The Creator Videos Our Ads Never Used

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Speaker C: I'm Christian Loversich, a DTC founder and operator. On this podcast I share what I'm seeing, testing and learning from actually building and scaling e commerce brands. A lot of brands are sending product to creators right now and counting on the ads to pick up the videos. I did the same thing in February. Here's what our media buyer found when he checked which ones the ads were using. Back in February, I ramped up how much free product we were sending to creators on TikTok. I was tracking them and I could see the videos starting to go up with our shop link on them. The way I understood it, every one of those videos was getting added automatically to TikTok's automated shop campaign, so more creators posting meant more videos for our ads to work with. I figured that should start to improve our results. A few weeks later, our TikTok performance was improving, which is what I'd said should happen. The theory that came up in a media buying meeting was that the campaign finally had more options to choose from. Then our media buyer went through every new video the outreach had produced and checked which ones our paid campaign was actually using. The answer had nothing to do with that theory. If you're working with creators going into Q4, you've probably heard the same idea I was running on Send product to as many creators as you can, let them post with your shop link, and the platform will find the best videos and put your spend behind them. I want to walk you through what we found when we checked, because by the middle of March, the whole program was built on a different idea. Here's the check I'd do before you send out another round of Pull every video that's been posted since you started sending samples. Then look at which of those videos your paid campaigns have actually put spend behind and compare that to what your top spenders were before the outreach started. It takes an afternoon, and it tells you whether the creators are feeding your ads or doing something else Entirely. So here's how it started. We'd restarted the affiliate program on TikTok and decided to scale it as part of a bigger TikTok plan for the quarter. The person running our creator outreach kicked off a big push at the start of February, and I was the one pushing it because I wanted content going. Product was going out to a lot of creators, and the videos were coming back. In our media buying meeting a week or so into it, the team had put the samples on the agenda. They'd noticed how many had gone out, and our media buyer said the expenses from all that product had jumped way up compared to the month before. With that many samples going out, the program was unprofitable. In the middle of that, I asked about something I've been assuming. When somebody posts on the shop with our product, does it get added to the automated campaign automatically or do we have to add it manually? Our media buyer said it's automatic as long as the creator tags the product or the post has a shoppable link. So I said, that's exactly what's happening. They're posting the videos with the shop link, so I'm assuming they're being added to the campaign and that should start to improve our results. He said, yes, that's correct. And the volume was on me. I'd ramped it up and I never told them. The way I saw it, we never stopped the program. We just slowed it down at times so it didn't click, that I needed to pass the information along. I said it in that meeting. I should have told you guys. Our head of media buying explained why that mattered. With our own videos, there's no affiliate commission, so the return targets the team was buying against were built around that. If most of the volume started coming from affiliates, the return could look fine on paper while we were actually losing money, because we'd have to account for 15 to 20% commission and sometimes more. There was one more thing I asked for before we got off the call. When we sat down to run the numbers on the program, I wanted the organic results counted, too, because those posts don't only feed the ads, they bring organic traffic of their own. Then I told the team I was going to have the outreach pause so we could run our numbers and set the right goals. The outreach stopped on the 12th. A week or so after that, the team had its media buying meeting while our head of media buying was out. TikTok was looking good that week. Our media buyer said it was massively improving and that the week was clearly better than the one before. He also said he was going to put together a document on whether cutting back the outreach had changed our profitability and by how much. That's where the bigger question came up. Performance is improving, fine. But how many new affiliate videos have actually gone live? Is the automated campaign picking those new videos up? The thinking was that the campaign just had more options to choose from now, and that was what was improving performance. So was it worth it? The plan was to cross reference the date we stopped sending samples against every video that had gone up since and find out whether the campaign was using them. Someone in that meeting also pointed out that we were only spending a small amount a day on TikTok at that point, so of course the return looked good. As you scale, that's going to change. And there was a question about whether we could use that type of content for other ads. Not long after, our media buyer sat down with our head of media buying to go through it, the question on the table was whether the improvement was coming from new ads and whether any of the new videos were getting ad spend. Our media buyer had asked the person running the outreach for, uh, a link to every video posted by the creators who'd received product going back to the 1st of February when the push started. So this was the full list of what the outreach had produced. None of them were allocated to our paid media. All of the new videos were performing organically, and he said they had no impact at all on the paid side. When he looked at the paid data, the top performers were the same videos that had already been performing before the outreach started. So what was spending? The top spender was a creator video that had been posted the year before. It was old, and for some reason TikTok had started pushing it. In second place was our own content. Most of what was spending in the campaign was actually our own videos. The theory from the week before didn't hold up. The improvement wasn't coming from any of the new videos. Our, uh, head of media buying asked the obvious question. Why aren't the newer ones getting any ad spend? Our media buyer had already talked to TikTok's reps about it. What they told him was that it's completely automated. TikTok picks by itself what it thinks will work best, and if something hits even a little with healthy traffic and good conversions and it pushes aggressively into that one video. The way he put it, we could have a million videos in there, and if only one of them starts going kind of viral, it'll push everything there. Then he showed an example, we just launched a campaign for a second product the day before. It was already spending its full budget and it had already found its favorite. When he checked the impressions, 95% of all of them were going to that one video because TikTok had chosen it. The only thing that had clearly changed overall was reaching. We'd been having trouble getting spend because not enough people were watching, and our impressions had almost doubled. So the campaign was getting more reach. It just wasn't getting it from the creators we'd been sending product to. Think about what that means for a program like ours. Part of why I'd pushed the outreach was that I assumed every new video would get added to the campaign and improve our results. I'd even asked about it back in that first meeting and been told, yes, they get added automatically. But being added to an automated campaign and getting spend from it are two different things. The campaign isn't trying to spread its budget across your creators. It's trying to find one video and put everything behind it. So the question that was supposed to decide whether the outreach was worth it, whether the campaign was picking up the new videos, had a clear answer. It wasn't. Our media buyer said it plainly in that same conversation. All the new creators we got mostly went to organic, so it didn't make an impact on paid media at all. By the middle of March, the plan for the program was built on a completely different idea. The plan was to restart it with our top affiliates before any new outreach. Instead of just sending product and waiting, we'd make them an offer to create content. I got on a call with someone who runs creator programs at scale and with the person running our outreach because I wanted her to learn his process. I'd read the process he sent over, and he had a calculator for it. The whole thing was built on paying creators based on the views you expect them to generate using the views their recent videos usually get. I explained it to our outreach lead the way. I think about ads. When we run ads, we know what a thousand impressions costs us. So the question is whether I'm going to pay that for a thousand impressions with ads, or, uh, whether I'm going to pay a creator and get more impressions for less than the ads cost. Then I asked about the Shop link. Do we even want the creators to tag the product in the video? My answer was no. Most people are going to scroll right past it if they see the Shop link. And the goal now was to get as many views as possible. I said I wouldn't even Bring the shop up. At first, the goal was to top off the audience. The creators get the views, and we pick those people up on Facebook with retargeting. If they post the same video on their other platforms, we pay for those views too. So the more reach a video gets on every platform, the more the creator gets paid. And I said I'd get, uh, our creative lead to help develop the content with them. Put that next to where we started in February. The shop link mattered because it was how a video got into the automated campaign. A month later, I was telling the team not to even bring the shop link up. Here's what actually happened. We sent out a lot of product the creators posted, and none of those new videos were allocated to our paid media. The automated campaign kept its spend on an older creator video and our own content. And in the new campaign, it sent 95% of the impressions to one video. More creator videos didn't give our ads more to work with because the campaign was only ever looking for one. What the creators were producing was organic reach, which was the part I'd asked to have counted back in February. By March, the plan wasn't sending product and hoping the campaign picked the videos up. It was paying creators for views and checking that price against what our ads cost for the same thousand impressions. If you're running a creator program right now and want direct access to me to work through it inside your own business, join me in the growth boardroom. The link is in the episode description. See you in there.

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