate copy, generate hooks. And what it really does is it allows you to have a laundry list. of hooks, you could ask ChatGPT to write you 100 hooks, and you then as the human are the filter for that. So a lot of that we're still adjusting, we're still toying with to make that end product, but it's giving us a list of ideas which could have taken us hours previously. And so it's not necessarily writing any of the final hooks, messages, or copy points, or scripts. but it's giving us a long list of ideas to pick from, which we may not have thought of on our own. And so there's a lot of awesome stuff there. Now on the actual creative or video or photo side of things, this is good timing because we actually experimented with something new yesterday that seems to be doing pretty well in one of our accounts. You know, I credit one of our editors, he's absolutely brilliant. And he delivered the recent folder of creatives, which he initially just had images to work with. And he wanted to make some videos out of these images. And so he used an AI software to essentially turn these images into animations. And those seem to be performing quite well, at least out of the gates. So yeah, some really cool stuff there. I don't think it's long before we see AI. actually editing full videos for us in doing some of the The back-end work for us on the creative side of things or even developing images cgi Is one that makes a lot of sense. Why why? Can't we one day tell a computer I want a cg3d Rendering of this watch or this necklace, right? That I think that's going to be If it doesn't already exist pretty easy, no-brainer, just because it's a computer doing computer work. So I think that's going to be really exciting once that happens.

Kunle Campbell:
Yeah, I was watching a video yesterday around Adobe. I don't know whether it's a better, it's this private beta version of Adobe, but it had chat GPT type prompts on every aspect of an image. So if I wanted to change my hat, and say I was wearing a hat, I was not even wearing a hat, I could just hover over the head, my head in a video or image actually, and I could just say, put a red hat on prospect or, and then it will, it will. And then you could so say, no, make it a bowler hat. Oh no, you know, that sort of thing. It was really, really intuitive. There were some hits and misses, but I found that really accurate and convincing. Yes, there are video editing apps out there for sure. For sure. Out of curiosity, this AI software that changes images to animation, do you know the name of it?

Blake Pinsker:
I don't actually, I can find out.

Kunle Campbell:
I'll pick it up

Blake Pinsker:
Probably

Kunle Campbell:
from you

Blake Pinsker:
not

Kunle Campbell:
and

Blake Pinsker:
on

Kunle Campbell:
then

Blake Pinsker:
this

Kunle Campbell:
we'll add

Blake Pinsker:
call,

Kunle Campbell:
it to the

Blake Pinsker:
but

Kunle Campbell:
show notes. No

Blake Pinsker:
I will

Kunle Campbell:
worries.

Blake Pinsker:
ask and then yeah, we can get out to the show notes or

Kunle Campbell:
Yeah.

Blake Pinsker:
someone can reach out DMing or something.

Kunle Campbell:
Oh yeah. Yeah. Um, another thing I'm, I'm finding very, very interesting with, with AI is just throwing in a ton of the tone of voice of a brand, just throwing that in completely, like giving, feeding AI like a thousand words. I'm speaking to Jack Chibity and then asking it for a hook. Um, as you said earlier, the, the more data AI has, you know, for you from you. the more accurate it would spit out. It's just so powerful as in the opportunity with AI and the speed it's giving your team

Blake Pinsker:
Yeah.

Kunle Campbell:
to roll out iterations and stuff like that. Even for this podcast, very lately, I've been sort of throwing in the transcript into ChatGPT and BAD, Google BAD, and then asking it to do all sorts of stuff, whether it's summaries. whether it's, you know, what are the key points, you know, picking out the key points and then giving that to the video editors to figure out for our shorts videos and all of that is just is, you know, I just I'm a huge fan of VIA at this point in time. Okay. Another question I had was a conversation I actually having on Twitter earlier on. It was with raw man who's the I'm co-founder of Linja. He's going to be on the podcast again. They've been on the podcast before and I think he has another brand called Raycon that's like a $50 million brand. He's coming on the show fairly soon. We've had a few hitches with him coming on the show, but he asked a question, um, very open ended question and it was more around retargeting. Um, so what percentage of your, your account budget do you. do you allocate to retargeting if at all, given the fact that Advantage Plus is really a retarget, it's a very efficient retargeting system within Meta. So I'd be curious to know what your focus is on budget allocation on retargeting.

Torii Rowe:
Yeah, I'm a 0% guy. I don't allocate anything to retargeting. Everything I do is just broad audiences and keep it at the top. and let Facebook go out there or whatever platform it is, go out there and decide who to spend those dollars on. There's no way, I mean, there's a lot of smart media buyers out there, but there's no way we're smart enough to pick exactly what it should be doing by saying like, this is who, like we used to bust it out of like seven day, seven day add to cards, 30 day add to cards, 90 day add to cards, everybody remembers those days, but there's no way that now at this point with how much data is in the backend of Meta. that we're gonna come in and say, hey, this is like the best audience you should go retarget. We just leave it open now. We just leave it open, focus on the creative testing and keep pumping numbers in there. The other thing is too, is people have to look at things as like holistically, that omni-channel. The more people we can just get to the site, the better off you're gonna be long-term. It's not always about like trying to get that second dollar or third dollar immediately today. I feel like sometimes, you can lose the balance, like when people retarget, you can lose the balance in an account. So if you're retargeting to like, in a three and a half ROAS, people just keep raising those budgets and raising those budgets, but you also have to realize, you're burning the funnel too. You're burnt, like it's like, it's just like when you run a sale, and you know, you burn the funnel out, and then you gotta rebuild the funnel. It's the same thing. There's this fine balance for you to try to figure out in the account, and I'd rather just leave that to Meta, where we focus on the creative testing and better. account structure and things like that.

Kunle Campbell:
I don't think anybody has ever expressed the concept of a sale the way you just did, which is like you burn a funnel out. I think that was pretty cool. Sorry. Okay,

Blake Pinsker:
Yeah.

Torii Rowe:
Yeah, yeah, I mean,

Kunle Campbell:
so let's

Torii Rowe:
it's true.

Kunle Campbell:
talk

Torii Rowe:
As soon

Kunle Campbell:
tech.

Torii Rowe:
as you burp, go ahead, you're good.

Kunle Campbell:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's apt. It is apt. It is true. You burn a funnel and you need to rebuild it, you know,

Torii Rowe:
Exactly.

Kunle Campbell:
which is interesting. Yeah. Apps. I really want to talk about AppStack, your go-to AppStack, what you recommend to the audience from that perspective. Also, what is your dashboard? Facebook, if we're to sort of liken it to a dashboard in a car, you will not drive well. Simply, your speed limit, you will essentially... break some speed limits as in if you go by the dashboard in, you know, on Facebook, you might be slow in certain roads. Um, you might not know when you run out of fuel, you know, when you look at Meta's, um, you know, dashboard, is that still correct as, you know, um, speaking to, to you as an expert, um, if it's not what you lean on and, um, just blow up your, your app stack to, to us, please.

Torii Rowe:
Yeah, so I mean Facebook's still good with high level metrics. I still look at the majority of things there, click through rate, cost per link click, all of those things are still gonna be legitimate. Thumb stop ratio, which we talked about earlier. it's still legitimate inside

Kunle Campbell:
Mm-hmm.

Torii Rowe:
of that. It's a custom metric you have to make, but all of those things are still there. Now, as far as attribution, that's where we start getting lost in media buying nowadays. And so you have so many third party attribution tools such as, you know, triple whale, everybody knows of, north beam, you know, high roast, those kinds of things. I've used all of them. And I would say, I don't know if they wanna hear this, but I'm gonna be, you know, straightforward here. I think they're all pretty similar I don't think anyone's pixel's 10 times better than the other person's pixel. It may pick up a couple more purchases, somebody's might, but you still have the North Star here. They're all still pointing towards this ad is doing the best or this ad is not doing the best. And so all you need nowadays is to kind of have, like you were talking about, you're steering or driving the car or whatever like that. You just need to know which way the road needs to go. Like you turn it left, you turn it right. when to brake and when to hit the gas. That's all you need nowadays for the most part. And so all of those tools work really well. I think Northbeam goes pretty far and in depth of like. you know, lifetime value and things like that of how long it takes for someone to convert. But then on the flip side, you have Triple Whale, who's more data aggregation. They take all your platforms, put it in there, and you can see that profit by the minute, you know, for your business, which is pretty incredible. So it's, it's come a long way from the spreadsheets and, you know, Google Analytics was it that we used to run off of. So those are the main ones for media buying. But as far as like e-commerce, I could go into a tech stack that's, you know, there's a lot of things as far as an e-commerce business, but media I don't think it needs to be as complex or convoluted that some people make it. You just need good direction.

Kunle Campbell:
And how critical is proprietary software in the media buying world?

Torii Rowe:
At the top levels, it's what's gonna make or break you. Getting a company to nine figures, I think is way more difficult than it used to be. The brand is obviously very important, but tech is what's really driving the game here. From the creative standpoint, you need fabulous people, but you also need good tech to analyze these things. And then also on the media buying standpoint, like we talked about a couple of times as events manager scores and things like that, Some people don't even know what events manager scores are, diving into those and things of how much data is getting pushed back into Facebook for you to optimize off of. Most people, if they look at their page view events, they're usually sitting at 20 to 25% of their page view events are pushed back into Facebook. We usually have our clients sitting around 98 to 99% within 90 to 120 days, and that's proprietary. That's working for us, and that's what helps us grow. We're able to feed that data and continue to optimize off that where most people are losing 75% of that data that they're paying for.

Kunle Campbell:
Hmm. That's a very, very poignant point. So thanks for bringing it in. So it reminds me of, you know, when you're into cycling or triathlons, yes, you should perform as an athlete, but you know, parts of your success is dependent on the bikes you choose. on the gear you decide to choose on obviously the team. So super interesting there insights on event management. Right, is there anything we haven't covered? Just about to wrap this conversation of which I've thoroughly enjoyed by the way, because there are two perspectives, normally there's just one perspective, right?

Blake Pinsker:
Thank

Kunle Campbell:
Yeah,

Blake Pinsker:
you.

Kunle Campbell:
is there anything you think we should talk about that I haven't really... you know, covered just yet.

Blake Pinsker:
Yeah, let me first ask you this. Most of your listeners, what types of roles are they serving and what size company is most of the audience? Maybe I can give you an answer based

Kunle Campbell:
So

Blake Pinsker:
on that.

Kunle Campbell:
the people who reach out to me directly, they're either operators or they're working for operators that are like 10 million plus. So they tend to be like Shopify plus merchants, most the ones who stick around

Blake Pinsker:
Got

Kunle Campbell:
for,

Blake Pinsker:
it,

Kunle Campbell:
who stock around for

Blake Pinsker:
got it,

Kunle Campbell:
a bit of time.

Blake Pinsker:
got it, got it. Yeah, I think one thing that I'll share for people who are hitting a glass ceiling at that stage, I think that there are a few things that you really need to look deeply into. One, product market fit, right? Am I really doing something different? Is my product at a good enough price point, high enough quality where this is really scalable? And I think that's number one, because no advertising channel, no creative, really matter at the end of the day if you don't have good enough product market fit. You might hit a glass ceiling. If you have that, the second thing that I think is a misconception right now that the best brands in the world, they're still finding a ton of success on meta, and they're still scaling on meta. The landscape has changed. And the problem is a lot of people are still using 2015, 2016 strategies, pre iOS 14, pre COVID, right? And those strategies just don't work anymore. And so I think it's important that you look at the brands that are doing really well still. You reverse engineer what they're doing, especially on the creative front. But then you also say, OK, what do we lose with iOS 14? Like Tori just touched on, tracking, right? How do we fix that problem? How do we solve that problem? How do we get our event matching scores from 20% to 90%, right? If you're able to solve those problems, then you don't have an iOS problem. It's different, but at the same time, you are solving the problems that are keeping you from scaling and keeping you from growing. And so I think that it's a misconception that Facebook doesn't work or people can't scale in this environment. And for every brand that you show me that isn't scaling, I'll show you one that is. So I think that's often an excuse. And I can find you a handful of success stories, people who are absolutely crushing it right now. And so I think that everybody has that opportunity still.

Kunle Campbell:
Fair point on differentiation and that product market fits to really, you know, open up that runway, you know, for you to grow the scalability runway. All right, chaps. It's been a pleasure, you know, having you both in. For people who want to find out more. you know, about your company Dream Labs or agency rather, it's dreamlabsagency.com. Are either of you active on any social platforms professionally?

Blake Pinsker:
Yeah, we're active on Instagram and Twitter.

Kunle Campbell:
Okay.

Blake Pinsker:
Yeah, so maybe you could put the handles in the show notes.

Kunle Campbell:
We'll link to your website and your social handles in the show notes. What else can I say

Blake Pinsker:
LinkedIn as well.

Kunle Campbell:
on LinkedIn?

Blake Pinsker:
Yeah.

Kunle Campbell:
I've actually added you literally as we're speaking on LinkedIn. So great stuff. Look, I'm going to keep in touch, you know, continue to watch your work. You know, yeah, we're onto something and, you know, I really love your ambition, the calibre of... brands you've worked with in the past and the ones you're supporting now. It's been a privilege speaking with you both. Thank you for coming on the 2X eCommerce podcast.

Torii Rowe:
Thank you

Blake Pinsker:
Thank

Torii Rowe:
so

Blake Pinsker:
you,

Torii Rowe:
much.

Blake Pinsker:
Cooley.

Torii Rowe:
Appreciate

Blake Pinsker:
Appreciate

Torii Rowe:
the time.

Blake Pinsker:
the time.

Kunle Campbell:
Cheers.