We Audited 40+ 8-Figure DTC Ad Accounts in 2026. Here's What's Broken and How to Fix It

Speaker A: Over Q2, I think we did 40 audits for different consumer businesses, majority of them doing eight figures a year and above. We've not done a solo in a while.

Speaker B: I feel like every time we do a solo we say the same thing.

Speaker A: Now too many guests, even though they do the best. I know. Uh, I think the last one we did was a Q1 recap. So two and a half months in two and a half months later.

Speaker B: Yeah, we're back. Lots, lots to catch up on today. Um, some, some just lots going on in the market anyway, so we can, we can maybe start there.

Speaker A: Yeah, loads been going on since we last spoke. Um, even in the last week it feels like there's a bit, a lot happening.

Speaker B: Yeah. The World cup started.

Speaker A: SpaceX have IPO'd. Yeah. Government have pulled back Claude's model.

Speaker B: I know. Which is, which is really sad because, um, I, I was in some, I was doing a lot with, um, Fable and then like, it just the chats that I was working within it, it would just like stop letting me use it entirely.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting. I, I, I didn't get a chance to use it too much because I was away. But, um, from what people are saying, it just sounded like a crazy model. It's weird that that's not made like mainstream news.

Speaker B: I know.

Speaker A: Like, it's not been on any news outlets in the uk, at least, because I was looking and it's like nobody's really mentioned it other than unless you're like, really deep in the, in the weeds of like, uh, AI, I guess, tech and Twitter.

Speaker B: Yeah. I wonder if it's got anything to do with anthropic, um, not being, you know, a far right.

Speaker A: I think, I think I was reading the thread on this, so I'm not gonna claim that I made the statement, but someone was making the point of, like, are they working towards the concept of regulatory capture? So, like the US government capture part of the company and then that creates a monopoly because they're obviously government backed. Um, I also just think a lot of their marketing has sort of pushed this. It's like all they do is talk about how crazy the model is, how it's going to destroy everyone's lives and work.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, it's not that surprising. But how did you find using it briefly?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, again, similar to yourself. Um, only really just started, um, getting into it and really didn't even probably go near the kind of level of capability that it had. Um, it's expensive, but yeah, that's the one thing That I noticed pretty quickly. Um, I know Josh who works uh, at sawgroup, um, who heads up a lot of our kind of code, um, and builds that we're doing with AI. I know he was absolutely rinsing tokens.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's like I think he used, he was subsidizing so it was going to be subsidized until the 22nd, then move on to API. And I think he was using like £4,000 a day in tokens. Uh, he actually one shot an app that got to number one in the app charts. Yeah, that was crazy with like 60, 70,000 downloads. So shout out to Josh for, for getting stuck in.

Speaker C: Before we get back into it, let me ask you one question. How much did you spend on meta ads last month? For a lot of you listening, it's probably quite a lot. But how much of it actually came back to you? If the answer is nothing, you're going to want to keep listening in. Card is a financial platform built specifically for modern digital businesses. The thing most people will fixate on is the fact that you can get uncapped cash back on all of your expenses. Because unlike a lot of these programs where the categories are pretty much useless to all of us, in card gives you 2% cash back on things that actually make up uh, your cost base. Things like SaaS, ad spend, travel and lots more. The things that you're just going to pay for anyway to allow your business to run and grow money back on your existing outgoings. And if you're anything like most of our clients, that's going to be a lot and it's going to add up fast. But it's not just cashback. Corporate cards with multi currency accounts, a proper connected banking experience and direct integrations with things like Shopify, Xero, Stripe and lots more all in one place. And if you've ever had 15 tabs open, working from about three different bank accounts and a spreadsheet that nobody's touched in three weeks, just trying to get a full picture of where your money actually is, then that's the problem that this solves. One connective view your whole financial experience in one place. Brands like Asio Beauty and Aloparis are already scaling with this. So if you're spending serious money on daily expenses and getting absolutely nothing back on it right now, you're going to want to look into this. Back to the episode.

Speaker A: I think this interesting. I've just built another doc around our AI strategy and we are going to move out of this heavy subsidized era and I think model, you've got model abstraction and how they change over time, but also how you route different requests into different models based on the, um, complexity of the ask. So Opus, for example, isn't very good at making plans and like making an. So creating a plan of how to achieve an outcome. Whereas Mythos from Limited, you seem to be very good at that. So it's like, do you set up a system that balances cost? Where Mythos builds the plan, Opus executes on it. Yeah, there's going to be so much. Many layers to that. Ah. With so many different models. It's a bit like how you do with creative generation, where you're using like, five or six models.

Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I mean, the, um. Funnily enough, I listened to a podcast with Anthropic CFO recently, and he said that, like, when Opus came out, no one moved from Sonnet to Opus because they just didn't really understand how much better it was and because it was that much more expensive. So they. They actually brought the, um, the. They made Opus a lot cheaper to get people over to it. And it's almost like a strategy. So then when you're on it, you kind of don't leave. But actually, that was like the. The kind of law of accelerated returns, and the compounding effect of more people going on to Opus actually meant that they drove a lot more revenue for their business anyway.

Speaker A: Yeah, really interesting. I guess, like, usage goes up as the quality of output goes up. Yeah, that CFO is great as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, he should be interested.

Speaker A: He should be the spokesperson for Anthropic, I think. Better than the cfo.

Speaker B: I agree. Yeah, he was. He's super interesting. Really, really interesting guy. But, yeah, his, um. We can get onto that in a. In a bit. But, um, it was a great podcast on Invest Invest. Like the best that everyone should listen

Speaker A: to with him on SpaceX.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: IPO. 1, World.7 trillion. I saw it went up 20, 20% yesterday. I saw a tweet this morning that said that the value of the company had gone up $420 billion in a day. It was the single biggest value in a day. And the stock exchange is history. And it increased Elon Musk's net worth more than what Warren Buffett has earned in his whole career.

Speaker B: It's crazy. Well, I saw something saying that, uh, the average American now is closer in wealth to Jeff Bezos than Jeff Bezos is to Elon Musk. Um, yeah. Ah, to put it into perspective. And like, I saw this on Twitter. But, like, so it made 400. 4400 millionaires and 400 over 100, worth over $100 million. Um, and then if we just like, put into perspective like, how much a trillion actually is. 1 million seconds is 11.6 days, 100 million seconds is 3.17 years, 1 billion seconds is 31 years, and 1 trillion seconds is 31,700 years.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's mental. Um, just crazy how much, like, value creation Elon Musk has managed.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: In his career at this point. Yes. Um, we are going to get into the juice of, of meta. All things D2C, but a couple of other topics to touch on before we do that. You mentioned you put down here the Levi Arena. I did. I think it was cool, but I do think they could have done it better.

Speaker B: I agree. Well, I think it's the start of. I think they're going to do more with it because it feels like they're gonna. This is kind of the start, essentially for context, there's. Is it called the Levi's Arena?

Speaker A: Yeah, Levi's Stadium.

Speaker B: Stadium. Um, one of the stadiums in the U.S. obviously, we're, we're at the World cup now. And uh, FIFA, uh, obviously if you're not like an official FIFA sponsor, uh, they're not going to let you have, um, any, any form of free publicity. Uh, and being, you know, the Levi's arena, they had to essentially remove the name, uh, temporarily during the tournament. Um, so what they did was, which was super smart, was essentially, I don't know if you, you know, like the, the Levi's logo is. It's got the, the word Levi's inside the red. It's almost like a bat shape. So they just left the bat shape and then just put like, you know, uh, something white over it that covers it, but it kind of perfectly still leaves the shape. And then they changed that icon, um, to their social media icons. And I think they're working through a lot of other stuff there, but I just thought, super interesting way of, you know, kind of just taking the piss. Um, but then also building, um, you know, just, just building a bit of hype around, uh, something that was a negative, turning it into a positive.

Speaker A: They need to turn it into a pair of jeans next, like jean pocket, like back pocket of the jeans, something like that, just to take it that next step further. Uh, but yeah, it was really smart approach to, uh, covering it up. So, so, so crazy that when you compare. And I was reading about the, the U.S. world cup versus like previous and how like FIFA. That's an example of like FIFA having impacts on like sponsorship. And if you look at Russia and some of these other countries where previous um, in previous World Cups like FIFA would only let him sell one type of beer. Russia had to give everybody with a ticket a visa for the country for the period of the tournament. It's like, it's just interesting to contrast how the power shift into America. Uh, whether, whether you, what you think of it is I'd leave to everybody's interpretation but it's just so clear that the power is more with the host than, than previous where Russia obviously had a lot to gain from, probably more to gain from hosting a World cup and therefore gave up a lot of concessions in comparison to America. Whether um, hiking up like travel prices, um, all sorts.

Speaker B: Can't get a ticket for less than $1,000. Yeah.

Speaker A: Denying entry to referees, all sorts of stuff. It's crazy. Before we jump into all the juicy DTC stuff, just like to always do this best bit of content you've watched since the last episode. Yeah.

Speaker B: I think jumping on, kind of following on from what I just said that Krishna Rao, the CFO of Anthropic, I think. Well he, he, I thought the whole thing, the whole podcast was just really interesting because it really puts into perspective like actually especially from his Persp, how difficult it is to predict the growth of like an AI company like Anthropic because there's, there's, it's, it's, there's, it's multi layered in terms of forecasting. Right. So you're, you're having to forecast demand so you know how many people are actually going to use the product. Then you have to off the back of that reverse engineer compute. So having to essentially make a bet on how much computing power you'll, you'll need if you, if you, if you over forecast and you have too much, you know you've spent hundreds of billions um of cash flow that you didn't necessarily have and that could literally put the company under um, or if you, or under then you're not going to have enough to, to actually serve the, the consumers that use your product. Um and then a deeper layer than that is capability. And there was a really interesting question asked. There's one thing like trying to predict demand but then trying to predict the capability of a model which you know, they don't necessarily know how it's going to change and how the models are going to evolve. So then having to, to kind of predict that. So then I was like it Kind of made me think it's an interesting thought process of scenario planning capability similarly to how you would scenario plan a forecast like and demand for your business. So you know this is, we're talking a lot about how we approach the, the next evolution of like you know, building kind of services of software almost like in terms of what we're doing with the agency. And it's very difficult like if I'm looking six months down the line to say okay how can I, how can I resource plan or look at what is our uh, what does the org look like when it's very hard to predict what capability looks like because that is going to impact um, you know the resource that we need or having the business. So really like thinking of it through. We need to set a best base and worst case scenario of what capability looks like through the lens of AI setting that KPI something around efficiency. So in this case you know for to, to make it simple like cost per creative you have a best case, a base and then a worst case and you have a scenario built for each of those cases. So therefore if you've, you know you've got the North Star of where you want to get cost per creative to that also becomes the influence in the north uh, and the direction that you take with all of your AI builds and what we do as an agency versus doing things that are shiny and pretty but don't actually add any um, you know real IP to what we are doing. Um and then as a result it's not only given the direction that we need to take but and keeping us on the straight and narrow but also we can plan for each of those given scenarios which is going to impact things like resource.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think I listened to this as well. I think the comp just don't envy the complexity that he's facing and how difficult a challenge that role must be. I think it must be the same in all of those businesses that are just investing so much Capex. Yeah taking such big bets. So I like that that the way you've then applied that to our business and how we're thinking about it. It's really hard to build for the slope of change. Um, so I think you do have to build multiple scenarios and reflect quite regularly on how we're pacing towards that. Uh, I also liked another episode of that same podcast. We may be sending people away from our own videos by talking about this. Brian Chesky did another episode on AI founder mode and how he approaches one to ones and I think that's a I'm not going to go into it because I'm conscious of time, but super strong episode on how he runs Airbnb, how he changed the approach. I think we've mentioned him a few times on. On here at this point, but just really enjoyed that app as well.

Speaker B: Maybe give it like a top. Just like. What's your biggest insight from that episode? Um, because he's just super compelling, isn't he?

Speaker A: Yeah, he's a really good storyteller as well. I really like the way he does. He's like, they've just done another. They do those product releases every half of the year and I find, I always find them really. It's the closest thing to like Steve Jobs, Apple type videos, I think, from a CEO currently. And the way they tell a story, the way they. The way he presents the releases and he uses that as a forcing function for pace of progress in the company by setting those two points in the calendar that they have to then hit the summer editions launch. And I think quite a few businesses do that now.

Speaker C: Um,

Speaker A: I guess my insight, he just completely changed the way he ran Airbnb through Covid and then has continued to do that beyond that. So completely stripped out the concept of one to ones. Um, he's very, very in the weeds of, of a lot of the business and not all the time, but like. But still manages to retain like a cross sectional level of understanding of every area. And I think it's similar to Elon Musk as well. Like he's very in the. And of engineering, finance, the whole, the whole company.

Speaker B: Yeah, he looks at things through a very different lens I think to most people. Like almost like in a controversial way. Like, you know, he, uh. One thing that was interesting on that he was saying about you, you shouldn't give control to anyone or the freedom in power to give them the freedom until they earn that. Yeah, essentially. So he's almost like he will start by micromanaging them and then slowly, you know, pull back over time.

Speaker A: Yeah, really interesting. Very different way of approaching. I think you've got to take some things and maybe not, not everything from it, but I just find it very, very compelling to listen to. So moving into Meta dc, what everyone's probably come to listen to, um, I wanted to set the scene before we jump into. I guess we wanted to go through probably eight or ten different things that we're seeing really work right now and drive value for brands. Uh, over Q2, I think we did around about 40 audits for different consumer businesses, majority of them doing eight, eight figures a year and above. So loads of context. Obviously we've got our own client base as well where we can pattern spot and, and surface insights. But I think the broad setting of the scene is that I think it's been quite a challenging environment since, since March. So if you're watching this finding, finding it difficult, more difficult than it has previously been on Meta to acquire customers, I think you're not alone. It certainly seems to be a shared pain, a shared narrative. Um, obviously in March we saw the platform roll out a number of attribution changes. So changing the model away from seven day click, one day view. Uh, it seems like since then they've been continuing to roll out a number of different back end and front end change just have thrown the algorithm off. From what we can see, we've seen audience network issues. So uh, again if you haven't done this already and you're watching, we've seen a big spike over Q1 of percentage of spend delivered through audience network placements and that massively inflating traffic and that traffic being a lot of bots or just really low quality and then that's created a signal that's impacted the pixel and then worsened performance over time. We've also seen like a more recent issue where uh, um, ad spend concentration has just seemed to skyrocket over the last week or two where a lot of ads have just seemed to drop off to zero spend and a low volume of ads has started to take more spend and we're having to be a bit more aggressive with how we force, force budget through certain assets and we've seen an issue with related media which um, you need to check across your accounts. I'm not going to go into that in too much detail because we, we're looking into that at the moment and I guess you've got all of that sat in the backdrop of pretty poor consumer confidence as well in, in the market. So it's definitely a challenging time for brands. Um, so hopefully we can go for a few things that we're seeing work within that um, that you can try and take and, and implement to maybe offset some of those, some of those problems. But definitely, definitely not alone. If you are struggling or finding performance to be a bit softer right now

Speaker B: we're all in this together.

Speaker A: Yes, exactly, exactly. You don't want to. I always think you control what you can control.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: But I think it's definitely the narrative we're seeing on Twitter. Um, you can feel it in accounts and I think there's just been a lot of fundamental problems on the platform, um, outliers. Some of the things I mentioned that just shouldn't really be happening, uh, that you need to be cognizant of.

Speaker B: I don't know if they've changed something with their like flagging, flagging system as well. Um, which is obviously like this AI flagging, uh, wrong hole there.

Speaker A: Sorry, say that again.

Speaker B: Um, yeah, because I've, I think I've had about six conversations in the last week with, and this happened with Club Neuro as well. Just like the, the most random videos just being flagged as something that like one of our video, one of our ads was just flagged with selling uh, edible cannabis, another one for fraudulent um, work activity. Like the weirdest thing. And then I've had like five other conversations with people that have said the same thing. So again maybe that's a coincidence but

Speaker A: just feels like they're making a lot of changes and whenever they make a lot of algorithm changes it's all, and I don't know, you can only speculate to what that is. Like there's so much of the platform we don't have um, visibility of. But these issues, the periods where this, this, this sort of stuff happens, uh, it's just been very noticeable over the last couple of months. Um, despite that, ah, there are still some, some clear trends, clear things that, that will work, that, that we're seeing work. Uh, I would also see say there's some common mistakes across audits. Um, and I wanted to pick out and start with like five really key errors that we're seeing the, the vast majority of brands that we're, we're looking at through this process making consistently that are contributing to poorer results. And a lot of these are quite quick fixes. Some of them are a bit more structural and strategic. Um, but I just wanted to whiz through them just because I think it's important to then to reflect on your ad account setup and just see if these are uh, things that you're maybe missing in your setup and something that you can implement to generate some quick wins. Firstly attribution. So I think this is an issue that has really reared its head since that change in March. A lot of ad accounts are ah, still including viewthrough as a attribution window. So maybe running seven day click one day view. I think we've touched on this a few times. Um, if you've got a really big repeat customer component, you'll be pulling through a lot of conversions that would have happened every Anyway, you'll be forcing Meta to be less incremental. So we need to be stripping that out. I'd say that's a problem on nearly every account we look at at the moment. Just too much spend going through viewthrough. Some accounts should have it, some most accounts shouldn't. Uh, so stripping that out is a really quick win. Secondly is like engaged audiences. So making sure that we've got really strong definitions at an account level that give you clarity over where you're spending your budget, whether it's engaged, existing or new, and trying to force more and more towards new. We want to define that on an, on an account level. But then we want to apply exclusions the right way depending on where the account's at. So we don't want to exclude engaged from every campaign because you may. I think ASC is getting better at sequential ad delivery. So like top of funnel, then a retargeting ad, walking someone through that customer journey in one campaign. We want to increase the like level of exclusions on a campaign basis depending on how much of a reach problem we're facing. But definitely engaging. Um, defining it on an account, on an account level is really important. Funnel coverage, so creative like still, I'd say 90% of the brands are not making enough problem aware ads, which I think we've been talking about for maybe 12 months now. And then we're going to come on to some stuff there, uh, shortly. Um, concentration, so creative concentration, um, like most of your spend being through a low volume of ads that have very common features. Whether that's Persona format, I think that's a problem today and a risk for the future. And then I'd say the final one would just be um, landing pages that just sell a product but don't sell like an outcome. I did an audit recently and it was a really well known, pretty large brand. And I think because I'd come at it from like a, I wasn't as close to the problem. Just it was so easy to like look at their page and, and be like this is too technical. It's missing these fundamental elements, um, that that would appeal to the consumer and it's just really having that consumer centric mindset when you're looking at your customer journey. Yeah, not thinking too much like a brand new.

Speaker B: Um, this happens all the time. Like we've done it before where you think the, the route is to go very expert driven and it just, it doesn't cut through and then you dumb the language down like you're trying to Speak to a five year old and suddenly, you know, it starts working.

Speaker A: Yeah, there's a, there's a website. Is it hummingbird? Humming, humming something. I've definitely got that wrong. Um, but basically you should, there's a, there's a website where you can put your text in and ask it what its reading age is. And if you look at newspapers and like some of the biggest publications in the world, like New York Times for example, will be, will be written in like grade seven, um, reading age. But then you'll look at like a product page and you'll be writing like a technical expert. You'll have all this jargon that no one really cares about or understands and just simplifying and thinking more through the lens of a customer.

Speaker B: I think that's why like the ads that you always see doing really well right now are the ones that are just like visual metaphors.

Speaker A: Yeah. Easy to understand.

Speaker B: Uh, like you know, representing something by showing sugar, emptying a jar, you know, really simple. But uh, visually encapsulating.

Speaker A: Yeah, 100%. I think that's a huge, huge problem. So uh, I would, I would even say for scripts like going through some of your top performers and seeing if you can put it into, I can't remember the tool. We'll link it below. Put it, if, put it in, see what it, see what it says. If it's, if it's like quite technical, just simplifying the language, reproducing it probably would help with, yeah. Iteration and go, go back to the store.

Speaker B: The, the um, the script writing master class I did because I do a whole section on, on that and how to speak like a five year old essentially. But one of those, one of those, one that really helps with that is bringing in those visual metaphors.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: You know, it's like you trap your, your gut is like a traffic light. That's the good stuff. Uh, the green lets the good stuff through, red keeps the bad stuff out. You know, things like that that are just super simple but you instantly resonate with it. And you know what that means.

Speaker A: Yeah, Claude's really good at writing metaphors as well. Um, but yeah, those are like the five big, uh, errors. Um, just to paint a picture of how big that engaged audience piece is, we did a, we brought on an account that hadn't defined those audiences correctly and then didn't know they were spending 41% of the budget on repeat customers. So you can imagine just reorientating that spend completely transformed their performance. So those are the problems. Those are the Common errors. Um, we've now got about six or seven things that we want to talk through on how we're seeing best in class brands. Fix them. And I know you came, you wanted to start with the Hudson method. Definitely not named after me, named after the Comfort founder who pioneered this. Uh, great name. Um, but yeah, would you want to dive through like how, how you're seeing this work?

Speaker C: Before we get back into it, let me ask you one question. How much did you spend on meta ads last month? For a lot of you listening, it's probably quite a lot. But how much of it actually came back to you? If the answer is nothing, you're going to want to keep listening. Incod is a financial platform built specifically for modern digital businesses. The thing most people will fixate on is the fact that you can get uncapped cash back on all of your expenses. Because unlike a of these programs where the categories are pretty much useless to all of us, Incod gives you 2% cash back on things that actually make up uh, your cost base. Things like SaaS, ad spend, travel and lots more. The things that you're just going to pay for anyway to allow your business to run and grow money back on your existing outgoings. And if you're anything like most of our clients, that's going to be a lot and it's going to add up fast. But it's not just cash back. Corporate cards with multi currency accounts are proper connected banking experience and direct integrations with things like Shopify, Xero, Stripe and lots more all in one place. And if you've ever had 15 tabs open, working from about three different bank accounts and a spreadsheet that nobody's touched in three weeks, just trying to get a full picture of where your money actually is, then that's the problem that this solves. One connected view your whole financial experience in one place. Brands like Asio Beauty and Aloparis are already scaling with this. So if you're spending serious money on daily expenses and getting absolutely nothing back on it right now, you're going to want to look into this. Back to the episode.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Seeing this more and more and I think we're, yeah transparently like we're seeing a lot of brands that we work with now that are starting to use methods like this to drive, to create that flywheel at scale. So essentially um, you know it's all about how to, how you can create a, create a flywheel and lower your cost per creative and create this kind of compounding effect that can be utilized across multiple different channels. Um, so essentially it's this idea of being able to seed hundreds of creators through TikTok. Um, you know you pay them a small fee plus commission to be able to use that creative on other platforms but then you are able to incentivize them by, by you're able to incentivize them to reach certain milestones that could be in relation to volume, gmv, other things that, that will then in turn be able to um, you know drive, drive this kind of creator armory essentially that could be used across multiple different platforms. So I think I'm going to use like the Comfort founder as an example because he, he I think has over half a million affiliates now that, that work directly with them. And it's super interesting. Like if you, I was on their ad library the other day and I am um, filtered by highest impression ads. Their top five highest impression ads are affiliate ads to that are just calling out affiliates really not even like ads of them selling their products. So that, that kind of shows you like where they're actually driving you know lightly most of their revenue from. But his whole method obviously they're, they, you know they're, they're finding creators through different means. Right. So they essentially have created coordinators that work directly with them. They uh, use things like manychat for uh, where they've kind of created these chat funnels where they're able to actually trigger DMS to these creators. Um and then also obviously they are, they're approaching people through TikTok shop as well. Um, and what they are doing is they're creating these kind of communities where they are incentivizing them to post 10, 15 times a day for 45 days. And they call it like the 45 Day Challenge. And if you reach it you will uh, they'll essentially pay you a bonus off the back of it. And then if you reach certain levels of um GMV you will get you earn uh more commission off the back of that. So it kind of creates this whole flywheel where uh, the, it compounds at scale because the creators within this group of people are feeding ah in new ideas. They're able to execute them at scale by driving volume. And I know that this brand, and I know this is an extreme example but they are, they are able to create hundreds of thousands of ads every single month at a fraction of the price that you would pay a UGC creator. And, and you, you know, you're benefiting off that in multiple different ways. The, the reach and I guess more top of Funnel reach that you would be able to drive through TikTok that then would translate into you know, search traffic and, and you know feed into meta that then being able to be utilized as meta creative. And I think that idea of being able to lock in a loyalty system that you can drive bonuses through is a way that can gamify at scale. So it's, it's, it's definitely not one for the faint hearted because I think operationally it can be very complex but you don't need to do it to the same level that maybe comfort uh, have you could do it on a smaller scale that is more contained.

Speaker A: Yeah, you see more I think more and more brands deploying this method. Um, I think there's a couple in the UK that have done it really well as well. I think overload do quite a bit of this if I'm correct. But don't know from what I've seen. Anyway, um, I think the key is that gamification and reward scheme and making it really incentive aligned for these creators because more and more brands are going to do it. So how do you get the better creators to work with your business? Are you seeing. I think I saw Shark Ninja. They've started taking a lot of the top, top affiliates for like two events and hosting these big events for them which I think is another evolution of this. Um, but just the sheer volume and variety of content that you're seeing brands generate and the, the scale of organic unpaid awareness is just crazy. Yeah, um, I think that's been the, one of the main drivers of comfort hitting that sort of just that massive like crazy growth journey in terms of revenue.

Speaker B: Yep, exactly. And it's like if you can like guarantee the reward and essentially then it's like you can help them crack the code, you can, you can help direct drive them towards the reward. Um, so yeah, I think super interesting. I think the thing that we've obviously spoken about on top of that is is how can you enhance their chances of succeeding through that. So we you know being able to like jump, have someone that can jump on a call with all of your creators on a weekly basis or being able to feed insights back into the system. So then they are heightening their chances of actually, you know, finding a winner with one of these ads, um, is also a good way to um, you know, to, to, to help kind of build that relationship, seeing more tech come

Speaker A: out like that's allowing brands to bring that level of like transparency and tracking and accountability to meta that you can see on TikTok. Shop as well. So like attribution tools where you can onboard creators and track percentage of spend, um, into your meta account and then obviously incentivize them directly in that, that way as well. Be interesting to see how this continues to develop. And I think it's that obviously the second point I put here is that TikTok shop into Meta, which is like the starting point of this, I think for brands, if you want to do it in a more simple way, like a version one would be just getting cracking with TikTok shop and using it not only as a revenue generation engine, but mainly using it for affiliate creative that you can then pull into meta and scale. Um, and then off the back of that, starting to build the more tiered structure that comfort have built out over time.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Cool. Next we've got creative volume.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So this idea of. We've spoken about this a lot, but it's the idea there's this kind of constant debate about volume versus intention. Yeah, I think there's. You can have volume with intention. Right. And I think that's where we're going, we're going with here.

Speaker A: Yeah. I saw North Beam put out a, a really interesting post about the sheer volume of ads that their top 1% of advertisers, the top 1% of ad accounts are responsible for 36 of all ad creative on Meta. So top 1.4%. So the median advertiser is running 23 different ads at a time. The medium North Bean customer is running 150 ads. So like they're, they're stating that, that that top percentile is just doing so much more volume and therefore it's creating so much more scale. I think the apprehension and the reason that people are pushing back on this is I think it's difficult to connect strategy and volume together with the right intention. We've spoken about that a lot. Um, and therefore you can start to see real diminishing returns as you scale up volume of output. But that doesn't mean that it's not the right, the right, the right approach. It just means the system is complex and the intention needs to be there. That behind it.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah, exactly. And I think the, the big thing here is, is gap analysis because it's, that's, that's what's going to identify if you're over indexing into either a Persona, a vehicle type of messaging. You know, these are all of the things that you need to make sure that if you're looking at it like it on a heat map, that you are really Spreading yourself across all of these areas or otherwise you're going to be too oversaturated in, um, in, in. And then as a result diminishing, um, incremental reach. So it's what, what I, I would recommend even doing. And it's b. It's very easy now to like build a skill on Claude where you can connect Meta's API. I think be careful because you can get um, banned if you do it wrong. Yeah. But, uh, it's very easy to do that now if you are clear with your naming conventions, you can directly pull that creative and start looking at things like, are we diversifying across all of our Personas? Are we actually tapping into all of the emotional, uh, zones within the valence heat map? Are we actually speaking to people through different vehicles? Because I think I was speaking to a brand the other day and, and they thought that they had real vehicle diversity. But then if you actually run that through a tool like we've built, it actually identified that it's, it saw most of the ads as the same and it didn't actually see them because this, the, the differences were so subtle.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: That didn't actually differentiate. So I think this is, these are like the different variants that you need to be looking at to ensure that you are diversifying as much as possible.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think, um, I still think the language and tone and valence zones is one that almost every brand we encounters missing at least one of the core quadrants in that process. Um, so I 100% agree with the gap analysis and it's just making sure that you've got those two KPIs running across the process, like hit rate or average spend per asset or whatever the measure of quality you want is, whilst you also scale volume. But it is the thing that's coming up the most on calls with brands right now is that they feel like they're in like a creative echo chamber or they're just um, struggling to. They feel like they're just doing more and not better. So it's a common problem and it's, it really does need a detailed and intentional system to connect, connect the two together.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's not.

Speaker C: That's the thing.

Speaker B: If you're, if you lower, if you lower spend and you're not driving as much volume, it's not as important, but it becomes much more important with scale. So the sooner that you can kind of build a system that allows you to exercise that the, you know, the quicker you'll be able to increase spend. But I just Want to like go into some of these areas that you need to be thinking about that will help determine whether you are over indexing in one of these areas. So firstly thinking about Persona coverage, how many distinct Persona clusters do you have? Now obviously this differs based on your, your volume of spend. Um, but really you should be looking at if, if you're spending over 100k a month, you need to be looking at in terms of macro Personas, at least four to five macros and then obviously more micros off the back of that. Are all three identity angles, uh, covered. So that's actual self. So how am I feeling in the moment I'm sitting in the pain or self which is, you know, um, how, how am I feeling about my partner who I could be motivated to buy something for? Uh, or ideal self. Um, you know, the, the, the more sitting in the after state. What do I, the, the you know, the motivation for actually wanting to feel something, wanting to get to a solution. Now one thing you will know about that if you look at these identity angles in your ad account and if you actually label uh, each creative against, I would say probably 90% of your creative is an actual self. So that's a big one to look at and there's some big opportunities there to go into or an ideal. And then looking at spend concentration by Persona, if you look into your ad account and you see that actually yeah, we're covering 5, 6 Personas, but 80% of spend is going into Persona 1. You know that maybe there's not enough coverage of some of these other Personas. The second one is messaging diversity as we spoke about before. So we spoke about Valent zones. As I said. Sarah Levenger has a great article on this. Literally take that article, transcribe it, put it into Claude. If uh, you've got a skill that, that is connected to your meta API, ask it to do a scrape. Um, and actually just try and build a bit of a heat map of how many, where your creatives sit in each of these zones. You will find that uh, there are zones that aren't even being uh, targeted yet. Distinct messaging angles as well. So you know, how many different messaging angles are you covering? Um, awareness level coverage is, is another one that we've spoken about because you might have diverse messaging, but it all might be messaging that sits, you know, solution aware down. Um, and then also another one that I haven't really spoken about much on this podcast, but I did this for Club Neuro recently and it really uncovered an interesting insight that we were over leveraged, um, in an emotional driver. So when we're looking at emotional drivers, we're looking at the, through achievement, belonging, autonomy and empowerment. What I realized after doing that gap analysis was that there was zero creative that sat in empowerment, uh, or sorry that sat in belonging, which for like Club Neuro, which is all about belonging and community and you know, being a part of something was a real concern. And that, that actually is the biggest potential opportunity in terms of how we could be speaking to those customers. So again that really identified an opportunity there for us to diversify and allow us to drive more volume as a result of that. And then I think when you get on to like volume and velocity, looking at things like how many ads have we launched in the last 30 days? Is volume sufficient to hit target spend? Now I don't know if you want to speak to that for a moment. I know you, we've done a whole episode on like how to identify the amount of volume for spend.

Speaker A: But yeah, go into, go back to the Creative Forecasting masterclass I did a couple of weeks ago and there's a, there's a detailed notion doc of how to map that out. I think the key here is um, do the quality before you do the volume. So run that process, get a measure of hit rate, reflect on your data, decide whether you need to make the process work harder first or just do more volume. But you should be able to build an expectation of how many ads do you need to launch every week, two weeks, 30 days to hit your spend target for the rest of the year. And avoid leaving yourself short by making proactive decisions to resource that two, two months before you need to get the, the asset volume in place. Um, I think most brands are still making far less ads than they need to be, not as many as they should be based on their spend targets. And especially as we're getting closer and closer to Q4, when spend really ramps up for a lot of, a lot of categories that, that needs to be top of mind.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, next one is format and vehicle. So like I would just go through your ad account and like, you know, even if you do this manually, count how many different types of vehicles there are and we would determine a vehicle by vehicle is, is a, is a way that you deliver a message into, in, inside each format. So if you've got hybrid ugc, static as each format, you'll have different vehicles that live within that. Uh, so a vehicle for a UGC would be a whiteboard ad or a raw face to camera testimonial as an example to count how many of those do you have? And if there's not enough, then again that's an area where we need to be driving more diversity. I also think like, look, if there's like a lot of spend that's being driven through one vehicle specifically, I've seen this quite a lot where brands will, you know, almost do it subconsciously while they're over leverage one vehicle because they see that it's working time and time again they almost get it in their head, oh no, this is just the type of ad that works for us but actually it's just because we're not putting enough resource into testing, um, you know, more, more diversity.

Speaker A: I think that's the issue of confirmation bias or like going to tunneling down into one type of vehicle. We've actually just had a client really push towards this in the last couple of weeks and it can, it'll maybe help in the short term but you've got to keep 20% of your creative output on, on um, new different things you've never tried before for that reason.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's always when you, that's, that's just, yeah, that's how you see the brands will hit a ceiling. It's always because they, there's not a willingness to be able to diversify vehicles because they think one as you said, confirmation bias. But then second to that it's they don't want to break outside of what they feel, um, sits outside of their brand essentially. Um, another thing that is super interesting to do is looking at how many Personas are served by different vehicles. So if you've got a list of like your top 10 vehicles that you've tested, almost create like a heat map of have we tested those vehicles on all six of our Personas and if not that is a really good opportunity or a quick win low hanging through to test those vehicles against different Personas or different messaging angles because usually you'll see, oh no, we've done it over here. But there's all of these Personas that we have already validated that we've not tested those vehicles on.

Speaker A: Um, yeah, 100%. And the final, the final one I wanted to touch on before we move on is just like concentration and lifespan. So like reviewing your current inventory and how much like risk sits within top ads you want to be avoiding, ah, a single ad taking more than 20% of spend, looking at like what's the replacement rate of Churn Creative and really treating it as a portfolio. I don't I think that's how to, to think of an ad library over time. Um, I think that's something again brands are not reflecting on enough. Like what's the quality of that, that ad library and how is it improving with the work that you're doing on the actual creative output? So we sat on that for a while. I just wanted to. Do you want to quickly touch on the hit rate case study? Because I kind of, kind of segues off that.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's just a good example. I won't touch, I won't stay on this for long. But a great example where this, this happened within one of our ad accounts and we were over leveraged in Ideal Cell, um, in actual self messaging and only one zone within the psychological heat maps that we discussed. So we did a bit of an analysis and actually broke down macro M Personas into deeper micro Personas to really understand their motivators and fears. And then we adapted the psychological messaging to ensure that we were covering ourselves across that whole heat map. Um, so just two simple changes there. You know, introduction of more micro Personas that spoke to the macro Personas, but in a way that was much more specific to a certain type of person within that. Uh, and then more a gap analysis from a psychological messaging standpoint to really kind of unlock um, you know, the gaps that we hadn't yet explored. And I think the, the third thing that, that isn't on these notes but really is important off the back of this. If you were gonna, if you are, and I've seen this before where uh, creative strategists will really be super intentional in a creative strategy and actually build these micro Personas, really understand the person, how to speak to them and what their fears are and their desires. But then actually when you get to the point of writing a script, it just feels very surface level. It doesn't, it's not obvious that you're speaking to that Persona. And I think with this, this one a great example was like, and we spoke about this on the episode with Chris was it was so obvious even from a static exactly who that person was down to like their hobbies, that it meant that meta had the signals to be able to put it in front of the right consumer. And that comes back to that Soulmate theory that we've spoken about.

Speaker A: Yeah, I just think it's a great case study of applying all of the bits we've covered over the last couple of months into transforming an account in a very short period of time. Uh, it's like turning that Theory into action. So it's great to just recap that. Another point that's like all over Twitter and quite common narrative right now is this, like, distaste for iterations post Andromeda. And we've touched on this previously, but we're still seeing iterations drive like really significant impacts in a number of accounts. We did kind of cross business analysis of our iteration workflow. Um, and I know the key area we're seeing it really work is through the lens of a format multiplier, isn't it?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think it's, um. We talk about this a lot with our creative strategy team. And it's like if you have found a vehicle or format that has really worked for one Persona, rather than when you're introducing a new Persona, uh, reducing your chances of success by essentially changing more variables. Take the winning vehicle and just apply it to a new Persona, uh, as a way of validating that. And we've, we've done that at scale for lots of different brands and it works really, really well. And uh, an example, we did this with, with Club Neuro and it was like a three reasons why. Very simple style creative. But we saw that it really worked for one Persona, uh, uh, and obviously like, you know, the. It's a very new ad account. So, um, there were multiple Personas that I hadn't yet validated or tested that I wanted to bring into the ad account. But I wanted to, especially with the amount of budget that we had available to us, I wanted to reduce the chances of, you know, wasting that budget essentially. So I essentially took the exact same framework, uh, and the vehicle that we, we have validated, and then applied a different Persona, uh, and valence messaging to that. And by doing that, we did it four different times and it worked every single time. So it shows us a good. It's a good way of validating a Persona, uh, and then almost creating this tree off the back of it that then you can test against that.

Speaker A: Yeah, nice. I think we talked about that on the Alex episode. That brand that just use basically the same concept to scale to like nine figures nearly, which is an example of taking something that's worked and really pushing it to the extreme. We also were chatting in the office yesterday around taking angles and messaging that's worked from another business and pulling it into your brand, like another audience, another Persona, but then using like Gemini and Claude to adapt a script to your own, um, product or proposition.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: What's the process behind that?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I think again, I hate. And we've spoken a lot about this. Going to actual direct competitors and just, just pulling their scripts because it just becomes an echo chamber.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, but I'm yeah, a big believer of like taking winning scripts either mainly through organic, um, I think work a lot better. Um, or going to, you know, brands that aren't direct competitors of yours, uh, as an opportunity to test more vehicle diversity and taking vehicles and frameworks and applying them to your brand. Essentially just take putting it into Gemini, asking it to translate it into a framework and then from that you can essentially take one of your winning scripts and ask it to apply it to that exact framework with an exact angle valence zone, um, and Persona. And it will be able to do a really good job at just placing it within the framework that you can then test against your brand.

Speaker A: Yeah, I like that for uh, looking um, at products that solve a similar problem. So speaking to a bedding brand recently and push them to go and look at sort of sleep supplements because a lot of the outcomes they were, they were selling a, um, a bedding that really helps with like hot sleeping in summer. So it's like the outcome, the outcome in the, that the customer wants the free failed previous solution. The emotional reactions will be very similar because you're solving the same problem, but the way they'll be packaging that up will be so different that it's quite interesting to take inspiration in that way.

Speaker B: It's a really good. Yeah. Ah, it's a really good example. Um, so I know you've been going deep on landers and post clips.

Speaker A: Yeah. Just think this is the next frontier. Like we're starting to do some work with clients. I think it's super exciting. Something I really enjoy spending time on is sort of post click and funnels as an area of the marketing ecosystem. So um, I saw David Herman tweet about it how like taking proven creative winners and scaling them into new landers is helping with incremental reach and that, that belief that like a landing page is part of that creative diversity mix, um, it definitely seems to be the case and it makes sense because meta crawls, not only the creative and the landing page, it's getting more sophisticated. You can see how that can sort of support you. The algorithm is built off the concept of expected action rate. So if you can improve landing mage performance, funnel throughput, then it'll improve cpm, it'll improve bids, you'll win more auctions, etc, and I think when you look at the playbook, some of the biggest brands in the space and the fastest Growing brands in the space have applied over the last 12 months. Grunds Ima mars of men top of mind I know they're all supplements, loop kind patches, um, so many others. Uh, they always come out the gates not only with creative but with so many customer journeys. And it's all through the, through the view of like Persona or need state, um, Funnel and that alignment through that, through that journey. And I just think the competency level hopefully if you've been watching this podcast, hopefully your competency level has increased in creative over the last 12 months or last 18 months. I think the market is getting better and more sophisticated in that area. But I don't think many brands are connecting landing pages at scale because it's another element of complexity. I think it's most impactful across problem and unaware stages. There's greatest upside. Um, I also think it's where they can often be the most needed because you can only do so much education in a 40 to 45 second to 2 and a half minute video but you can use them all the way through comparison pages PDP improvements that align a PDP more with a Persona. Um, and I just think this is going to be something that develops rapidly over the next sort of 6 to 12 months. Uh obviously there's a lot of brands agencies that are doing it very well. We're starting to roll this out with a couple of our partners. Ah Claude. It's actually amazing if you, it's amazing how far you can get with Claude one shotting now. So using Claude design, creating a GitHub that like codifies your brand guidelines and your visual identity. What good looks like historically from like a website blocks perspective and then some reference points for great pages. You can pretty much one shot Alandas you can pretty much one shot PDPs, advertorials, listicles, quiz funnels. I was one shot quiz funnel last night and it was nearly perfect. So you assume m that's gonna get um, get even better but it brings into focus the strategy right and the um, the the approach to doing it well and it it as with creative it has Personas as the foundation. So same Persona and Micro Persona should connect all the way through the system. You should prioritize based on spend volume by Persona and Micro Persona. You can actually do it quite easily by just taking sort of either using Claude or taking top 20 ads and running it through Gemini and just been asking it to split spend split by Persona against your creative OS and then start to build a bit of a strategy off that like aligning some PDPs, duplicating PDPs thinking about. I, I really like things like five reasons why, seven reasons why because they're such uh, formula, such a formulaic approach to education.

Speaker B: It's very digestible as well.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's just, it's really easy to do like executionally. It's not very complex to just break a product out into seven reasons why someone should buy it. You just go benefit, benefit. Common objection. Common objection. Social proof. Social proof. Cta. It's like the angle's quite self explanatory um but we're seeing more and more of these different, different customer journeys. Like I think they've always, they've been around um, brands have been doing them for, for years but I think we're seeing them done a higher volume um, with more of a thought process around the creative that connects to it and a greater level of diversity with things like quiz funnels becoming a really big um, part of the, part of the strategy for quite a few different brands.

Speaker B: Talk talk on quiz funnels because I think there's yeah this is something I'm seeing more and more and um, it's super interesting. I know we've, we, there's been times where we tried it in the past and it hasn't quite worked as, as it seems to be now for some brands.

Speaker A: Yeah. So looking at mars of men rather than talking theoretically, I'll just walk for an example. It's like their landing pages. Find out what's really suppressing your testosterone. Take this two minute assessment, social proof. And then it starts with like how old are you? What's the one thing you'd fix about your masculine health first? And then it's all of the benefits and you just select a benefit. How would you describe your build right now? Um, how, how's your strength training trending lately? And it's just that it's got like before and afters. Um, so yeah just super, super thought out and intentional. Lots of social proof um throughout the journey, lots of common failed solutions, benefits. Uh and then it feels like he's building like a custom solution to your problem rather than just serving you the same product.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So I think they're really impactful um, as a funnel type. But I just don't think brands are doing enough here in terms of testing um, and optimizing starting with the PDP and improving that and I think that's a separate workflow to the, to the landers above it. But when you can connect the dots at scale it's super, super powerful.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Such a massive improvement in performance and volume.

Speaker B: It's just again like a build on Personas, isn't it? Yes, it's, you know, it's like if you just, if you're super specific with your Persona targeting or meta, but then post click, it's like a generic pdp. Like it's, it kind of, you know, loses the impact. Um, so yeah, it really helps with that full funnel strategy.

Speaker A: Just translating conviction and building continuity and trust. So I think um, I would encourage everybody watching to do that process of just pulling out those top two Personas and thinking how do I start? Do I need to do a step page? Is conversion rate telling me that there needs to be a big change in education or can I just reorientate some of the things on my PDP to be more aligned to the, to the buyer that's coming through this type of creative? Yeah, um, yeah. And the final, final thing on Landers is that whole perceived value and increased average order value and how you're seeing more brands re engineer their offer to drive higher average order value through improving value perception of the product. An example of this being IMH's recent move or uh, somewhat recent move to a three month sub on the front end on the Met as their main offer.

Speaker B: What did that move from one month just rolling?

Speaker A: Yeah, one month roll into three months up front delivered monthly. Um, Danny in the podcast episode we did discussed how significant an improvement on the AOV and LTV that. Oh well, he didn't touch on LTV because it was too early, but transform their average order value. Um, and they've done it through the lens of like engineering the value perception of the product through so many different monthly, um, gifts, uh, benefits. Uh, they've obviously released this like 90 day IMA transformation program where you get masterclasses quarterly. For those people who are on that quarterly subscription, uh, it's all about how although the price has increased, it's like increasing the perception of value of the product beyond the, the price. Um, so that the pain the customer feels is greater than the price that they're going to have to pay for the solution to that pain. Um, again, I think offer is a bit of a dirty word in E Com, but when you're thinking through the lens of perceived value, how do we increase the perceived value of our products within the customer's eyes to allow us to charge more to increase our average order value? I think we're seeing a lot of brands unlock a lot more volume when doing this. Well, because it allows you to spend more on meta. So it increases your allowable cac. You can win more auctions, you can generate more. Um, just, you can just spend more. And that often will. Almost always if you increase aov, it'll increase the LTV of those cohorts as well. So I think there's a lot of value there. Maybe a follow up masterclass we can do around that.

Speaker B: Yeah, super interesting. I feel like, yeah, you did a great session with the team. Um, brought in some of this and um, just offer is something we don't speak about much. So I think that would be valuable.

Speaker A: It's like the, it is the ceiling. It's like if your offers, if you're not. I think with the business you need to forecast how are you going to increase average order value every quarter. Like what's the, what's the strategy that sits on the AOV line of the P L? Um, because you are, you are just going to hit a ceiling if you don't manage to do that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, a lot of brand. Well, I guess AOV and LTV if you're, if you're working on a payback period. But yeah, I can do a session on that maybe moving forward. I think we've chewed through a lot there.

Speaker B: Yeah. It's always good to get these little shoot uh, the episodes in, in the diary. I think we need to do them more. Yeah. Because they always go down well. Um, but yeah, I think that's everything. I think we can end it there.

Speaker A: Yeah. Well, thank you for watching. We'll be following up with more solos like Lucas said over the coming months. Um, if you haven't already and you've stuck with us to the end, please do like and subscribe. We've just passed 5k.

Speaker B: It'd be appreciated and we're gonna have loads of bite sized masterminds coming.

Speaker A: Yeah, looking forward to that. So, yeah. Thank you for watching SA.