How Performance Creators Beat Meta's New Algorithm with Mal Chia, Managing Director & Co-Founder at Ecom Nation

Speaker A: Meta in the last 12 or so months has moved towards a model where all that audience targeting used to be able to do with interests, lookalike audiences, custom audiences. Basically, that's all out the window now. They actually inhibit your performance. So what you need to do is actually have your creative do the targeting. Meta's data has shown is that ads can still disrupt in different ways, but it still needs to be in that format where it feels real, it feels authentic, feels engaging as well. And most brands aren't geared up to do that at scale, whereas these creators, that's all they do.

Speaker B: Welcome back to the Partnership Economy Podcast. I'm your host, Todd Crawford, and on this episode, we're exploring the major shift in paid media and what it means for brands looking to stand out in an oversaturated feed. With detailed targeting options disappearing on Meta, Creative is now the primary targeting lever driving 56% of a campaign's success. This puts all the pressure on brands to produce ads that stop the scroll and speak directly to specific audiences. But doing so at scale feels impossible for most. Here to dive into this shift today is Mal Chia. Mal is a seasoned CMO with leadership experience at Uber and Riderware. Now, as the managing director of EcomNation, he helps dozens of clients turn this new reality into measurable results by designing growth systems that actually work. If creative is the new targeting, it's crucial to partner with experts hitting those targets. Mal and I will explore specific types of creators who can give you the volume, authenticity and performance you need to win in this new landscape. I hope you enjoy. All right, Mal, welcome to the show. Great to have you on from Australia.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me on, Todd.

Speaker B: One of the things I really like, just in general about this industry or anything, I guess, in life, is helping people look at things from a different perspective, like another facet of something they think they know. And that's what we're going to dive in today. We're going to talk about creators, uh, but we're going to talk about a type of creator that, um, you've got a lot of experience working with that I just think is really an interesting way to approach it. So there's three types of creators or creator strategies that brands can, can, um, employ. And I think there's overlap there. But the first one I think we're all familiar with. It's the. I'm going to work with the biggest creators on the Internet and pay them a ton of money to post about me. And then there's one that we're very familiar with@uh, impact.com, which is more of the performance type creators, maybe mid size, even smaller creators, but in mass can drive meaningful conversions. Obviously if you're a retailer, revenue across both of those types of creators, user generated content is seen as something very valuable for brands to repost in their social media because it does perform well. But you brought something up to my attention that I want to unpack with you and that is finding creators that you solely only work with to create user generated content. And you don't even care if they post. It's just create me the content. Right? Is that where we're at here?

Speaker A: Pretty much. Pretty much. You're using them as a, ah, content producer, not, not for their reach or for their platform. You just use them sheerly just to create content for you. That's it.

Speaker B: To me that's like a novel perspective on this and I think most brands probably haven't gone down that route. It's like I said, uh, I've got this guy, I paid uh, a million dollars to do 10 posts or five posts and I want to make the most out of that content. And from your perspective, I think the first thing is why would I do that? Why wouldn't I just use the two that I'm getting now?

Speaker A: That's a great question. I think probably the best way to answer that is to look at it as a uh, Hollywood production. They're the main stars. You know, you're casting them because you're expecting them to reach a whole lot of people. The ones with the big followings, uh, the ones with their own platforms, they've got their own reach which you're trying to leverage by hiring them and casting them in your movie. Whereas the other ones are character actors. The ones who we're using for UGC creators, they're just purely character actors. So they have a role which they need to fill. You know, it could be like the good cop, it could be the bad cop, but you're, you're hiring them for a role because they do that type of content really well. They fit that particular vertical really well. So you can find a whole lot of creators now who you're engaging because of their craft because they're really good at creating content for that particular vertical, you know, whatever they may be. And you get them who specialize in beauty, some specialize in fashion, activewear, fitness, supplements, you name it. They always tend to niche down into a vertical and they're really good at doing that vertical really well because they actually understand it and can talk about the products which they're, which they're using in their creative knowledgeably and it feels authentic as well.

Speaker B: That's really interesting. And I guess from my perspective I'm trying to understand like, okay, I'm, I'm the social media team, so I'm, I'm creating my own content and then I'm, I'm reposting user generated content which we talked about. We're getting maybe some user generated content from some of those big publishers, maybe not, maybe some of those creators don't let you have that, or it's so limited that you can't use it for very long. Then maybe I'm doing the performance stuff. So I am getting some from them too and they're good creators. But this next level, what's the strategy here as the social media manager?

Speaker A: That's a great question because it does vary and a lot of this is driven by the fact that the platforms like the advertising platforms like Meta have really evolved in the sense that you need to do a lot of creative testing because of how the targeting works. Now you're not really doing any of the targeting. So Meta in the last 12 or so months has moved towards a model where all that audience targeting used to be able to do with interests, lookalike audiences, custom audiences, basically that's all out the window now. They actually inhibit your performance. So what you need to do is actually have your creative do the targeting and their system, their AI actually uses a creative to figure out who that creative is going to resonate with. So from a testing level, the volume of creative you now need to test has gone through the roof. For an average brand, you know, perhaps doing like, you know, seven figures, you know, maybe low eight figures minimum, you should be testing is somewhere around to 12 to 15 different creatives each, each week or each month. So the volume which you need to put out there just to make sure that there's enough there to train the machine so that it knows who to target with. Your ads has just gone up so much. Right. So along with that as well, a lot of brands haven't been able to keep up with that, with the amount of creative they're able to produce. So you think about uh, a traditional in house creative shop. They have a process they need to work through. They've only got a certain capacity in terms of how much they can produce. They're producing emails, they're producing ads, they're producing packaging, you name it. So because of all that, this increased demand has meant that brands have now had to look elsewhere for their creative. And one thing which Meta has shown in particular, I'll talk about Meta specifically, is that in their own testing, when you're using UGC content so uh, more that lo fi style content rather than the highly produced ads, you are typically going to see uplift of roughly about 20% compared to those other ads. And we've seen uplifts of often like you know, uh, 80% improvement, you know, on click through rate return on ad spend from those particular types of creative. And it just shows that what's actually working right now on the platforms, whether they be Facebook or Instagram, is that lo fi content which doesn't actually, actually take you away from, from the feed because so much of it now is living in Instagram reels TikTok where people are just scrolling through, consuming videos, going down that doom scrolling and anything which interrupts that is likely to take them out of that pattern and they'll actually jump off and do something else instead. Whereas what Meta's data has shown is that ads which actually fit that format, they can still disrupt in different ways, but it still needs to be in that format where it feels real, it feels authentic, you know, and it feels engaging as well. And most brands aren't geared up to do that at scale. Whereas these creators, that's all they do.

Speaker B: What does uh, one of these creators that creates UGC look like? Or are they more focused on being a creator creating you know, user generated content for brands or are they building their own brand? And yeah, I'll do that too.

Speaker A: It's a bit of both actually. And there's some creators who I work with who have their own great personal brands. You know, there's one uh, athlete who I work with, um, who's a strong man, does a lot of strongman competitions, very highly regarded. He was actually on a Netflix TV show recently. Um, but he's also a content creator as well. So he does that as just like another revenue stream for, for, for him personally. Whereas there are others as well who don't really have a personal brand. They're just really good at creating content. They've typically got maybe 800 or so followers, you know, maybe, maybe up to a couple of thousand. But they're not focused on actually building their own personal brand, their own profile. They're just really good at creating that type of content because a lot of them are doing it as a bit of a side hustle. They've got a typical nine to five and on weekends they're just making some

Speaker B: extra money and they're not probably even posting that, are they? I mean, I don't know. Yeah, right. So how do I know they do that?

Speaker A: That's a great question. Look, so back in the day when you would have to research creators, you would have to go through Instagram, find out who's created that content, find something you like and then slide into the DMs. That was the old way of doing it. But now there's so many platforms out there which actually aggregate a lot of these creators and creators sign up to join those platforms. And even Meta itself and TikTok have their own creator marketplace as well where you can go onto those platforms and see who is talking, who is trending in different categories, uh, and filtering through in different regions, age demos, all that sort of thing to find, to narrow it down and find creators who you think you want to work with. And then you reach out to now some of these platforms out there, allow, have them all on there and you pretty much manage the entire process on there. So it's actually a really smooth cycle now M. Much more than it, than it used to be before.

Speaker B: So you kind of have to not really use follower count as a criteria on whether you would work with this creator because it's not about their follower count, it's about their talent.

Speaker A: Well, that's interesting because on these platforms you actually have the ability to actually ask them just for the content or you ask them to deliver the content and post it themselves or you do a partnership where you know, and you can negotiate, you know, rates with them in terms of like um, uh, other, other sort of commercials which you want, but also in terms of whether you also want to run them as a partnership ad as well on, on Meta, in which case that's a different fee as well. And then you set the usage rights if you want them to collaborate on that post for, for whatever period. So there's a lot of flexibility in terms of how you work with, with these different creators. And on the platforms as well, you can see all those typical metrics such as um, uh, such as their follower count. You can look at their average engagement rate. Um, but then also uh, the ones I work with in particular, you can filter that further by different brands, different categories they've worked with before to see what's their engagement rate when they're talking about a certain category. So you can see how authentic they are, how much their content resonates in beauty versus fashion.

Speaker B: Okay, so I wanted to go back to something you said earlier that brands should. Because how competitive is you really need a lot of content. And like 15 posts, let's say a week is kind of like now the, the bar, the minimum. How much is too much?

Speaker A: That's a really good question because a lot of it comes back down to what your ad spend is. And what I'm talking specifically around is that we're using these creators. Some of them do get used for organic socials and you're welcome to post that on organic socials because most of the time you have unlimited usage rights on them. Um, which is fantastic, it's your content. But a lot of the use case is to actually use them as ad creative. And how many you use is highly dependent on your budget and how much you can actually at one time. If you have a uh, unlimited budget then by all means you know, go crazy, put in like 30, 40 new ads and test them each week. But if you've got a much more constrained budget then you really need to think about how much budget do I need to put behind each one before I can actually see effective results. In particular, how the algorithm works now is that when you put ads into a, into a campaign or an ad set, a lot of the budget will quickly go to some winners and when you add in new ones it's very hard to get the budget to then spend evenly across, across other ones to pick it out. So typically what I've always is dedicated testing campaigns for the UGC creators to put them all in there seeing which ones win. Make sure there's like a minimum budget they're all spending each week. Um, and then once you find some winners, graduating them to your, to your main campaigns. But it's all very highly dependent to make sure that you know you've got enough budget going into each of them within a seven day period to be able to see um, uh, whether they're able to actually exit the learning stage.

Speaker B: Right. And so when you think about your total budget you've got as you pointed out how much you're going to spend on in this case meta to um, I guess get, get those to get enough impressions to see how well they work and then you've also got to pay for the creative. So your budget has kind of got two sides to it. So first I guess you know what's kind of a range that a brand should expect to pay uh, for content and how, what kind of content are they getting for that range of price?

Speaker A: Typically you're going to be asking for videos, uh, it's very rare that you would go to a creator and ask them for, for a static image, um, you could probably just pull that out from the raws yourself. But typically you're going to be asking for raw video and the price generally is around the 3 to $400 mark. You know, for, for a video and sometimes depending on how big they are, it can go up. And particularly if you have specific requirements like length requirements, it needs to be like a 5 or 10 minute long infomercial about a particular product. Yes, they'll quote you a different price, but generally the base tends to be around like three to four hundred dollars for a standard second to one minute. Um, video.

Speaker B: Yeah, 30. And I uh, would imagine shorter ones with everybody's attention span, well, 15 seconds.

Speaker A: Well, part of the beauty of this is that when you ask them for the creative, you ask them to create something a bit longer, like 30 seconds or a minute and then you tell them to include in your brief the different hooks you want them to touch on. So these are the key points I want you to address. This is how I want you to do it. They'll film that and it provided you've got a long enough video, you now can edit that down into different cut downs to test out different hooks, different lengths to see what's going to work. You can change the audio, swap it out from you know, uh, to a voiceover, add music, whatever you want because that becomes your content. So rather than what you typically get for uh, you know, in another relationship where you're just collaborating in a post, um, you now actually have much more flexibility to take that content because there's no usage rights to it and edit it however you please because it's yours.

Speaker B: So let's just say I paid 300 bucks for 15 different. 300 each for 10 pieces of content. So my math is easy. So I'm three grand in here. Now what should I expect to have to spend in meta to get the word out with that, to test that content? I guess get enough impressions to where the testing works. If I understand I'm not going to really know or it might be not the right result.

Speaker A: At a minimum you'd be looking to put them in a campaign and you'd be putting a daily budget of seven times what your CPA is. So your cost per sale, your uh, cost per acquisition. So let's say your cost per acquisition is $100. Hopefully it's not $100, but let's say it is. You would need to be spending minimum $700 a day in that particular campaign to make sure that at least one of Those has the potential to get out of learning, um, and, and become a winner. Ideally, you're spending more than that to be able to effectively test. But that's more just like a general rule for running meta ads anyway, that you need to have that budget. But along with that as well, you got to factor in that if you spent $400 a creative, you can't think that I spent 400. I need to put $400 behind it. The fact is it just may not work. But it doesn't mean that doesn't work. It means that particular version doesn't work. So often what we're looking at is, okay, well why didn't that work? Can we actually take that piece of creative and edit that into something different, you know as well, so that we can test that, particularly if you find a particular format that works. All right, let's look at what we've got from our creators and go through all of them and brief our video editor to remake some of these in that style. You know, testing different hooks, formats, you know, whatever it is, continually get more and more use out of them. So when I say you need to be testing at a minimum 10 to 15, um, pieces of content a month, it's more about the case of they don't need to be brand new assets. They can be the same assets but cut up in different ways. Just as long as you're feeding enough information in there and testing enough different, um, objectively different variations to continue to push the machine to continue to learn and optimize.

Speaker B: So on the KPIs or I guess you know, what meta uses to optimize, you know, my personal KPI, let's say, is revenue, right? A return on ad spend or whatever. But there's click through rate, there's thumbstop, you know, is there a way to weight those or am I just, is it a black box? And I don't really know what made it the absolute winner.

Speaker A: I mean, yeah, it is a bit of a black box, particularly with how so much AI is now driving it. You don't really know why that, why that worked. Um, you can have hypotheses for that and there's a lot of great tools out there which will help you do creative analytics. So we'll, we'll dissect the creative and we'll tell you why this one more one worked and why one didn't work. But again, it's all AI, so it's all algorithmic in terms of how it's assessing that. So I think a lot of it is also just down to human judgment as well to actually be able to look at it yourself and go like this is why I think that one worked. Now I have a hypothesis, I'm going to test that hypothesis again.

Speaker B: And I guess it also matters what the, what the brand is more focused on. I mean maybe it's more about reach and attention than it is about revenue and even click through rates. I don't know. Right. I mean it could be. So you just kind of look at how each piece of creative performed and you can say I'm going to maybe take these really strong return on ad spends or maybe strong revenue, uh, results and use them in a different campaign. And then I'm going to create another campaign that's more about attention and, and reach. Right. You can kind of slice them up. Right.

Speaker A: And you use them at different stages of the funnel as well. So I'm a big advocate and a big believer in investing in brand and just pure brand awareness consideration rather than conversion. Whereas I think a lot of people in the retail space tend to over index on convers version only. But if you focus on that, you're not actually bringing more people into your brand ecosystem. So you need to continue to invest in that. And sometimes creative works better at different stages as well. You've got creators who are really good at getting attention and getting eyes on your brand and then there's ones who are really good at selling the product, you know as well and creating that desire so that someone is going to click that buy now button. But one of the things you need to watch out for is how you actually measure this. Because the in platform numbers sometimes can be inflated and don't necessarily tell the true story as well. Because just because something is performing in the ad platforms doesn't necessarily mean it's translating through to incremental revenue. So you always need to be doing everything with a more holistic view by also looking outside of the ads and making sure you're looking at how your business is performing overall. So if we're using let's say an E commerce brand and retail for, for example, you'd want to be looking at what are you investing in your ad platforms and how's that translating through to more traffic, new customers and actual sales as well on your, on your E commerce platform. And the gold standard for doing this is doing holdout tests. So the absolute gold standard if you have the patience and you have the budget and I got to say a lot, a lot of founders don't have the patience for this. But I, uh, this is my ideal world is that anytime you test a new initiative is that you do need to run a holdout test and actually put it into two similar markets. One market you're running that experiment in and seeing how it performs there, whether it actually leads to a lift in terms of like any of those three metrics or anything else you decide versus another similar market. And by doing both of those you can then identify and actually, or at least have a better understanding if that's actually leading to a real uplift rather than meta. Just saying there's an improvement there. Meta and the other Apple platforms, Google, TikTok also offer a lot of abilities to experiment as well and they highly encourage you to experiment with, with those different types of creative hypotheses, targeting hypotheses to see whether it actually leads to a genuine lift in conversion, not just in platform, but off platform as well. And more and more, I think in the ad tech world there's that understanding that it's not just about the in platform numbers because I think everyone understands that if you looked at all those in platform numbers in isolation, you'd have way more revenue than you currently do.

Speaker B: This is not what you're describing is not part of the initial test. Right. That that initial campaign is to find some winners. Now I'm going to take those winners and create new campaigns and that's where I'm going to focus more on these metrics, correct?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Well you want to focus on them, uh, in all of the, in every single stage. So. But yeah, but definitely with uh, with the initial winners, you'd be primarily relying on your testing campaign, you'd be primarily relying on the in platform numbers to be able to say, okay, are there certain creators who are resonating better in platform?

Speaker B: So once I kind of tee up my next campaign. Right. So now I found the winners, I guess I keep investing in those, um, until they start to fade, I guess. Uh, where do I say, okay, this creative, you know, that's why I guess you gotta keep backfilling, testing 15 or more a week and then I'm creating subsequent campaigns. So I mean how many campaigns could a brand have running at any time, including testing to you know, more campaigns that are probably. It's the last time I'm going to run that creative. Yeah.

Speaker A: And a lot of it is dictated by budget. Um, so again, going back to how the algorithm works now is that for a campaign to properly optimize, it needs to receive a certain number of Conversion events in a given time period in order for the machine to properly learn. So you don't want to fragment your budget too much either. So you want to make sure that you've got more budget concentrated of your campaigns rather than fragmenting too much, you know, in there. And typically within those you, you'll see creat of naturally fatigue. And one thing to make sure you're looking at um, is that you're looking at the trend of it rather than looking at it at a certain time period. Because if you look at it as a raw number, absolute number, just for one certain time period, it may give you an amazing number. But if you actually look at the trend, the trend may be declining. So it's always really important to be looking at the trends for how they're performing in terms of click through rate primarily um, your click through rate, your CPCs, your CPMs, um, to understand, okay, well is this actually standard fatigue? Um, is my frequency for that particular creative getting too high? Okay, I need, maybe need to turn that one off and add some, add something in. So you're always needing to look at those numbers and so there's always. Not necessarily, I wouldn't say it's kind of like arbitrage but you know, you are always looking to cycle out the old ones and bring in the new ones. And that doesn't mean you don't use them again, but you maybe turn them off for a little while and then reintroduce them at a later stage.

Speaker B: Another point for, for brands to think about is, you know, the creative isn't solely there to drive sales as you pointed out. It's really creating um, interest. But also I think sometimes a social post may have a completely different um, call it purpose or angle of attack versus maybe working with affiliates or even some of your other media. And I don't know if you have any other thoughts on that or examples or ways that brands should think about the difference between user generated content, maybe in other channels, uh, and the purpose of it.

Speaker A: There's a lot of different ways you can use it, um, and it does. And I think part of it is thinking that is this whole notion that the funnel was actually collapsing as well where if you go back even just like three, four, five years ago, we were very fixated on the fact that there were different stages of the funnel. Like something we need to have this particular stage of awareness and considerations and conversion. But everything is collapsing now in the sense that the same creative can actually used at different stages depending on where someone is in Their buying journey as well. Um, I think Google came out with a really great graphic, you know, a long, long time ago, calling about the messy middle that we talk about the customer journey starting here and ending there. But in the middle it goes all over the place. It goes forwards, it goes backwards, it goes up, it goes down. And you're looking at all the different nodes people touch at. So as we go through this journey, we need to be seeing the right creative at the right time, which we, where we are in that journey. You know, my wife and I may be talking about how our bed's getting a little bit uncomfortable. So that sort of initiates that then maybe, but then we forget about it for three months. But during that time there may be additional content which I'm, which I'm suddenly become much more aware of, you know, like Billboard, which I never noticed before. I suddenly start seeing it because, uh, I'm paying attention to it because it's top of mind where it's somewhere in my consciousness. I'm starting to move further down that buying journey. So we need to make sure that you've actually got the right creative operating at all stages of that as well. As people move through those different stages of the buying journey, they go forward, they go backwards, they go really forward and then they go back again. Then eventually six to nine months later, um, they finally make that call of buying that mattress. And like we talked about before with the UGC creators is that some of them are really good at creating that attention grabbing content which is like the problem solution, which is just like, oh my God, that's exactly me. I have that problem now. I'm problem aware and I'm starting to think about what the solution. I may not be ready to solve it now, but you've triggered that for me. That, oh, that's a problem I have now. I need to be thinking about that. And then that's where the reviews then come in. That same creator could then have another piece of content which is that unboxing content, that demo, that product demonstration which then shows me how to use it and talks about the results like a before and after or something like that. And then that plays a role at the bottom of the funnel, but you need to have it all as well.

Speaker B: So back to I guess these user generated content, um, creators. I've got my roster, I'm testing their content, they all do pretty good. So um, I'm going back to them, right, and getting them to do more. I guess some point for some of them, maybe the effect wanes Maybe people get tired of seeing them or their style of content. I don't know, does that happen? And then I've constantly got to be backfilling jobs never done.

Speaker A: Right, that's absolutely correct. Uh, look, and I have a dashboard which I create the platforms, I don't think actually have this in them. So I have my own Google sheet where I import all the ad data, um, from TikTok meta and have all the creators in there. So I have a dashboard, a giant dashboard, which actually allows me to see over time how different creators are performing. So over the last 12 or so months, you can filter by month, you can view it across the timeline to see is the performance going up or is it going down and how much are we using them as well. So I look at the creator, how many pieces of content we're using from, from have been live in the ad accounts each month, what the click through rate, what the return on ad spend is, um, just to get it and what the thumbstop is just to look at. Are they starting to fatigue? Are they? So being served to a new audience is being served to a returning audience. So much data in there. But honestly, you could get lost if you just keep digging, digging, digging. Right. So I just tend to just focus on those headline numbers to get a sense for, okay, are we seeing some fatigue in certain creators? So should we start to use them less and are there ones who are actually seeing great performance from? So let's actually start to use them more. And I know a lot of brands just go, we need X amount of new creators each month. It's like, well, do you really like what's wrong with the ones we currently have? And it just becomes a number. So that's where you got to get away from that thinking as well, that if you have these benchmarks, that's all they are, they're benchmarks. They don't actually necessarily reflect the reality of your business.

Speaker B: You think there's any risk of maybe suddenly I've, uh, got a creator that's strongly associated with my brand. I mean, do you want to kind of nip that in the bud and say we're going to have to move on from this creator because maybe they're becoming.

Speaker A: It absolutely does. There is a huge risk if you, if you rely too heavily on a certain creator and then they become the face of the brand because then they have the leverage in the relationship as well, whereas you want to make sure it is fairly diversified so you're not just constantly showing the same face over and over again. So while there is that element of trust with having a certain face associated with the brand, it also introduces risk as well. So you always want to make sure you are bringing new faces into there as well. Um, one of the big trends at the moment is obviously founder content and CEO content. And this isn't just in like the, you know, the SMB mid market space. We're also talking about enterprise as well. You can see what has been happening with McDonald's and Burger King with their, with their CEOs uh, now fronting ad campaigns. That helps build trust, but it also introduces risk as well. Particularly with McDonald's CEO where people were then asking did he really eat the burger? Like why is he so awkward in camera? I'm like, is that an AI, is that an AI generated video? Yeah, so it always introduces that. But also it's about attention and hopefully it does lend the, to trust and someone being more willing to purchase from that brand. So it's a, um, it's a double edged sword when it comes to it if you over index on certain types of creators. So I know myself through my history, I've had that before where we've had influencers who became the face of the brand so much that people were asking this particular influencer if she owned the brand. And that was like, that was the light bulb moment for me back in 2019 of like, oh, we are, we are hugely at risk. That led to a conversation around like, okay, well what's that, what is actually um, the magnitude of that risk from a dollar figure. We tried to quantify that and then we very quickly moved to actually mitigate that risk by reducing our reliance on this particular influencer. But that was not great for her, but smart business sense for us.

Speaker B: What about negotiating with a, uh, creator so you've used their content, it performed well, you come back or it didn't perform as well as you thought, so you got a little bit your return on ad spend or whatever your KPIs are, we're a little under par or just uh, whatever you're, you know, you're not as quite as happy about it. Do you go back and kind of talk to them about it and maybe try to get a lower rate? Or do you feel like, hey look, these are all, you know, under a thousand dollars for a piece of creative. I mean that's their rate. I'm not going to talk them down from 300 to 200 or something. You know, what do you think is kind of the best practice there's.

Speaker A: Once you agree on the rate that's locked in, you pay them, you know, whatever that. Agreed, right. Was, let's say $400 for that piece of content. But if it didn't perform well for you, you can go back the next time and say, hey, we really liked your content, but it didn't actually perform up to the standard which we needed to. Would you be happy to accept a lower rate? I've never actually done that before. What I've typically done is just provided them that feedback and then they go and try to improve it. They make revisions to their existing content, um, or create something new with those, with those, um, notes, uh, in mind and we see how that one performs. The most common one, which I've done, is that when there is a creator who is performing really well, we then lock them in for a certain amount of creatives and we guarantee them that every month we are going to come to you with four new briefs. That's going to be normally $400. Uh, can we actually negotiate that? Um, that right down to 350 or 309 times out of 10 they're happy to do that because it locks in that work as well because they also want that consistency. But a lot of it is just down to relationship.

Speaker B: Let's talk a little bit about that. I mean, obviously, uh, a creator that's producing great content, you know, you do want to lock them in and you do want to have a good relationship with them. It is transactional, right? I mean it's time based for them. It takes them X hours to produce Y content. And so that's why I think I agree with you not negotiating the rate down like let's say content piece to content piece, but once you feel good about them, maybe even just the vibe, the energy, the personality, you know, between even yourselves, getting them locked into a set amount of content over a set period of time, there you, there's a little bit of room to negotiate. But to be honest, you know, two creators could produce the same content that you like equally well. One could take twice as long to produce it as the other. So it's impossible to really know.

Speaker A: You're absolutely right. Those are the factors we look at as well. We look at what time, like how long did it actually take them to fulfill the brief, um, how many reviews, visions it take. Because that all factors into how much time we need to spend managing, uh, you know, managing that relationship, but then also getting that creative and actually getting it at already. Sometimes if you're lucky, you have a creator who they produce something and it's at already straight away, you slap on, you know, some captions and it's ready to go. Whereas other ones, you still need to do some tweaking. You know, you need to fix the hook here. You need to edit some parts out. You know, you need to, you know, do whatever it is. But most of the time it does require some work. So you want to make sure that, you know, that time to, the time to utilization of that content is, is as short as possible. So you're able to also get that out into testing, you know, as well.

Speaker B: I'm trying to understand, is there anything else, any other tips or tricks that you want to, uh, to share?

Speaker A: Probably the main one is just looking at where it actually sits. Because in, within an organization, um, because I think that's something which always kind of gets confused with, um, uh, in marketing about is this a brand function? Is it a performance function, Is it a creative function? And I've been having this discussion for years, way back when, talking back like 2018, 2019, uh, it was something which squarely sat in the brand, uh, team or a social media team, because they were the ones on the platforms, they were the ones seeing all that content, scouting those influencers, reaching out to them and getting them to deliver content. But we were just taking their posts and just, you know, just using them as ads. Whereas that has evolved so much now. And particularly since, you know, we're moving to this world where it's marketing, it's not brand marketing or digital marketing, it's just marketing. And that's what the most effective marketing teams are, where there's no different silos and everyone is just collaboratively working together, which then changes the conversation around where does this particular piece of that partnership live? When you're talking about this performance creator who is creating content for the explicit purpose of running on ads, you need to have someone who actually knows how to brief them. And this is where the relationship is very different. Because you, yes, you do need those brand guardrails, you know, around who you're using, what they're saying. But the reality is they have a way of creating content. And what you're tapping into is the fact that they can convey your message to an audience better than you can. So you don't want to hamper them by putting too many guardrails. You want the right ones there, obviously. So in terms of where it sits, you know, the performance team is generally not really geared up for this as well, because they need to get the creative, they need to manage iteration and Then they need to then pass it on to the creative team to then make any edits. Where I've actually seen this work most effectively is when it actually sits as a function within the creative team and there's someone in that creative team who is managing, managing those relationships, who knows exactly the types of creators who are working, is privy to all the data about what credit is working, what isn't working and can constantly keep finding new, those new creators and briefing that into editors or perhaps even doing the editing themselves. I've got one client who has one person who manages all the influencer uh, relationships, all the UGC creators and edits all the videos. So the speed which they can create, get the content in created, make variations. They uh, are testing like 20 to 30 new new creators a week. It's unreal the velocity they have because of how they've centralized everything and they've just got this unicorn person who can do it all, who can do some basic graphics, can do the video editing and can also manage relationships.

Speaker B: Well this has been really entertaining. I'm so glad we got to go down this path because again, I think not every company approaches user generated content from solely a user generated content. They see it as somebody else doing some of the social lifting or driving more revenue based um, content like on YouTube in particular through affiliate. Well again thanks so much and greatly uh, appreciate your time and sharing your insights and knowledge and experience. It's really been eye opening.

Speaker A: My pleasure, thanks for having me Todd.

Speaker B: What's really sticking with me is that Hollywood casting mindset mal shared and how it translates into this simple reframe. Stop trying to do everything yourself and start hiring specialists for the role mark. Marketers who want to thrive should learn to adapt and start thinking like producers who need a cast of creators to fill specific roles. So here's a challenge for our listeners. Run a small low risk test. Find one or two UGC centric creators and brief them to create content for a performance campaign. Suggest a few hooks to try. Get the raw footage and run your test as Mal suggested. Put some budget behind it like 7x the CPA minimum to get a real signal from the algorithm. Then see if that authentic content gives you the kind of winners you can scale with. Because what this all boils down to is building a system for sourcing creators, testing creatives and cycling it out once it fatigues without burning out your team. At the end of the day the algorithms and the data are just tools. This is still a relationship based business and building strong partnerships with talented people will always be a valuable asset. Uh, my sincere thanks to Mao for his insights today. Thanks for listening, and I look forward to next time.