Jess Bachman Lights Creative Strategy On Fire transcript

[Music] foreign [Music] podcast thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of the show and I have one of my favorite people on in d2c e-commerce you yes you Jess Bachmann you are one of my favorite people in e-commerce on the show today to talk from fireteam to talk about creative strategy creative iteration what I really want to give you today is a method for generating creative that sells product based on the data that you are getting in your meta ads dashboard to use that data to iterate creative but something people talk about a lot the idea of using things like watch time and hook rate and that sort of thing I want to give you a method and by I want to give you a method what I really mean is I want to ask Jess to give you a method because he and his team fire team have generated a clear methodology for iterating on Creative to make creative perform better if you are trying to grow your eCommerce business with meta ads you know how important that is you get the idea creative sell product make money you win that's what we're getting at here today on the show let's jump in to want to kick the Kudos back to you because this is also one of my favorite podcasts so I'm happy to be here you were truly born for this medium and I can tell I also appreciate the diversity of guests that you get on here which is important too oh thanks man I uh you said that I was born for this medium at one point on Twitter and I was thinking about what that meant I was thinking what does it mean that I was born for this media and the actually the only thing I could think of is that you may or may not know this about me Jess but I I used to do some preaching I occasionally still do in my in my church setting and so uh with some background training there yeah I I feel like I've just changed my subject matter over from from the Bible to theology that's right to e-commerce and specifically bid Gap so it is funny I've thought about like you know I do some solo episodes that maybe is not something that other people do and I think sometimes people will ask me like what's your prep process for that sort of thing and it's like it's actually not that all Jeff definitely drop bullet points down and that kind of thing but yeah I feel comfortable talking to a mic so anyway thanks for saying that that's very nice and yeah I appreciate you saying that publicly in some other voices too sending me that listeners from your the social media Colossus that you are yeah it's very helpful okay so just before you are the co-founder and creative strategy director at fireteam tell people what fire team is so that everybody after so that after you tell them how to do it they all believe that you have the right credentials to tell them that yep fire team is a performance marketing agency that focuses mainly on Creative but I think where we're a bit different is that myself and the and the other two Founders came from a traditional creative agency Mad Men style making commercials and what we found there and I sort of ran the digital Department there and what we found now this is like coming up as people are getting more into Facebook ads client-wise Facebook ads and we finally were able to get some performance data on our creative which really does not exist in you know TV commercials type thing and it was kind of interesting because the traditional creatives did not want to hear about what worked or what didn't because the the metric there is like industry Awards you know how many freaking golden pencils do you have or whatever that's truly the metric and so that got kind of gross and we left to do performance creative but I still I still feel like we bring some of the traditional creative thinking or or juice to the to the mix as well well I would say one of the things that separates your content at least from everybody else is that it is drastically more creative in the true sense of that word than other people's and and like you know I this is this is part of why I say I like following you on the internet so much is because like you you actually have that kind of creative and one of the things I actually know about myself is that I am not a creative that when I think of that phrase there's people who who have an instinct to like come up with what I the distinguishing sort of attribute I think of creatives is is the ability to essentially create out of nothing they go to new places in their minds and they take go to the newspapers and I'm like much more of a an idea generator like I'm like I want to like I'm like uh if you were to put me in college like I would have been really happy to write persuasive essays that would have been my Approach whereas like I think there's a kind of approach to content that's much more creative and interesting and um and I I don't have that I just can't do it I've been around enough people who can do it to know that I can't and so I like love talking about that but then to to marry that get this like performance component is actually a really rare double skill set you're right I think the true creative types often either really struggle to like deal with metrics or or to deal with True Performance feedback it's really hard for them it's like it's like a muscle that's really hard for them to exercise or they actively don't want it you know like you said they want they want sort of other things and that sort of thing so yeah go ahead it's interesting going from traditional creative to Performance because you know two years ago creative was like the you know stepchild to Media buying you know and I think that's sort of changed a little bit and people start to understand that creative is important I'm just kind of sitting here being like like it was always it was just as important back then you know as it is now but I'm I'm thankful that people are really starting to turn a corner on the importance of of creative because you know in the traditional world like that's the only thing that matters yeah it's funny do you think that's a recent thing because my sense is long this is actually a good lead into the car to the bulk of the conversation here because my sense is that people actually have been saying creative as the differentiator in Performance Marketing like my entire time in the industry but but what I think they don't have is a way to like really create methodology around that or measure it so like I have my creative brief outline that I use in terms of the structure of something currently but I would say that like for when I hear you talk about it you've got like I think you're thinking probably more deeply and more detailed about it than I am as my sense but yeah I I think like I think people have been saying it for a while but but there's also like a lack of rigor around the concept yeah and it's it's hard to come up with ideas that aren't just you know um ugc I think there's a little bit of like a talent pipeline issue where we you know the industry doesn't have as much like the creative people you go to you can go to school for ads like there's ad schools but you then don't you go to a traditional agency you don't come into d2c so you know creative strategist is is a term that's gaining in popularity I do think we have some time to like build up the skills in here and that's why I have that's why I have a like a really positive outlook for DDC in general because I feel like we're at like you know second gear in terms of the creative possibilities in this industry and once people get more skills and and and more comfortable doing it and experiment more there's a lot of Headroom to improve it's really interesting to hear you say that about creative specifically because that's exactly how I feel about some of the financial Concepts that I tend to talk about a lot and I know that in part because of my own Journey on this where like I just know how much more skilled I am in that area now I've been in the industry for coming up on nine years and even the conversations that are publicly being had are so much more developed than they were when I started and so to hear you reflect on that from a creative perspective is really interesting you know because it's sort of parallel to that same thing there's just sort of like a growing skill level as you get around people and it's and as there's more content out there and as as stuff gets produced yeah it's really really interesting okay let's talk about this so the big thing I brought you so some of this started my Twitter spat which is how all good conversations start between Taylor holiday I was in there a little bit you were in there a couple others and Taylor was making I think what is it was a good point which is that essentially at a point that I think you agree with which is that like when you go look at things like click-through rate in your ads or video watch time or you know one of any other sort of what we'd call Upper funnel metrics sort of metrics that are not actually purchase Behavior metrics they they don't correlate to the return on ad spend very well and that leads some people to say therefore you should not look at those metrics at all and you should only really worry about your purchase behavior when you're analyzing your when you're analyzing your metads and Taylor was making that point in a sort of strong opinionated way as you'd want to do I have always agreed with that but what I heard you say in response to that after some argumentation around baseball stats was that actually that you agreed with that point that those metrics do not correlate to roast in so many words done the math yes yeah right so I've run the studies a million times and and stopped five years ago I stopped running them not even like creative metrics like there's not much that correlates you to grow with no it's funny actually the one that was like the closest to relating was CPM with a positive correlation and this is so this is another funny like little mythbuster thing but they're like the higher the CPM it seemed like there was a better row ass which is sort of interesting and counter-intuitive but anyway I don't want to get down that pathway but the point you made is actually not that those correlate but that using those to iterate on your creative to use those as signals of user behavior in relation to purchase behavior that does correlate essentially now I don't know that you've cited in a math pure correlation kind of way but that you regularly with your team use that that information to iterate on Creative create new versions and then improve performance over time so for example let's just let's just get I'm sure we'll have more examples here in a little bit but you talked about or let's say you um noticed that maybe we'll call it hook rate I don't know if you use that phrase or not but you know the idea that sort of like the percentage of people who view your ad that actually watch a significant portion of it maybe you would see a low hook rate and go okay we need to create a better headline or first line or whatever it is and that way people will engage with the content more and then they'll get to the sort of Education body portion of the ad or whatever it is and and Etc and so then you would go back to the web and you would say okay people are not watching enough of the video how do we hook them you know create a stronger hook in the beginning to get them to watch more of it and then that will end up creating a better ad so I was very fascinated by your comment about that because of I think that what you're saying is actually different than what Taylor is saying and and ends up being um a really potentially useful idea to help people come up with an actual methodology for iterating on their creative so that's a long-winded intro to the point but and you can clarify anything that you want there Jess but talk to me about that of the big picture and then let's start to dive in what I really want you to do is is Spill The Secret Sauce here tell people how you guys do it and and all that so yeah open book so I'll just say quickly that the correlation issue fundamentally I feel like it's just a dirty data problem and it's just you're not gonna be able to find a correlation between almost anything because of a million different reasons what I don't want to do is turn into some like creative nihilist and be like this doesn't matter so like creative it's my job like what how do I get better like I need to do my job I need to make better creative for for my clients so I need to figure out ways to improve and so by doing these iterations this is sort of this is the way that we do it yeah that that makes sense I actually like this the idea that like you sort of have to take responsibility for that because that is what creative like oh that's what you're supposed to do just like have just just not not not listen to what your users are doing at all you know it's that kind of idea yeah okay so let's talk about it so what do you do so creative is your job so what do you do to generate creative that sells product because that is the Difference Maker for a lot of people trying to get their business into the eight figure range or seven figure range or whatever right so I'm I'm not going to get in you know there's other people can talk about like the creative strategy and like coming up with you know reading reviews and all that stuff but I can certainly talk about the iteration part because that's a huge piece yeah so there's there's two things I can share I can share like what I'm looking at in ads manager and some of those metrics are hugely important in the way that they're defined uh and then I can show like we have a creative process called it's a very long acronym it's called the code attacked c-o-d-a-t-a-c-t but it is a process that we've developed to generate a lot of ideas very quickly Co d a t a c t code attacked yeah okay great but you know we have an agency or if six people we have 10 clients we gotta generate ideas very quickly we used to like have like an hour-long meeting like per client once or twice you know once every two weeks or something and then it just became too many meetings so I'm a huge process person so we figured out at like the most streamlined approach to maximize idea generation so I can get into that into in the back half yeah okay so so you want to start with the iterations we want to start with idea generator well I'll just start with the the metrics because they kind of need to be defined in particular so let me sort of share my screen okay so if you are listening to this actually these are all now uploading with video to Spotify so if you're listening on Apple I don't know if there's video there because I haven't never owned an Apple mobile device but Jess is sharing his screen so if you are not and you're not saying this it might be very helpful to you to check out the screen share here if you're if you're just listening to this because we're going to have some screen shares we're just going to walk you through it I'll do my best to do the audio versions as well because I know I listen to it on mayor pod so oh yeah I can't even imagine watching a podcast I know I was like shocked when people told me like hey can you go on YouTube I like to watch I was like really you guys but anyway that's I guess what people like so anyway so in terms of creative there's there's four metrics that we really look at three of them are the most important one is a little bit of a wild card and so a lot of them are custom metrics so the first is the thumb stop which is three second video plays divided by Impressions a lot of people know what this is it's like basically did you get someone to stop and so like we like we try to do above 30 is like where we try and land on for that and we've seen that like even like across clients this doesn't really have a lot of you know flow or or flux to it like below below 20 is absolutely problematic can be fixed 40 is like really good let me just do a look at the last seven days instead of just one one day here and so we try and break up the ad into different chunks so the first is the thumb stop and like if something's low it can absolutely be fixed by throwing a different like a different Banner for context or we are not a fan of doing like super weird gooey thumb stops because like I feel like you by the super weird and GUI do you mean clickbait yeah click yeah yeah yeah so why not why not just try to run that thumbstop to 60 or whatever you know with like something crazy whatever right because we we call it the tactic we use is called continuity goo where you can do something weird it just has to connect to the rest of the ad like if all you're doing is just like smearing some ketchup on something that's gonna stop people but then you're gonna then you effectively start the ad after that after three seconds and you literally have half the people left so you're like starting the ad with half the people you haven't really hooked anyone but you know example like go ahead it's worth hitting this point because I asked you that question but actually 100 agree with you that like you actually want to avoid clickbait because part of the goal of creative is to be the targeting right and so you want you don't just want to reach the most people you want to reach the right people that's like that's like the whole power of meta ads is it's so good at reaching the right people so you want to reach the right people and then of the group of the right people you want as many of them as possible to see and want and buy your product Etc and and that sounds mercenary but maybe another way to say that the you want to serve that person as well as possible with your product so and so you have to show them how you're how you're gonna deliver on the promise that you're promising and so when you run super high you know clickbaity kind of stuff it actually can be effective depending on some things but like it's often the case that by running that approach you just kind of tracked the wrong people and like you said like half of them drop off and it's a fact you might as well effectively chop it in half and it doesn't really matter and part of the thing with like the clickbait if you think of like BuzzFeed as the extreme example of clickbait or the sort of canonical Evangel example of it anyway if you think about that that's because BuzzFeed is paid on page views you know and I'm keeping you there right so so it actually doesn't really matter as much for them is my guess they want to keep the right person but they also want to just keep them clicking and scrolling whereas I'm paid on purchases and so it's just a different game right so a good example of like using clickbait but doing it well like we have another client they sell a protein bar and so the thumb stop was this woman pulling a chicken breast out of her purse and so that you know that stopped people was like you know 50 or more but she then continued it's like this is not how you eat protein on the go you know you use this bar instead and so that became a very successful ad because you know so you know come up with like who your target is don't start with what like what's the interesting thing start with who the target is and then figure out what is the interesting version of that you know makes so much sense and then you measure that with that hook right three second views over Impressions you go create a custom metric in your dashboard you call them stop and go from there the next one is hold rate and our opinion A lot of people calculate this wrong but we use through plays divided by three second plays so basically 15 second plays divided by three second place some people do impression you know through plays divided by Impressions or something but the reason why we do this three second play is because we want to isolate that second part of the ad if we just include Impressions a like an excellent thumb stop would affect the hold rate but since we're basically starting this from the three second to 15 second we are isolating that to see if that part is problematic yeah yeah I love this idea it's funny I was just setting this up and I again per that Twitter conversation I was just starting to play with some of these column setups of my own and I wasn't sure how to think about three play versus three second plague I was I was initially not using three second play I thought that might not tell you enough the thing I might care about is through playover Impressions but I think what you're doing is pretty smart here to say let's get that first release seconds and then think about that next chunk after that which is like are we actually keeping people yeah like hook essentially in the thumb stop or hook rate or whatever into hold rate I think is is really good right because we do see ads with good thumb stops and poor hold rates and I'm not I'm not going to go into the correlation thing but from our from just our general sense pull rate is much more correlated to a better performance than thumb stop so I do need to isolate that part that makes a lot of sense because the hold rate is going to qualify people it's going to um select for people who are actually engaging more of the content more deeply you know which which is I think really the key it's part of why I I like long-form content quite a bit is that like yes you have a good chance you're gonna reach less people but the people you reach you're always trying to reach a subset of a subset with a creative right it's like you know if one out of 100 people click that's pretty good and then if you know and then if four out of those people who four out of 100 clickers buy for most brands that's very good as well so like you're reaching this very small subset of people and so my goal is not to actually reach super massive all the time it's to talk to the right person the right way and it's where like you know the concept of hold rate I think is helpful to Think Through how long is somebody engaging with this for right in terms of scaling we try to think of it like each ad has its own total addressable Market of people that resonate with that concept I completely agree yeah yeah and that's totally right it's the reason why split testing sometimes is a bad idea too which is that like actually your ads may just reach different people it's not about one better than the other it's about like reaching as many people as possible and yeah that's right each ad has its own total adjustable Market I think it's a very helpful way of saying it and then the third is click-through rate and this one's actually changed recently we used to use unique outbound click-through rate but now we we're sort of forced to use unique link click-through rate and like look at the difference between between these 0.34 to one percent one to two percent and the reason is because of Facebook shops any like traffic diverted to here is not to shops is not calculated it's not outbound if it's going to shops and so if you're running traffic to shops you need to use Link click-through rate yeah I just made the same switch for the same reason so are you just as a side note but are you guys seeing shops ads perform well or just shops perform well it's hard to tease out I think we see lower aovs and the typical stuff yeah we I have at least one client this is like one of my hobbies of advice right now I have at least I have one client that introduced shops and it was like 30 more volume overnight at the same row ass it was like just free money and so yeah I'm a big fan for right now I mean it's at least worth testing right and I'm always a little bit skeptical because I feel like Matt is going to divert like the best traffic to shops because of their product and we'll see how that pans out you know down the road once it's competitive um and then you click the rate so that's again validating somebody's actually willing to go and explore the product more by leaving the ad and going to going to the product and this is the metric that's the hardest to Benchmark because like if you look at the breakdown the age breakdown it's like old people click it three percent you know 20 year olds click it you know half a percent and then you get like a one percent average and so it's real hard to it's almost impossible to compare between clients but it is also hard to compare between ads because you know if you're using broad some ads if you're targeting old people they're gonna you know go to the old and they'll click more so um do you when you compare these metrics and you Benchmark these metrics do you think of it as a per client comparison or like like each client has their own benchmarks or do you think of it as some benchmarks across the board because yeah I'll just leave there yeah so um thumb stop hold rate are across the board for sure click-through rate it's like the media buyer needs to know in their bones what that should be for the client you know they have a good sense of it okay but you you do find that's interesting you find that thumb stop and hook rate or hold rate excuse me Thumbs Up and Hold rate actually tend to be fairly consistent across some of those demographics across clients okay do you have benchmarks for those two you said 40 is like very good for thumb stop I don't think we did that for hold rate yeah so I posted a lot about it I think it's like 30 percent is good below 20 or below like 15 is like super problematic 20 is is not bad 30 is good and rarely do you find something above 40 percent and if it's above like 50 it's almost like hold bait yeah right right yeah yeah I mean maybe you rarely find about 40 just but I'm just outputting Banger after Banger so that's probably what um I believe it I'm kidding I'm kidding yeah okay that's great so so we'll say 40 thumb stop we'll say 30 hold rate we feel very good about those and you you can probably win at less than 30 hold rate but it but if you want to smash it 30 is the is maybe where you want to go right and the the ads do need to be longer than 15 seconds for the hold rate to be accurate otherwise it's not accurate yeah that's right because through play in in meta let's just clarify really fast three plays either the entire ad or at least 15 seconds of the ad and so if you're out of 10 seconds then you're gonna get a three play if they finish it so when we're reviewing creative we look at those three metrics we first determine it did it perform well and that's based off you know in platform triple well wherever we get that sense first and if it did or if it didn't we figure out where the issues are or maybe why it performed well but the the last metric is actually conversion rate which we do find varies by add yeah oh for sure yeah why do you think that is because some ads do selling more or some some ads you can like basically pitch the product in the ad and some ads basically kick people to the landing page to do that work in particular you know yeah yeah and I also think there's different strategies which is like there's like the convert a small percentage of a large number of people and there's also convert a large percentage of a smaller number of people and so you might get like worse hold rate Etc but the people you hold are very interested and they're going to buy or you might get like a you know like again an ad that's maybe your chicken ad is a good example of this like where it would be like you're reaching a ton of people and maybe you actually you do get some lucky blue click bait type stuff mixed in there you convert less of them but you know if you get enough of those people to actually engage with the ad and math works out and so you can actually win you can win multiple ways with conversion right the the biggest and most fun Mysteries are when like the hold rate's good the thumb stops good even the click-through rate's good but the for some reason the conversion rate is not there particularly to the rest of the ads and so it is rare but it certainly does happen and a lot of times we find it's not like a matter of like people are just confused about what's going on for example we had an ad for this client javasoc where you know people use this product it's a iced coffee Koozie to go into Target on their target run and keeps their you know iced coffee cold the whole time so we had an AdWords like come with me on my target run and they went through all that and it's like you know I love my Java sock our opinion was like people were just sort of clicking through thinking they were almost going to the Target website and that wasn't the case at all and so the you know the conversion rate was poor the bounce rate was high and time on site was also very low as well so that does happen for sure yeah okay so that's really interesting so let's so those are the metrics that's how you calculate them talk about what you do when you see an ad that has let's let's start from the beginning so let's say you want to talk about thumb stop first of all do you see ads that have low thumb stop but good hold rate good click-through rate Etc like I mean like do you see ads where like the breakdown is very clearly in that one space we don't see winners with some stops below 20 I'll say that I mean what I'm saying is like let's say it's not a winner but the hold rate I guess maybe it's just not getting delivery at that point but if the hold rate is high enough but the hook rate is low enough or but the thumb stop is low enough do you just go back and say like hey keep all the same everything after three seconds maintain exactly as it is but we just gotta change the hook right so so that's what that's what we'll do when we sort of review creative I can I can go into our process for the code attack all right so so I'm gonna stop sharing this screen and I'm gonna share another one but the but the first part of the code detect is the C and the O is to collect and organize like brainstorm like you don't there's no new ideas out there and you have to generate you do have to generate new ideas based of other stuff and you need inspiration and you need stuff to bounce to bounce ideas off of so we have a process where if we see an ad in our feed that we like we just you know save it to our phones and we toss it into this slack Channel called adspiration or if I see something you know Savannah Sanchez will post something on Twitter I'll be I'll just toss that in there which allows people to discuss it in that slack Channel or not we then have our VA who takes what's in that channel and puts it into a notion database of inspiration you've heard me talk before about more Staffing and I'm talking about them again right now because I love more Staffing more Staffing is a recruiting a agency in the Philippines that helps you find incredible Filipino e-commerce talent and bring them to your business 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my business you you should too go to more now dot Co if you want to expand your team with Incredible talent in the Philippines more now dot co go check them out and let me sort of share my screen here again so we have we have a a database of just stuff that I pulled from foreplay stuff that I pulled from Twitter wherever and we have this sort of ready to go for this particular meeting this meeting we have every two weeks and it's a two hour meeting where we generate maybe 90 of the ideas for all the clients and you're so okay that's interesting so you're working in that meeting from that collection of ads to ideas for clients can you talk more about that meeting yeah so the the meeting actually starts with a we have a template in notion the meeting actually starts with a review of the previous ads that we've put in Market in the last two weeks I have enough data that can be reviewed so usually like three four hundred dollars worth of spend yeah and then so we actually we actually have see these we have like performance data in notion our VA will then take the data that we have on like click-through rate and put that in notion on all of these ad projects that are currently in Market that we need to review okay uh so we will we'll review whether it's like a winner a loser based off you know Rachel our media viral so make that call and then we'll look at the thumb stop and be like how can we improve it or not what we found is that for ads that are close like let's say our the target Roos or let's say the target CPA was like 30 for ads that are close like maybe maybe they're like 35 40 45 we can fix problems with that ad and get them over the line for the CPA Target sometimes that you know if an ads like you know 150 and the target's 30 like a you know a 20 Improvement on the on the thumb stops not gonna do it you know so we'll kind of like cut bait on that that's interesting so you're really looking at sort of like mid-tier performers and you're using this process not to not to resurrect the debt here but to you know fix some wounds to keep the analogy there right uh and and figure out if you can kind of make it go forward right yeah and so this creates a lot of iterations on existing ads and you know sometimes we'll we'll iterate up to like there'll be four iterations later but we have found that the the winners like the true winners that you can spend a hundred thousand dollars on are not the ones that were the first try you know it was like the third try or something yeah super interesting I'm replaying in my mind some of the winning ads that I've had and I'm thinking that you're I think you're right about that that like you know I wouldn't say I used I didn't use this against surgical of a process I mean you're being really detailed here with this notion thing you've got somebody inputting data all those things you got a clear process driven meeting you said you're great at process I'm terrible at process terrible so I I have a hard time functioning that way but I think I'm doing the same thing I'm thinking about an ad that somebody created for a client of mine and then I looked at it and went oh this is doing pretty well what if we did this and took the same concept and thought like here's why I think it's working and you're guessing right I mean there's some when you when you do the thing where you look at like like let's say thumb stop well if it's not very too easy I think maybe the hold rate is a really interesting one of these where you're kind of when you look at something an ad that has a certain hold rate you then have to hypothesize why it is or isn't working and that's going to be a matter of experience and subjectivity and some of those things but you might be right you know it's the thing like when you do that analysis there sometimes you could be right and so I've definitely done that and gotten to it you know iteration three and four like you're saying to where it takes an ad that was like spending some performing pretty well gone to like absolute spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on this ad you know business changing performance that leads into one of the biggest the biggest reasons to do iterations is not just for the performance piece of things but like how do we as a creatives get better at what we do and this is like watching game film you know in sports like Vienna is like what we did and it's not just like the ones that were below the mark like the things that were above you know that are above Target or who that that there really did work what about those worked because we have to make we do have to make new ads and every time you make a new ad it's like you need a a core of like learnings to to go off of if you want to be competitive you know right right and that's part that's the agency differentiator actually is that you're learning from all the data you have access to that that if you're an individual brand that you don't it's like organization institutional knowledge is what holiday calls it I think that's like a really helpful phrase and it's it and so you're actually generating that by watching your game film here and so we as we're going through this meeting we we have our own sort of database of learnings that we sometimes like sometimes we will put them in there and then sometimes there are like a suspected truth sometimes we'll actually test them sometimes their gospel sometimes they end up being discredited or whatever but like this is our Corpus of information that we build on to then make better and better and better better ads dude I so just click that back down you've got a learning here that's robot voice people just love it that is so funny that is so funny all of the kids love the robot voice that's a hilarious that's a hilarious point right well like with a team you have to verbalize you have to like discuss this stuff and you have to you know just make claims about something for it to be true you just like I'm terrible at having things in my head so I need to get them out of my head and into like a notion database there are some that we do more rigorous experiments on where it's truly like scientific method where we have a hypothesis as well this is more than just like you know we test robot voice or not robot voice and come up with a you know a conclusion as well so we do run that part as well so you showed one there let's just talk about it really fast you should the top one that you just shared there was no context copy versus max contest the idea just adding more info about the product increase CTR and the hypothesis is yes it will have you have you tested that one yet no this is this is the our latest one we actually have this meeting tomorrow so hopefully we we get there I have a strong Theory I actually recorded an episode about this that like basically like yeah I call it Bridging the digital Gap like giving people as much information as possible about the product is like just it goes really really far for helping them want to buy it and there's just there's just like people think there's like a creativity problem but not everybody actually needs to be just Bachman like what you can do creatively is actually different than a lot of other people and you can actually do this just by just by explaining more clearly you can be persuasive essay Andrew and not not true creative I was totally in the same camp with uh we have a copywriting tactic where we call Mega ads where it's basically like a landing page below the Seymour if people want to see more it's got everything in there but what we found is with some of our clients like those weren't there were some ads that just had like no context to them and they were crushing so I'm like what is going on here let's turn this into an actual experiment and test it out yeah I like it you know yeah it probably varies from Cloud to client yeah interesting okay really cool so okay anything else about this meeting and about this this notion dashboard did I cut you off somewhere a big part of the big part of the meeting is creating projects very quickly you like you have to be fast with it so all we do is just we put in like the name of the thing we'll just put like a little one line gist of what it is these are all the ones that we created the last two weeks one line just because if you get hung up and like what's the quote or whatever you're just not gonna get we want to create we come out of this project with like 20 or this meeting with like 28 things and so that's it and people go execute off those exactly right and then so the the second half of the meeting is looking at this inspiration and you know with powerful for the on the agency side is like we'll look at something we'll see this like weird ad Inception thing and it's like oh that could work for one client but could also work for like three clients and we just like create three different you know projects very quickly sort of based off that and like having you know talking about this stuff in person is also hugely important I don't I do not think the best work is done by a creative strategist like in a vacuum um you know by themselves so best I like we we often when we're brainstorming we're also like we need to get the bad ideas out first and then the good ideas come but if you're just doing it by yourself you almost don't even know what's a good idea and what's a bad idea so we review all of this inspiration and then create new projects from that as well it's really cool okay I love that so you're really pulling from a lot of sources here when I asked you to come on this show I wanted you to talk about the sort of iterative method that you're talking about but what I actually hear well what I really wanted you to talk about whatever you actually do that you've seen to be effective but but what you're actually talking about here is something actually quite a bit more thorough than that it's like you are working in iterative ways off of these ads right so it's like and then at the same time you're trying to figure out a creative way to generate truly net new ideas including these like sort of sub Concepts like robot voice a good example of this like the notion is like we're just gonna try and do this thing that grabs attention because people like it you know like and and it's not really a true creative idea it's in terms of it being this concept or whatever it's just like a thing to Pepper in to make an ad more interesting and to sort of break down these different parts and at the same time yeah you've got net new ideas completely like how do we come up with something that we're just not thinking about at all and and applying quite a bit of rigor across that whole process you nailed it preach yeah yeah yeah okay interesting so tell me sometimes it worked let's talk about an iteration one you don't have to name a client or whatever but like can you reference anywhere where you you saw like yeah we addressed this particular part of the ad based on these metrics and it changed the performance significantly yeah there's a there's a bunch of ads and our really go-to when the thumb stop is not there is just to add like a banner or a bubble that just gives a little bit of extra context like or just a little bit more targeting juice sort of applied to it like we like we have a tested essentially some on-screen texts essentially somewhere right that is just going to call it out a little bit better yeah we have a tactic we call hey lawyers where like if you're using Broad and you want to reach lawyers like you start the ad with hey lawyers like the only people who are going to watch that are lawyers and so it's good that's so juicy targeting for Facebook then find other people that look like the people that are responding to that so yeah so a lot of times so that's so funny that's so direct uh you know it's not yeah like I always make the distinction in my mind between sort of like Clarity and creative and it and I don't actually mean it's like a hard line but it it's like a really it is a clever way to just say like no just be really direct tell people who you're trying to talk to yeah and it you know as it like I've been a creative director and designer for a while so I understand the plight of my people who cringe when they when something is so like obvious but at the same time like you know Barry's gotta make ugly ads there's absolutely a make obvious ads like you know have those in the account once you have the obvious ads in the account then you can start to experiment with stuff that's like less obvious more clever more Innovative or whatever but you need to have like the hey lawyer stuff in there first that's so funny that's exactly how I thought you and I have not talked about this but this is exactly how I think of this issue which is like essentially what you want to do is create a base rate you want to create like an ad that you're pretty sure is not the best ad you'll ever make but that also probably will get some spend at your Target and the key to doing that is Clarity and it's like it's just like be as clear and direct as possible because some subset of people as long as your product has any audience some subset of people is going to be interested in buying it so just tell them exactly what your product is talk to the exact person you want to talk to make it really clear and just try and just assume that some people are going to buy that at your base rate and like you said it's not going to be the greatest ad you ever make it's not going to be the Super winner it's not going to be creative really but yeah just just go hey lawyers on it I think that's I think it's a really clever way to I think it's a really clever way to to frame it too is is the idea of hey lawyers and even adding literally that exact thing like just yeah what it's also going to do is grab people who are lower in the stage of awareness people who are just ready to buy familiar with the space or whatever and that's like the lowest hanging fruit which you need to do but the hardest part is like convincing someone who didn't even know they had this problem in particular which you can do in an ad it's just harder and it takes more skill and it kind of required to reaching some of the bigger the bigger numbers you know okay last question any any other any other examples of of things you've seen that sort of iteratively done that I'm thinking here about this The Listener who's like okay I've got a bunch of creative right now I want to try and go I'm ready to go analyze thumb stop and hold rate and those kinds of and click rate and and conversion rate any other examples you could think of times where you've sort of seen tactics that have meaningfully improved the performance of ads that somebody could just sort of walk away with and go try right now yeah so there's a tactic that we Deploy on all clients you may have heard me talking about it but the concept of a base unit so we make long ads almost all of our ads are like over a minute sometimes longer so we create a an ad unit usually it's like 45 seconds and it's got everything that we want people to know about the brand or offer or whatever it's got the best ugc reactions it's got review call outs you know the usp's done the best way and then we'll put the chicken ad in front of that one and so you know chicken ad might be 20 seconds long so what we find is that people who watch 20 seconds or 30 seconds of an ad they're like locked in so why shut the door on them like give them more to watch more opportunity to sell and so we have a metric that is a 60 completion rate or sorry a 60 second completion rate which you can find in there and like two percent is good three percent is very excellent and two percent does not sound like a lot of people but I guarantee you those are the buyers like those are the people who are like coming in conversion rate of like 10 you know whatever you know so so you're literally just stacking ads on top of each other yep yep cover cover all your bases because a big challenge I see with Brands and I watch ads and I'm like you know it was 14 seconds but like where's the rest where's the rest of it like all you need to do is create one unit that's like excellent put a lot of time and effort to it and then keep running with that over and over with other that's so smart man that's so obvious and so smart Jess we need to be done I I'm actually sort of amazed at how much we're thinking about this the same way I did not expect this because I do think your skill set is unique and different than mine which I love that like you know some of the ways you're thinking about even I didn't know that you you favored longer ads the way that you did I definitely do and it's because people just need a certain amount of information to buy and there's so much emphasis out there A lot of times in in anything related to social media on being like sure oh people have no no attention span you know that whole thing I just think that's that's wrong like like you're not actually trying to reach most people like I said you're trying to reach the subset of people who are interested in buying and those people will give you their attention so yeah it's really interesting I'm I'm very helped by this I think you can expect me very likely to blow up your DMs with more questions as I try to implement this and then at some point you probably should charge me for your time but I'll hold off on that as long as possible because I'm going I'm on Mentor past you know where to find it all right so there you go okay so that's actually a good final lead in here what about if people want to learn more from you work with you all those kinds of things where can they find you at higher fire team obviously on the internet fire team is there I'm currently rapping by the way I don't even references earlier my fire team shirt that you graciously sent me my son my three-year-old's favorite shirt that I own so that's good but yeah definitely wearing that for today's today's interview so so talk about where else people can find you yeah if you just like Google my name in Mentor pass you'll find me there but and there's a link to it in the show notes so you don't have to Google the name you can just go right to those show notes and go find Jess and pay them all the money to do it for you one of a big initiative that we're doing uh at the end of this year into next year is the final T in code detect is teach I don't know if you're familiar with like the learning pyramid where it's like retention rates of different styles of learning and like the best way to learn is to teach and so um we are putting everything we know in and the way about we think into I'm not even calling a course it's called fire school it's going to be uh cohort based I've done enough courses where I've paid a thousand dollars and got three three modules in and and bounced you know so so we're doing like a cohort based uh very sort of school oriented thing I think I think if you go there's a link in the description but I'm just gonna say it's fireteam.is slash fire school and you'll find more information about it there cool yeah go sign up for that go get on that email list and that way you can know when that's coming I you know you showed me the basic outline and it's like it's something it's so thoughtful and so much deeper than so much of what is out there I am very interested in it when the time comes yeah I'm excited about that go check that out for sure so okay and then fire team dot is pretty much everything else is there project.is yeah yep cool all right man thank you so much for your time I really appreciate it I think this is very very helpful very tactical people I think can probably find a few things that they can directly Implement which is awesome appreciate it always good to talk to you yep and I love it that we're uh we're getting closer together on the ideological front of this yeah oh yeah yeah soon you're going to be running straight up broad one CBO bid caps on everything you do and you'll never turn off an ad and we'll just be super happy about it okay that's I think those were your words that you're saying to me just off Mike a second ago I think what you said directly was Andrew I've noticed that you're right about everything you say that was I think what you said but all right man thanks [Music] all right I hope you can see why I like Jess so much after that conversation just one of the best thinkers out there that I know of bringing real methodology to his creative process to Performance creative uh you just heard the interview you don't need to recap it just awesome just awesome dude awesome thinker who I'm really excited to have had that conversation with I learned a ton from it I hope you did too you can follow up with Justin all the places that you usually can and they are all in the show notes make sure you follow him on Twitter honest to goodness one of my very favorite follows at higher fire team go check that out he's just a legend on Twitter he's so funny and so clever and so creative and informative all those things too go hire him on Mentor pass go hire fire team if you need great creative in your business for your Performance Marketing like just really really great people so there is that in the next couple weeks I have a couple of interviews coming up that I am freaking pumped about Patrick could do is coming back the proprietor of Supply Razer company you haven't heard from Patrick a lot recently including on Twitter we're going to talk about what is life like after the exit he's now exited his business online file back you could prep for that episode by going back and listening to my episode titled Patrick caduce old Supply we want I think by the first episode I released when I started the Andrew Ferris podcast one of the very first ones if not the very first uh he talked through the exact market for businesses for e-commerce businesses what was happening with him after you exited Supply we're gonna catch up it's gonna be really good and then I've got Sarah Moree coming up soon a client of mine running Curie deodorant I can tell you that brand is a monster of a business doing incredible things I don't want to spoil that interview but it's going to be a great conversation because Sarah is a freaking killer operator and so you're going to want to hear from her as well subscribe right now wherever you're listening to this or watching it to make sure you don't miss out on those episodes all right all the rest of the usual stuff coming don't forget to go follow up with my friends at more Staffing virtual assistants can be helpful virtual professionals can be transformative to your business so go hire virtual Professionals in the Philippines with my friends at more Staffing at morenow.co you can also follow me in all the usual places at Andrew J Ferris on Twitter email me at podcast ajfgrowth.com like I said subscribe wherever you are rate review share this with a friend who needs to hear about it I appreciate all that stuff so much it really does mean a lot to me when you do that so thank you very much for listening for watching as always and I will see you next time [Music]