The argument in one line.
Modern marketing is a numbers-and-response game at every budget level — the brands that scale are the ones that move fast, test everything organically first, and treat paid media as a validation machine rather than a launch event.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You run a product or service business and want a clear, level-by-level marketing playbook matched to your current spend.
- You're a solo founder or small team spending under $10K/month on marketing and unsure whether to prioritize organic or paid.
- You're a marketing director at a mid-size brand (spending $100K–$1M/month) trying to justify brand-awareness spend to a finance team that only trusts ROAS.
- You manage influencer relationships and want a framework for deciding between micro-armies vs. anchor talent.
- You're a creative professional who hasn't figured out how to price your skills or position yourself in the current market.
SKIP IF…
- You're looking for platform-specific tutorials (TikTok setup, Meta Ads Manager walkthroughs) — this is strategy, not implementation.
- Your business is purely B2B enterprise sales with no consumer-facing component — the organic social frameworks here assume a consumer audience.
The full version, fast.
The playbook is the same at every budget level — it just gets louder. At $0, organic social is free attention with real upside; at $10/day on Meta you're validating, not launching. The mechanism is a feedback loop: post organically to find what resonates, take the winners into paid, double down on what gets ROAS, and never stop testing creative. Brand risk and approval committees are the enemy — the 'permanent bias for action era' means any pause costs compounding opportunity. At scale, the game shifts from measurable ROAS to brand awareness and monoculture moments, but the cultural habits formed at level one — move fast, trust creative, kill the committee — are what let you survive the transition.
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Create a free account →Who's talking.
00:00guestGrant Owen
00:00hostUnnamed host
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 11:56
01 · Level 1: Zero to $10K
Organic social as free attention arbitrage; $10/day Meta validation loop; empathy over creativity; expert-on-camera beats founder-on-camera.
11:56 – 22:57
02 · Level 2: $10K to $100K
Building the organic+paid feedback loop; content market fit before brand fit; separating brand account from content strategy; bias for action as competitive edge.
22:57 – 39:00
03 · Virality, Funnels, and Tribal Pillars
Why virality raises the floor for conversion; the five tribal content pillars; qualifiers and curiosity gaps; covert vs. overt personality injection.
39:00 – 1:01:00
04 · Level 3: $100K to $1M
When measurability breaks; MER as a metric; betting on one new channel; team structure at scale; customer data for real personas; building community flywheel.
1:01:00 – 1:12:00
05 · Storytelling, Trend Hacking, and Brand Stealing
Using customer data for storytelling; trend-setting vs. trend-adapting based on where the customer sits on the bell curve; creative stealing in the post-originality era.
1:12:00 – 1:23:00
06 · AI in Marketing — Where It Fits and Where It Doesn't
AI in team workflows vs. generative content; Claude/LLM use for briefing and copy; AI personas vs. real influencer armies; 'wait till end of year' on AI-generated creative.
1:23:00 – 1:33:00
07 · Level 4: Over $1M a Month
Retaining bias for action at scale; how to structure specialist teams by platform; the director of marketing role collapsing into creative director; what the 'killer' hire looks like.
1:33:00 – 1:44:22
08 · Level 5: Unlimited Budget + What's Underemphasized
Monoculture campaigns and mass-market moments; Claude/Anthropic as the best current example of scaling influencer; the Mercedes thought experiment; volume and scale are always underestimated.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Organic social is the first time in history you can get attention for free — a brand with an iPhone can reach the same people as a brand with a TV budget.
- $10/day on Meta is not a marketing budget — it's a validation machine. You're buying information, not customers.
- Empathy beats creativity every time: understanding what your customer wants to watch matters more than being inherently creative.
- Brand risk aversion is now the biggest threat to brand growth — the cost of moving slow exceeds the cost of any individual mistake.
- The modern marketing team is a mini media company: an organic pod and a paid pod that share creative and data in real time.
- Content market fit comes before brand fit — it doesn't matter if it's your brand account, a random account, or a clips page, as long as it reaches the right people.
- Virality raises the floor. A million-view video that doesn't sell anything still earns you the reach to serve your next, more tactical video to a pre-qualified audience.
- The best creators for a brand are almost always already in the customer base — most brands never look there.
- A $50,000 meeting is the hourly cost of everyone in the room. Creative decisions with a 13-person review will always produce worse creative than decisions made by two people who actually make content.
- At $100K/month, measurability breaks down — the brands that survive the transition are the ones that already have bias for action baked into the culture.
- Trend hacking only works after you have a tested content strategy. Brands that try to hack trends before building formats just waste the moment.
- The influencer of the future is signed like an athlete — multi-year deals, equity stakes, and campaign ownership rather than one-off sponsored posts.
- Volume is underemphasized at every level: most teams could 5x their creative output without hiring anyone if they treated content velocity as the priority.
- The best marketing right now doesn't feel like marketing — it's a stunt, a TV show, a character in the warehouse, a real customer story.
- Saving and sharing are the conversion metrics for targeted influencer campaigns, not views. Saves represent real purchase intent for high-consideration products.
- Personas made from real customer data crush personas made up by a CMO — the data already exists, most brands just haven't plugged it in.
The same loop runs at every budget level.
WHAT TO LEARN
From $10/day to eight-figure monthly spend, modern marketing follows one repeating mechanism — test organically, validate in paid, double down on what works — executed faster and louder at each successive level.
01Level 1: Zero to $10K
- Organic social is currently the highest-leverage channel for any business under $10K/month — it generates real data on what resonates before you spend a dollar on ads.
- Start Meta at $10/day and treat the spend as buying information: if creative gets spend but no ROAS, the problem is the offer or landing page; if it gets neither, the creative is wrong.
- Empathy is the actual skill in marketing — building a fake social feed that mirrors your customer's real feed is a more reliable creative compass than any brand brief.
- The founder doesn't need to be on camera. An expert in the niche — even a hired one who genuinely believes in the product — outperforms founder-led content in most categories.
02Level 2: $10K to $100K
- A modern marketing team is two pods: one analytical (calendar, data, briefs) and one creative (shooting, on-camera). The rule is the creative person never attends the meetings.
- Brand risk aversion is now a competitive disadvantage — the cost of moving slow is higher than the cost of any individual content mistake for brands outside the Fortune 500.
03Virality, Funnels, and Tribal Pillars
- Virality's job is to raise the floor: a viral video that doesn't convert still grows the audience that will see your next, more targeted video.
04Level 3: $100K to $1M
- Customer data platforms can generate real personas from your actual buyer base — every campaign strategy that starts from a made-up CMO persona is already wrong.
- At $100K+/month, measurability breaks down and you have to make bets — the discipline is picking one new channel and committing to it fully rather than spreading thin across three.
05Storytelling, Trend Hacking, and Brand Stealing
- Trend hacking only works after you have a tested content strategy — brands that try to hop on trends before building a content foundation just waste the moment.
06AI in Marketing
- AI in marketing team workflows (briefing, copy, persona research) is already table stakes — the generative content question is still unsettled and worth waiting on until quality improves.
07Level 4: Over $1M a Month
- The influencer relationship of the future looks like an athlete contract: multi-episode commitments, equity or profit-share, and brand adviser roles — not one-off paid posts.
- Distribution is about squeezing every asset across every platform, persona, and language variant until it stops generating revenue — most teams stop at one post when they should be running ten variations.
08Level 5: Unlimited Budget
- The brands operating at the highest levels are winning with volume and speed, not sophistication — teams of three running 3,000 creator affiliates a month, not teams of thirty producing one campaign a quarter.
Terms worth knowing.
- MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio)
- A blended metric that measures total revenue divided by total marketing spend, used when multi-touch attribution breaks down and you need a single number to run the business.
- Content market fit
- The point at which a brand's content reliably generates engagement from its target demographic, regardless of which account or format it lives on. Precedes product-market fit in importance for scaling organic reach.
- Whitelisting
- Running a paid ad through a creator's social account rather than the brand's, so the ad appears to come from a trusted individual. Increases conversion rates because the audience already trusts the face.
- Media pod
- A small, self-contained marketing unit pairing one analytical/operational person (calendar, data, briefs) with one creative/on-camera person — designed so the creative never has to attend meetings.
- TAM (Total Addressable Market)
- The total universe of potential customers for a product. In content strategy, used to distinguish broadly appealing formats (wealth, health, relationships) from niche ones that address only a small segment.
- ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
- Revenue generated divided by ad spend. The primary metric at Levels 1–3; becomes unreliable as a standalone metric at Level 4 when brand awareness spend becomes necessary.
- Monoculture moment
- A cultural event with mass simultaneous attention — Super Bowl, Olympics, major holidays — where brand participation can create outsized awareness because everyone is watching the same thing at once.
- Script accelerator
- The practice of taking one proven winning piece of creative and replicating it across languages, demographics, and visual styles to multiply its reach without rebuilding the concept from scratch.
- UGC (User-Generated Content)
- Content made by real customers or low-cost creators that mimics organic posts rather than polished ads. Performs well in paid channels because it reads as authentic peer recommendation.
Things they pointed at.
32:40toolOuter Signal
09:09productOneSec (social media friction app)
1:03:02productWhisperFlow
1:13:04productCutthirty (creator training program)
1:24:48productHubSpot Media Network / Starter Story acquisition
Lines you could clip.
00:45
“Organic social is this outsized opportunity that allows the smallest brands in the world to compete with regular sized brands right out the gate.”
05:12
“Creativity isn't what makes content and ads work. It's empathy. It's understanding what is the problem I'm solving for a customer.”
21:35
“Brand risk thinking right now is probably the biggest threat to brand success. Because everything is moving so fast and there is so much opportunity.”
41:21
“I made a video this week about coffee shop design. Got like a million views. It's not gonna give me any customers. What it is gonna get me is anyone interested in design as a follower — and when I then make a more tactical piece, a lot of them are gonna get served that same video.”
1:00:05
“Everyone now is trying to AI automate their customer service. Be the one that doesn't.”
1:39:24
“The scale you can really operate at even when you're a smaller team is absolutely staggering if you just lean into it.”
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 11:56denseLevel 1 — Zero to $10K marketing
11:56 – 22:57denseLevel 2 — $10K to $100K + team structure
22:57 – 39:00denseContent strategy — virality, funnels, tribal pillars
39:00 – 1:01:00denseLevel 3 — $100K to $1M + personas + community
1:01:00 – 1:12:00steadyTrend hacking, brand stealing, personality injection
1:12:00 – 1:23:00steadyAI in marketing workflows
1:23:00 – 1:33:00denseLevel 4 — Over $1M/month + org design
1:33:00 – 1:44:22denseLevel 5 — Unlimited budget + monoculture moments
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
metaphoranalogystory
At level one, I have $0,
and I have the opportunity to spend between 0 and 10 k on a marketing budget to make money online. I want to market for my company. What is something I can do that's actually gonna drive revenue?
So two things. Making organic content on social media. We are at this fascinating point in time that even though it dominates our culture, people don't talk about enough in that you used to have to pay for any degree of attention.
You had to pay for a television ad. You had to pay for a print ad. No matter what you wanted to do to promote your business, it required you spending dollars.
Now from TikTok number one, Instagram post number one, you can get views. Make a video. You put it on TikTok.
You put it on Instagram. It will give you at a minimum 300, 500 views from moment one.
And if it's any good, it'll be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, a million. So that is this outsized opportunity that allows the smallest brands in the world to compete with regular sized brands, like, right out the gate. You have to be taking advantage of that.
Any type of video content, any type of carousel content using organic. But that ties to point two, you know, the meta ads economy. Right?
Where if you start spending on meta, you if you have any level of knowledge from what works on organic social, that helps inform what will actually help perform as an ad. You don't have to guess. You can validate a bit on organic and then take some of those learnings and put it into meta.
What's great about Meta Ads is you can start your budgets. Like, we started most of the accounts we work on at like $10 a day. You know, it is not a massive investment to go say, we're gonna spend $300 to validate a product, whether it's software, an agency, an info product, an actual physical product, and test our way into something that works.
So all of this is a test. Right? It used to be like this perfect launch world.
I have to have all these assets, all these things. I launched my brand. Now it's like, alright.
We're gonna try 50 social media videos that we make for free, and then we're gonna take some of the top things from there, and we're gonna be trying one to two new pieces of creative every few days in our ad account until we find the ones that work, and you iterate your way into success. And that's the beauty of it is right now, you have a thousand dollars and an iPhone with a mic, and you can be on that journey to sell whatever it is you want.
And it's really like a at all. What about if I don't feel creative? I feel like that's almost a fallacy.
Right? Where if you don't feel creative, it's because you've been put into a bucket where you do that.
Like, every single human is creative.
I think at at our heart, like, weren't born to go make slide decks and, like, work in spreadsheets and do x or y. We wanted to be artists and lovers, and like we had other goals in our lives when we were young.
Even if you had a passion for sports or whatever it is. And so like creativity isn't what makes content and and ads work.
It's empathy. It's like understanding what is the problem I'm solving for a customer. What is the person who I'm watching this?
What are they dealing with in their life? What do they wanna watch? And, like, what do they wanna enjoy?
And then creating that in any level of capacity. Some of the best, you know, people we know that make content or have run things on ads are just talking about real things that happened in their life while they're yapping on a walk. Right?
And so I think it's like getting in that mind state that if you're not creative, maybe you really are, option one, or option two, I don't need to be creative. I just need to talk to my customer about the things that they wanna hear. Something I I think you touched on immediately there, which is really interesting, is that using empathy, it removes the ego from ourselves.
So for example, like, think even today, I was thinking about making a story, and I started recording, I was like, ah, this is about me. How do you get someone out of that mindset of being like, it's about them? Nope.
It's about your client or your customer. The number one thing you should understand in marketing is you have to put yourself in the customer's shoes. And still, I meet marketers and teams and people who just can't do that for the life of them.
But like a good way to do it is making a dummy of your avatar. So for instance, if you're like, I'm making content for younger guys who wanna bulk up what fitness content. Right?
Okay. Go have your Twitter, Instagram account, or your your TikTok account. Follow the people they follow.
Find one or two of your customer avatar. It's easy. Look at who they follow.
Follow those same people. Create a faux feed, and look at it. And be like, okay, what are these people digesting normally?
What is their content flow? And what do they want to get out of? Are they trying to laugh?
Are they trying to cry? Are they trying to get info? You know, like are are they late night?
Are they trying to meet the opposite sex? What are they what are they doing with it? And then you're in the mindset of what they want.
And when you begin to think about those factors of what they're already seeing and what they want, you can begin to devise a plan. I think that's the number one thing that any business person and any creators needs to think about is like, no one cares about your story. They care about the value you give to them.
Now you can make a Instagram story talking about you if it has value and interest and entertainment to those people. Uh, and that just has to be the requirement before everything. You know, I use, uh, OneSec on my phone.
It's like a app that blocks social media, but it requires you if you do wanna use social media, you have to, like, say why. You can set custom ones. And it's like, cool.
If you have that reminder in text every time that, like, I'm gonna tell a story to my customer, pop. It's like those little subliminal things.
Um, I'm big on this. You've probably seen the Jake Paul meme where he has, like, all the then the Paul brothers have, like, all the manifestations, like, on their mirrors.
Like, I'm exactly like that too, but it matters on your phone as well or before you open a social media app. So there's a lot, like, little things like that that can work. So do I have to have an overarching perspective on everything and everything I want in order to get started?
No. You need to have someone you are trying to serve. And that's with any business.
Right? You start a blue tint glasses company. You're trying to you are serving someone who stays up late at night working on their computer.
I make content for creative and entrepreneurial people. They have a set of problems. I everything I'm creating just needs to serve them.
And if if you just have that attitude on any business that you have and that's where this place you're coming from, you don't even need to be an expert. You don't need anything else. You just need to have their best interest in mind.
So if I'm selling a product and I know that for a fact that there's not gonna be any point that I'm gonna wanna press record. Do you think that it makes sense to have someone on my team press record in this? Com completely.
I think one of the biggest fallacies in brand content creation is it has to be the founder. It has to be the CEO. It has to be the whatever.
It does not matter at all. Ideally, it's an expert in the niche, and this is something I encourage for a lot of that, especially medical. Right now, medical people have discovering Right?
The the peptide world, wellness, everything's exploding. It's like, yeah, get a dermatologist on camera.
Get a nurse on camera. Get anyone in scrubs or a hat who believes in your product, who's on your advisory board, and put them on it. Their credibility is better than yours as a founder.
Right? And if they really believe in it, they give real advice. That's kinda worth whatever budget it takes, uh, or whatever equity it takes to do it, and then you can kind of trickle it down.
But even if it ends up being a just a personable, friendly person, a model basically that works at your company or that you hire that's reading a script written by a professional, it's getting the same job done. Right?
It's just you have to think about it's really about what the stories those people can tell. A founder can tell a certain type of stories. I don't even think now.
A lot of people wanna hear that. They wanna hear the expert. This is, the true expert era of content, and the expert can be either a true expert or an expert writing for a friendly face.
I don't have much money. So
what is the gap? Should it be a priority at all unless I'm able to spend a lot of money? Back to this opportunity,
it's like if you have any business and you are not leveraging the fact that you get free attention on the Internet from making, like, quick little videos, that would be priority one in terms of upside. Least amount of money I have to spend to most potential results.
Right? And then right after that, it is how do I take any of those learnings and apply that to meta spend where I can get money back guaranteed at a certain ratio? And, really, I'm playing a game of how much good creative do I have to put in that I've learned from this free organic stuff I'm doing to be able to get that ratio higher.
I think I'm already learning something here because it's you're the fact that you're saying, like, you would spend $10 a day on a specific meta ad, what learning am I looking for if I'm doing that? You'll solve those problems for you. So for instance, if you set up a typical meta ad structure for a smaller business, there'll be meta ads gurus have different opinions.
But basically, you will have a test campaign and you will have a scale campaign if you have a simple product set. Right? And the test campaign you are putting in let's say you're spending somewhere between 10 and $50 a day.
You're putting in one to three pieces of creative into that every few days, and there's two things you're testing for. One, does it get spend? So Meta will give spend to a piece of creative based on if people engage with it or like it or actually watch it, and they can find a demographic for it.
And so if that happens and it gets spend, but you don't get any money back, then you've learned something. Right? You've learned that this is a piece of creative Meta likes.
People enjoy watching it, but I'm not selling right. I'm not actually giving enough info or context, or I don't link my ad and my landing page. A couple of things you can diagnose there.
Or number two is it's not getting any spend. No one's interested in it. And then you start looking, oh, it's getting spend, and it is also making me money back.
It's getting ROAS on that. And it will take a few days. Right?
You're only spending $10 a day, and you have a $150 product. It might take you two weeks to validate something. Right?
If you start to see some positive spend, it's like, alright. Let me increase that budget. And we'll just keep doubling.
There's a lot of conversation around the, like, the double it, you know, concept. Obviously, it doesn't work when you're spending 6 figures. But when you're at that smaller scale, like, this is what we've done even like I sell my shoe bags, like, on the Internet.
This is we scaled all our campaigns to this exact thing where, cool. It's $50 a day. Alright.
That's going well. $100 a day. Okay.
It's going well. It's $200 a day. And at some point, you'll see diminishing returns.
Right? Okay. That ratio is not the same.
Now is that I need more creative, or is it that like there's less interest in in the product? You can begin to test your way into it. But like, it's really a numbers game, and it's not a hard one.
Right? It's giving you all the information you need, and you just need to be diligent about tracking it. And I think people want it to be easy.
It's not easy, but it's very doable. So if you give me a framework here, I'm starting from scratch. Essentially, go and research my niche and the pain points of my niche, and then once I've identified whatever those blockers are or whatever they're looking to accomplish, I empathize it.
Yeah. You create empathetic content for that. Yeah.
And then I post that organically whether it's through myself or someone on my team. Yep. And then what am I looking for for an outlier data point?
Yeah. You're looking for what what gets views or not. You'll see a baseline.
You'll basically be like, okay. My average content gets 800 views. Okay.
This one got 4,000. Okay. That's something that is not only worth repeating that in my organic, but let's put that into an ad.
Two ways to put that into an ad. One is, okay. Is this creative actually talk about my product at all or tied to it?
Just put it in there with the organic comments, with everything. Just load it in the ad account. Right?
You can just basically get an ad code, um, and whitelist it if it's on, like, a team member's account. The second thing you're looking for is, okay.
Was this hook if he was interested in the hook, and can I redo that as an ad? This is something we do all the time where if you talked about a concept a friend of mine, Cody, had a viral video. He owns a gym about, like, the Kentucky strength training in the eighties.
And it's like, alright. That didn't help his gym when he made a video about that concept. But if he hooked with the Kentucky strength training in the eighties, and then he turned into a promo for how they use those principles inside his gym, all of a sudden, that's an ad asset.
So either you are taking the whole piece of creative or, like, the hook of the creative to then go into an ad. Is it primarily about views, or am I also looking for, like, sentiment and engagement? If you get a bunch of views and it's a negative sentiment, that's a different signal.
That only happens if you're making kind of oddball or off the wall content. Right?
As long as you are making relatively straightforward, you can kind of look at the views and the general engagement as the metric, but it's easiest to just look straight at, like, what just got any level of organic success. Right? If you're starting from scratch.
This is significantly more nuanced at, like, the higher levels of brand building. But if you're just at zero to one, it's like, oh, cool. That concept has four or 5,000 views.
Let's put that in the ad account. And then it's just about getting of the the internal stress of, oh, I actually just have to spend money on something that's, like, relatively approved. That's why I love Meta is, like, I started a T shirt business with a friend of mine in college, and we had to spend, like, $1,500 or whatever to get the first 100 T shirts, which is, like, a lot of money.
Then And it was like, okay. How do we even advertise it? We couldn't.
I was selling them at my college campus, like, out there the way guys would sell CDs. Right? And it's like, okay.
This is not a good strategy. But now it's like, oh, I can start with $10 a day. Like, if you don't have $1,500 to spend on products and $1,500 to spend on the just the ability to test some meta ads until they go, it's like, okay.
Just go work and do other stuff until you have enough money to do that to validate a brand. That is such a low barrier to entry. You could probably get away with doing that with $2,000.
And then it's about patience. Right? Because everyone's like, oh, I need to raise money to x and y, or you could just very slowly work this up over time.
I've worked on a a women's wear brand with with two of my friends for almost seven years now that started from they were literally selling leather goods at farmers markets, to we were running meta ads light, to now we run 6 figures a month on meta ads. And it's it's just such a and it worked up without any additional capital.
It was just slow. It was seven years. But guess what?
100% ownership, all the cash that comes out of it now is cash that we have. Like, that is a, uh, that's a real entrepreneurial arc. It's not, you know, the, oh, I'm gonna make a million dollars tomorrow.
That's not how this works. I think that transitions very well into level two. So level two would be that 10,000 to a 100,000.
And in this section, I kind of have questions because I think there's a lot of legacy businesses that have never existed online because they haven't needed to and that suddenly are realizing like, oh, I'm, like, five or six years way too late.
So what's, like, a starting point for them
if they're a small team or founder late led, but they're saying, okay. Do we just put our founder in front of a camera? Like, what's our what's our starting point from that gap?
No one knows how to structure a modern marketing team. Right? Because it's so radically different.
It's a mini media company with a organic aspect and a paid aspect that go hand in hand. That example I just had of if you're spending like sub $10,000 a month is kind of the exact same thing, like, in this next wave, except you have more things to try and you have more upside because you can press the gas pedal faster if things go well.
So really you are in charge of what assets can I make? Like bucket one is what assets do I have? Whether it's someone talking on camera, or a social media creator we have, or a team, or we're paying for shoots, whatever is how do we use that 10 to a 100 k we have to make x amount of assets?
And then it's what response do we get an organic social from those assets? Do we get organic sales from how we use them?
And then what do we get inside the ad account? And it is purely a numbers and response game for how good and interesting and resonant can the creative be here through any of the styles we're comfortable with. And I would recommend for a lot of brands, you need to get one person on camera.
Whether you hire a creator for eight or 10 videos a month, whether you have someone on your team, whether you pay for UGC, get that baseline of a person, and then try that hand in hand with like two other content pillars. Okay.
We do carousels that, you know, showcase our product really well. We do these, like, fifteen second highlight reels where we have mini tutorials around whatever our product solves. Okay.
We get these three types of content. We are seeing what works organic, and we're improving it. And we're putting as much of that content as possible into the ad account and making variance of that in the ad account.
And, you know, and you and until you get things that tell you what works, you don't go any farther. But as soon as you get stuff that works, it's like you double down on what works, and you keep adding to it. And this 10 to 100 is why you see so many brands grow so quick right now.
It's literally a formula of how interesting and creative and relevant you can be on organic and paid, and you run them both next to each other, and you don't need to do anything else. Brand guides, brand positioning, advertising, trade shows. All you need to do is go focus on that, which makes it very straightforward for a lot of people to actually solve it because it's a creative issue and a math issue.
I see a gap here where someone says, okay.
I don't know how to make people care about my company because their perception is when they're on social media, they care about people. I think about the people I even follow.
Like, I don't follow VaynerMedia. I follow Gary Vee. I don't follow acquisition.com.
I follow Akshay Mosey. There's a massive gap in terms of, like, how do I get people to care about my product or business versus caring about me as a personal brand. So I think there we are locked in this legacy of our social media account is the one we have to promote, the one that has our company name on it, which is just not true.
Now you can make content that's resonant to people from those accounts. Great. But all that's kind of out the window, and I think that's where there's even more interest.
And if you are a marketing person or an entrepreneurial person, you are okay not playing by those rules. You have so much upside here. Uh, but like, hey.
If you said we're gonna have a just a completely separate account that does x. Opal was a good example of this, like a social media app where they had a girl on a whiteboard doing tutorials about mental health. There were really plugs for Opal at the end of it, but it was very high value content, not on main, didn't even have a handle related to it, like, of this girl to help promote what's what's, like, their general thesis.
And you can just break that infrastructure. Really, you're you are trying to give valuable or entertaining content to the demographics you are trying to reach in a way that where you can either integrate your product lightly or integrate it well in the future. But you solve that content market fit first, and it does not matter if it is a person, if it is a random account, if it's a clips account, if it's a aggregator, or if it's your brand account.
It's whatever you wanna do. And so you can abandon that. Yeah.
It has to be the brand. It doesn't matter. Does that
bring out any level of, like, brand risk? Because I'm thinking about, like, if I'm the owner or founder,
I know that I'm gonna be having this, and this is my thing versus if I have, like, my director of marketing be as someone that's like a front face. It's a risk reward. Right?
It's like, are you gonna be on are you gonna play it safe and not be on the fringe and not grow the same way, or are you going to, like, try some of these things where it give you a massive upside that don't work? But I feel like brand risk and thinking about brand risk right now is probably the biggest threat to brand success.
Wow. Because everything is moving so fast, and there is so much opportunity, and there are so many new mediums, and people are actually taking advantage of them that if you are thinking or you're worried about this stuff for a second, you're basically already behind. Like, this is the I think we can call it the where it's like, okay.
Guess what? That person leaves. Okay.
Well, we got two more people that were pumping in there. They're following similar strategies. It's gonna be even better.
Right? You, like, you cannot spiral out from anything.
You cannot anything, like, we're gonna you have to be first. You have to be in this right now. Even the time if you go spend if you listen to this and you go spend ninety days planning, executing it, you're too late.
You need to be like, we did this in a week. I was having this conversation before we walked in here with, uh, I'm working on a, like, a new offer set and with the team there, and it's like, okay. This is no longer okay.
We'll write this out. We'll do the brief. It's like, who do we call today?
It's like, this is how fast it's moving. That's radically different from when I've had conversations like this even six months ago. It's like, everyone is doing it now, and they've noticed, like, how fast it goes, and so you have to basically make that cultural change of risk,
brand, hell, whatever. Bias for action is everything. The severe upside is obvious.
Right? So it's like if we had this amount of views, we can convert to ad spend over here, which will equate to a robo ads over here. So, like, there's a direct
positive benefit. Is there a negative downside of, like, a negative virality or, a negative like, more than just like, hey. We spent a lot of money.
It didn't really work. So if you have a bad message or a message that gets conveyed in a way that people hate, you either have some sort of core message or issue problem with your business or the people you have working with you, or you have a product that is bad. In which case, this conversation doesn't doesn't necessarily apply.
Right? But for any normal brand, like, real quick, hundreds of brands that come through Cutthirty where we, like, train creators and and brand stuff and, like, jewelry brands, clothing, you know, baseball accessories, vintage, whatever.
So many of those brands. Like, they've never had a a thing a negative thing happen. They've just been making a content.
Even when they have, it's been conversation starters. I remember the jewelry brand we had in there had a viral video about the the wedding rings that she thought were, like, tacky, which is controversial. Right?
Because no woman wants to be told her ring is tacky. But at the end of day, it wasn't like the end of the business or getting canceled, and there's a lot of people who want the advice. And so it just depends on where you wanna find on that scale.
There's very little downside to moving on things, and mainly because you look at every larger company is so slow, so painful. I did a series of brand workshops earlier this year.
We had 40 brands each at, like, these tour stops, basically. And we had major brands, like major airlines, big CPG companies.
Like, it was all, like, enterprise level brands. And their core issue that they're all talking was how do we get things approved? We cannot, for the life of us, get things approved.
And I'm like, oh, that's one problem we have to go solve. But for anyone smaller than that, for anyone outside of the Fortune 500 plus, let's say, the next 2,000, that is alpha.
You have you can take everything from those people because they can't move fast enough. And if you even look at it on a multiyear horizon, how different Gen Z or Gen Alpha habits are, it's a a radical opportunity. Can you, like, give me an example of someone you think is executing at this level very well?
A content style where they say, okay. Like, their execution's really great. They're iterating really fast, and their brand is growing as a result, like, astronomically.
Ramp in the software space is doing great. We're obviously they're trying all these things outside of main. Doesn't matter.
Doesn't tie to it, but they are kinda controlling attention. I think set active does a really interesting job with this where they're, like, theming campaigns. They have new stuff that's happening all the time.
Skims is probably the best where it's like they are always have multiple things. Like, their calendar is so aggressive more than anybody else where they're just spinning on. We have these influencers.
We have these initiatives. We have these events. We have all these photographers doing this.
We have multiple times a day on feed. And look. All good marketing kinda starts as gray hat, black hat.
Right? You look at like, okay. What are people doing on the fringe?
Like, we got to clipping because of Andrew Tate for better or for worse. Right? That's how this ended up being a thing.
Now, like, streaming and who's really monetizing streaming and so it's stake. It's the gambling companies. Uh, like, that's it's the what the AI companies are doing, like Higgs Field breaking all the terms of service of x to get people to do unpaid shills.
Right? All the stuff that happens in the gray market is just what's gonna happen in the white market in a year. Now probably less, like six months.
And so if you're really looking at where that alpha is or, like, who's doing it to x degree, it's like, oh, what these gambling companies are doing with streaming right now is, like, what Procter and Gamble should we think about how they're integrating their brands in streaming in the next six months? If you could structure like a very nimble marketing campaign, what's the team members that are probably required to do that?
So it usually starts with you have a more analytical briefing, kind of typical social manager person who like does the meetings, does the posting, pulls the data, gets some ideas. And then you have an actual creative or creator, like a person who can go shoot a bunch of content or be the face on cam, and they work together in a pod.
One, don't make the creative person go to the meetings. Don't make them fill out the sheets. Make them feel like their job is to get creative done.
And other person's job is to make sure their calendar is full, all the reporting is in, and that, like, all the priorities are adjusted. It's like, okay. That's a pot of one.
Right now, everyone's a multitasker. Right? It's like you're no longer just a media buyer.
Are you a media buyer and a strategist? Because media buying has gotten really easy. You know?
Like, what what are those combos? Like, how do you get somebody on the more on the paid side of that to go with it? And then how do you expand those pods?
It's like, okay. If we have a creator, like, two creators, a social media manager, and an editor, we can get x amount of stuff.
Alright. Like, that's like pod one. Okay.
Now if we have oh, we can get two designers, a strategist. Okay.
That's like pod two. And then do we need any more on the media buying side to support that, or can we just do that with one person who also does analytics? You can probably do that.
It's like, then how many of those can you grow? You end up with these, like, little media pods. And what it turns into is like when you start to get to like a 10 person team, it's basically a writer's room.
Here's all the ideas. Here's all the product marketing stuff. Here's everything happening.
We're murder boarding it. It's being distributed down into an asset flow here, and then like paid media and distribution and and advertising begins to build out like a more structural part of the org. But I think that is the the smart way to do it.
Almost all these other jobs that you looked at, oh, we have a copywriter. We have a like, are integrated now into all those core roles.
What role do you think is gonna be outdated in the next three years? Having to do anything related to maintaining or editing like a website? It's not even being outdated.
It's just have to be absorbed by another role. Like, the designer now is like, okay. Because you can go right to code or because, like, in Framer, I can just edit and click or whatever, it's like you'd there's no longer a developer needed, like, on that end.
Media buying is another one that's kinda just being absorbed. Most strategists are just learning media buying, they start to realize, oh, it's intimidating because ads manager is intimidating. But once you use it, you're like, this is not hard.
Like, the answers are being given to me. And so, like, all the media buying is just gonna be absorbed into either, like, strategy or other social roles. The director of marketing and the social media manager, they're gonna be the same person if they if they aren't already.
And that, like, head of social role is really crucial. The head of social role replaces so much other marketing. All of this is morphing together.
Right? You see a lot of these teams that are on the cutting edge. It's the organic and the ads team are the same.
Like, how we did we discussed where they're going back and forth on absolutely everything in the same faces. That was not that's not the case for a lot of businesses. And so you see this kind of big amorphous
mess as a lot is enabled by just how easy some of these things have become and then how how it's basically like a circle now instead of these parallel paths. So here's level three. I think this is the place that's probably the most accessible and helpful for most amount of people because most marketing departments are here.
This is the 100 k to $1,000,000 in their campaigns or in their teams dedicated to making money, and I think a lot of them are scared about how much change is happening
so fast. What's different about marketing right now versus marketing like three years ago? The speed and the volume is probably the biggest difference and also the sheer size of options.
You started getting into spending 6 figures a month on marketing. You now have this, like, this world of things that you can do. All of sudden, there's, like, you know, actual initiatives, and we do x or y.
And if you are doing this in the old model, it's so easy to waste that money. Right? Like, oh, we're doing a trade show.
Oh, we started an events team. Oh, all of sudden, this is $40 a month, or this is a $100, or we spent 300 on this thing. And and you start to realize that if you don't maintain extremely tight control of what you're doing, that money just like floats into the ether.
Because this is also the the point in time where you lose measurability. So one of the biggest things from the last that's come up the last five years is that you can measure marketing. In those early stages, the first two stages we talk about, you need to be relentlessly focused on the return on ad spend and the return from your organic social.
How much money are we making? And since you're only doing a few things, it's very trackable. If it didn't come from ad spend, it probably came from organic, and you can really function off of MER, marketing efficiency ratio, like, as a metric of, like, how much do we spend and how much do we make?
And then you start to get to the, okay. We're getting closer to 20 to 50,000,000 in revenue, and then we're spending, you know, our eight to 20% on marketing. That tracking is gonna end somewhere in there, and you're gonna realize, okay.
We can't scale any farther with this measurability. The finance team is gonna be like, we got used to all that. You know?
Like, what do you mean we can't keep that going? You're like, gonna basically hit this top for a lot of brands. Some can continue scaling above it.
Most can't. And you start to realize, okay. Now we have to go back into the intangible where, yes, we can we need to generate brand awareness, and we need to do things that enable us to scale our spend more and enable us to get to this next level, and then it becomes more of like a chaos theory thing.
And because, uh, so many marketing teams got used to math and leadership teams got used to math, they have a really hard time breaking that gap. And so the the marketer's job here is to be like, okay. We are we need to maintain fiscal discipline on what we're putting together from our content and our ads while also getting enough attention that those things scale.
And then you have to look at this chart of of awareness. Right? So you have all these fringe activities.
Like, even three years ago, it's like, alright. TikTok ads wasn't really a thing. We couldn't scale it.
TikTok shop was not a thing. Live selling on whatnot or TikTok wasn't a thing. Streaming wasn't a thing.
Uh, we have all of these clipping. All of these things didn't exist as marketing tools. Right?
You look at all of these options. You're like, well, where do we spend our time and our dollars? Uh, and you have to really are we trying to generate awareness?
Are we trying to be so super sales focused? And you have to kind of look at where you are on that chain. Like, do we need more mass awareness to allow us to scale into that, or do we need to reach are we not optimizing how much people already know about us and are purchasing?
And, uh, and so then it becomes much more of a, like, we have to guess and bet. And where I see people get caught up now is so then they'll try to do three or four things, which is impossible. Like, you have to be like, alright.
We're gonna bet on one of these. We're like, we know Snapchat is where our customer is, and we are gonna be, like, the leading people in our niche on there.
And I was looking at it. Like, Knicks is a a cosmetics brand that, like, built up a big Snapchat following. A couple 100,000 when no other brand in the niche is is, like, doing that.
And was like, alright. That's an interesting angle to be able to go down on that. Tarte's another cosmetic brand where they went all in on influencer influencer trips in particular, where they were like, we see the ripple effects of trips.
Where if we had all these people together and there's drama, there's coverage of the trip, other influencers are just talking about what's happening. People are making viral videos about the stuff that they did. The people are collabing on the trip.
We're like, alright. We see ripple effects. We're gonna go all in on that, and they did.
Think that's where this gets interesting is you start to play with that. You have to dedicate. You have to be like, what is that one new initiative we're gonna do that we are just gonna be the best at?
How fast are these iterations? I mean, were you were talking previously about, like, the idea of being like, I can't do this in months or ninety days. I have to do this in week.
It's really hard to get a team to do that in a week from an organizational perspective. In those first two stages Yeah. You just have to move.
The getting started angle or the getting to, like, x amount a month is it just has to go. Like, there can't be any static.
Like, I've gotten caught up in this in, like, my own projects where it's like, oh, this will just wait for three months or I have other stuff going on, you just lit lies. But when you get to this next stage where it gets more interesting, you already have that bias for action. You only got to that area where you can spend 6 figures a month on your marketing because of the bias.
And so this is now where you have to basically try not to lose it, where you actually do have to plan. But yeah, we're gonna do an influencer trip. We do need to be four months out to execute that.
Concentrate on one thing that's gonna drive that metric for you, that brand awareness, whatever it is. It's gonna have the most results. You make your bet on it, and but then you have to realize if we're good at it, what scales need to operate at?
I think the biggest thing is when people find something like that, it's like, okay. Well, how many of these can we do? That needs to be the more the mentality.
It's like, oh, if it works and the numbers work, we need to be, like, hitting this as fast as possible because it's no longer there's no fatigue anymore. It is on until you're no longer hot or you don't create something, like or you've put a gap out in the Internet. You can, like, keep this repetition up.
So I think it's, like, it's almost like a different level of challenge. There's a massive gap between, like, the savvy teams
that are intentionally doing a lot of this research, intentionally understanding their avatar, and focusing more so on client acquisition versus, like, customer success or, like, customer satisfaction and service. Companies that exist in in the 20 tens, you know, like, they're thinking in sense of like, oh, we really need to make sure that our main pages are all brand aesthetically specific, and it's basically just a place for people to come in and complain versus come in and engage.
What's something that you think would help people come up with storytelling frameworks that incorporate their actual products? This is the stage where you have real customer data, right, where where you can actually get into persona. So software, I love for this.
There's a software called Outer Signal that, um, we used to do some of this manually, but it'll basically go and go through all your ecommerce customers, all your email database, and give you personas. Everyone makes up personas. Personas are really useful exercise, but they'll do like, oh, we did a couple thousand person survey that isn't indicative of what anything actually is, or they literally just make up whatever the CEO or CMO thinks it is.
We interviewed eight customers and see who they are. But now it's like you can get real data. You plug it in our signal.
It gives you, like, you have 30 to thirty five year old strivers in urban areas that also buy these things. You're like, oh, shit. I have, a persona.
I have seven. I can tape them out. I can put them on a board.
Right? And so I think that's the core thing to start with is like, okay. I have those people, and then who are they?
Customer service, like, radical focus on customer service and experience in this era is like, everything is important in this era, but, like, that's a particular one where you can stand out. Because everyone now is trying to AI automate their customer service and shit. Like, be the one that doesn't.
In that same software, the reason that we had started using is I used to manually Google every customer at the women's wear brand we worked on to find influencers because we have, like, one of every eight customers was an influencer, and it's very important for us. But now it's just like, you'll just identify it. You just get a list.
And it's like, okay. You can do it with every customer if you have the bandwidth, but at least for your top 10% most interesting and influential ones, like, direct contact.
That even if that's your marketing team. And it's like, can you seed them products for the future? Can you get feedback?
Can you learn about that experience? Can they make content for you? Like, all this, like, it needs to become a community flywheel.
If you want people to come to that page and have storytelling frameworks that apply to them, you need to understand the customer. You need the customer's help in creating things that kinda matter to them, and it's where you can get, like, really creative, um, and you can base it on data.
And so that's kind of like the exercise I think all those brands should go through is, okay. We now know who our customer is. We're now communicating with them.
Some of them are making content for us. Like, all your best creators for a brand are probably gonna come from your existing customers, and you get that flywheel turning, and then you see what that enables. Does that enable us to do certain types of campaigns?
Oh, do we actually have we over index in how much these people watch streaming? We should, like, lean into that. Like, that information can finally come from data.
How do I get people to genuinely
care about the company? The gap here is how do I get people to, like, root for me? Because there's a certain tier where people are like, uh, I don't I mean, I like the products, and that's fine.
But to be like, I actually am a like an ambassador, and I actually root for these people because I want to see this company win. First, it's really about the value you create in someone's life. Right?
Like,
does your product make their life significantly better? You know?
And will they advocate for that? We were dinner last night. Was talking about Whisper Flow, which is like a app on your phone that replaces your mic, and it's like an AI version of the mic.
I downloaded it today. I have a real advocacy. That product made my life better.
It was recommended to me by my friend James. I recommended it to you, and it's like, okay. That there's an advocacy because of the value.
I don't know shit about their branding. I've never followed them on social media. I don't know anything about it, but like like that is the number one part is you optimize your product experience.
Once you've gotten that, you're like, okay. What else can we do to really build that affinity? And, uh, it comes down to, are you providing value or entertainment online?
That's like number one. Like, am can I, in whatever content I'm doing, in whatever presence I have online, my influencers, my team, this this narrative we have, am I giving you real value? And like so for instance, if you're doing something, you know, you have a fitness product and you also include, like, amazing free workouts and x classes or do whatever.
You're like, wow. I'm really participating in this brand thing. It's valued.
I would have paid for this, and they give it to me for free. The entertainment's just as good. I look at this brand.
Alexis Batar is a good example of this. They're a jewelry brand, and they have, a TV show on their social media. It has characters.
The fans love it. They people follow it around. It's about, like, drag queens in New York and, like, you know, this has got this whole narrative, and their fans go, okay.
Cool. Now they're basically just giving me a a fun show. Like, I wanna participate in their world.
You have to look and be like, alright. From our product experience, the value we can give or the entertainment we can give, are we doing enough that our customer would care? And from there, once you actually start to build it, you then look at your worlds.
Okay. What are all the events we have? What are all the people that are contributing, influencers, customers, our team?
What are like, what's happening in the world? Like, how do we shape this to feel like like a TV network? Right?
To feel like all these things going on have this huge macro level view. And that comes from if you're really savvy at this level three, or if you're like, once you're getting into the deck that real spend. But all anchors back to product experience, value,
entertainment. I feel like it'd be interesting. You just said you've never seen whisper flows in social media.
Yeah. So can we pull that up and just you tell me, like, what stands out to you in terms of, like, the gap for them,
what they should be doubling down on. I have seen one thing they did on where they were like, we brought five people into a or 20 people into, like, a scenario almost like this.
And they were like, and if you can get WhisperFlo to mess up, you win a Porsche. And I was like, okay. That's interesting.
They're basically showing off the efficacy of the product by doing a stunt. At 23, this guy went to war with Microsoft. Microsoft.
Now Now sits behind Yeah. They're doing informational content.
The best marketing right now doesn't feel like marketing. In a digital first
Yeah. They're doing, like, high production value, like, using found footage and all that.
Whisper Flow lets you speak in your own words and turns it Yeah. They're they're doing it. They're building out their brand world.
Right? They're talking about other things in technology. They're explaining what they do in, like, funny and relevant scenarios.
Like, if you have a software based around a microphone,
they're doing the right thing. One of the videos that popped off it got 630,000 views at the time.
It's someone interviewing Steven about his experience using the product. Is that like a primary growth metric where it's like, okay.
I need to find someone legitimate to enjoy this
and then go find a way to do When we talk about emailing all those customers, it's like and how that's your content, like, that's the exact example. You'll be surprised if you go run your customer base through, like, a data platform like I mentioned, and you come out with those people, then you're gonna be like, oh, shit.
Steven's on there. I'm an email. Thanks so much for using our product.
Da da da da da. Like, start some sort of relationship. And then that quickly leads to, oh, yeah.
I love this. Oh, we should do a testimonial. Can I pay you to do extra y?
Can we run this as a whitelisted ad? This happens to me all the time as an influencer. Right?
Like, I, um, a good one was the human scale chair. I made a video about the human scale chair. Can we run this as an ad?
You know? Like, all of a sudden, you're, like, participating in that flywheel. That's a better ad than whatever the creative they're making because I'm genuinely like, I love this chair.
What happened with the the board? I got this, like it's a video game console that it's like a physical console that you can use pieces on top of that I got for my kid.
I was bought as soon as I had it. I made the video about it, and they hit the other day being like, Can we make an edit of this for the ad? And, like, I'm passionate about a thing I already own.
So there are probably a lot of good creators and influencers in there. And then how do you generate that into the content? That's the most underlooked for even the massive brands.
This is the era of the one to one, like, VIP experience, and that VIP might be someone that's super passionate about your product, posting online, getting four views, but they love it, or it might be the fact that you have, like, a major person you didn't expect in your audience. That's one of the things that I, as a creator, feel like I'm missing out on the most is, like, I was with Gary Vee's team this summer in in in Ken.
He has, like, people that are going through the people that follow him on social media who's hot online and, like, helping him run a CRM for it. Who should I message? Who do I need to know?
What do need to do x about? I'm like, man, I have so many famous people and verifieds and all, like, entrepreneurs that follow me.
I'm not accessing that at all. I'm not DMing them unless I happen to see it in the notifications. Right?
And it's like, that needs a team, and every brand should think like that too. Does that require a luxury brand? Does it require, like, a boutique aspect of it?
Like, if I have something that's, like, kind of basic No. I mean, look. This this is a voice app, and Steven Bartlett is doing an advocacy for it because he's a customer.
It just requires social. People ask often. They're like, oh, how'd you blow up so much on social media?
It's also like, I'm a very social person. I know every other creator in my niche, not because, like, they came DMing me. Being social was underestimated.
And we did the same when I was doing my, um, my my valuable line, which is like the clothing I do is basically like merch for me. My wife emailed every single one of our first thousand customers. And then when we went into drop two, emailed all of them being like, you wanna preorder the stuff early at a discount?
Right? Like, it was a and it was a lot of it was about who are these people? What are they into?
Are they liking it? Do they want the sizing? Do we have the feedback?
It's not a luxury brand. It's like, you know, streetwear that interests me at the time. And I think but it's like that participation is like takes less time than one would think.
Everyone's be like, am I with this AI that defeats the point? That defeats the point. Have those real human relationships.
Uh, you'd be surprised by, like, how far that gets you. Social media being inherently social, you have to act like that from a talking perspective, who you're contacting, collaboration.
Like, the more you lean into that as an individual or a brand, the farther everything goes. Is that something that you would say, like, is it is it function of the marketing team is that they would reach out to these individual people?
Like, should that be something that is Marketing or marketing coordinating with CX or it's one like, one of the founders is like, yeah. I'm dedicated to having these conversations with I this is the threshold I have. Really depends on where it lives, but, uh, I've been in companies where it's marketing coordinating with CX.
I've been with companies where marketing takes it on. And I've been like, and even where we're working, it's like, wife and I are the founders of it, and we're like, the team's not doing it. Like, we wanna talk to the people.
Yeah. I've received a lot of emails, like, stuff that I'm just like, oh, that's kinda received as, like, spam. A friend of mine has really tried to access more of the celebrities in his who are following him.
And I was like, yeah. Like, do you DM them something funny? Andrew Shuberman followed me the other day, and I sent him the skit I made about his chili he did with goop.
Because I was like, it's funny. I'm like, hey. You follow me from this video, but, like, you probably haven't seen this, but, like, this is really funny.
Like, I think you'll enjoy it. What do you wanna get DMed or emailed, like, as a friend? Right?
Like, you wanna get sent a funny reel, or you wanna get sent a moment or something that made me think of And, like, that is like, just be human. Let's bring it back to this, like, storytelling framework. You know, a year and a half ago, I was, like, really, really fascinated with Amalfi jets,
and that kind of marketing style was very obvious as to why that worked. And then Ryan Serhant kinda took that on, Ryan and Serhant's kinda been doing a very similar thing. In terms of, like, creating characters of your team members to maintain authority frame
for you as the founder, but leveraging them as, like, the primary person. The first thing that popped to bottom you said that was there's a a local place by me. Let me see if I can find the link.
It is a it's a Porsche restoration dealership that's by me in Orange County.
What they do is the guy in the garage working on these cars, and he will be like, hey. We're replacing the tire on this thing and that thing. Like, people get this problem on this year of model because x and y.
Here's the four options that they had to replace it with, and then they chose this one. I personally may have gone with that, but, like, I get it. You know, we're gonna do this trim color.
And I'm like, I'm in. I'm there. Like, someone's just explaining that interesting thing that happens.
If you have a visual environment like that, there's lot of conversation about sets right now. Obviously, we're like, you you you've embraced that. But, like, if you are a brand that has that location where it's like, we have a garage, we have a workshop, we have a warehouse, we have a manufacturing floor.
It doesn't have to be glamorous, but we can put a character from there, like, in on it. The manufacturing one's one the best ones. You see this all the time.
We're packing an order for, like, x and y or, you know Guy that does the lights. You know what I'm talking about? Where he says Oh, yeah.
He says, like, the meme, and then he's like, yeah. Tony? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. And then there's the girl.
She she sells pancakes or something like that, I think, where they do, like, almost as, like, reactionary, like and then they've established their own brands. I don't even know how many customers they get.
I'm I'm assuming a lot. It's a funnel. Right?
Like, all content's a funnel. It's like, okay. If I have that person, I have that character, and we wanna talk about frameworks, it's like, what generates attention?
Like, if Tony comes on and says something racist or weird on culture like he does, like, that's gonna get top of funnel. People are gonna get views on it.
And you're like, okay. That that may not sell a bunch of lights, but it's awareness. But then if the next level down doesn't get as many views, but it's actually way more educational, and it's like, here's how the sign came together zero to one.
And, you know, again, it doesn't get that virality, but it's middle of funnel. It's nurturing. Put that same face in your ads.
This is another thing people don't do. Uh, I was talking to a sunscreen brand the other day who has great great live people.
They do live on TikTok all the time. But those live people aren't on the organic feed, and they're not in the paid ads. I'm like, look.
You have all these people watching the lives, and these people are amazing on them. Like, get them on the main feed. Get their face in the ad.
Right? Then your bottom of funnel is just leveraging that. That's why people pay big bucks for me for white listing is because people know my face.
Right? And so that's a a something that every branch, like, take advantage of of that affinity. And, like, you start looking at that, and you're like, oh, this is we have a funny guys in the warehouse, and they do But then they also do very legitimate.
Here's all the hard work that goes into the order. And then those are the guys that are, like, you know, getting paid a little extra to be in the ads. Like, run it.
What do you think is the gap between, like, the pursuit of virality versus the pursuit of conversion? Most people don't understand is you need the virality to raise the floor to get better conversion. You So gotta look at that with my content.
I made a video this week about coffee shop design. Got, like, a million views. It's not gonna give me any customers.
It's not gonna give me any email sign ups, whatever. What it is gonna get me is anyone that's interested in design and, like, design in retail as a follower or as someone who's in my target.
And when I then make I made a more educational version of that video talking about, like like, applications, you know, brands can do in influencer marketing if they're doing, like, extra while.
A more tactical piece. Any one of those people that was aware of it before, a lot of them are gonna get served that same video. And if they are in a tactical role, now they're real fans.
And that's who I want. But I would never have the ability to even reach as many people with that more tactical video if I didn't just widen the TAM. Because this is how those social networks work.
Right? You see the viral video. You get to show more of that person's content, especially if you like it or you engage with it.
And so you need to leverage that. And so I think it's just a funnel, and it's like if you are really trying to build awareness and you're posting five times a week, it's like two of that top of funnel, maybe three of that middle of funnel. You're really focused on, like, getting all the way up there.
But if you're a brand that has big reach, you already have good views on almost everything, it's like, maybe we do one or no top of funnel, and we're really focused middle and bottom. I think about a lot with my content where I'm like, do I need any more followers? I have 600 k on Instagram to, like, do what I need to sell.
Probably not. If I just wanted to focus on selling as much as I could to those people, I could make no top of funnel content because the reach is there. And just think about where you're at in perspective.
So I think every single viral video we've ever made has been in one of, like, five
tribal pillars. It's wealth, health, relationships, politics, or religion. And within those, there's there's subcategories.
And so for example, like within the relationships tribal pillar, it's like there's parenting. Everybody has a parent or is a parent. There's dating.
Everybody wants to date or has dated or hates dating. Right? Everyone wants to be married and hates like, my assumption is a lot of people in this space, they go into the wealth category and then subcategories of that wealth category.
For example, under the wealth category, you have luxury. And then within luxury, you have luxury sub.
And then within luxury sub, you have this. And there's like these tiny little niches that fall within those overall buckets. I'm curious what you think in terms of, like, how does someone add more personality so that they're more likely to have virality or have mass exposure on the right things?
Because, like, for example, I don't wanna be necessarily associated with politics because that's nothing in regards to my content, but, like, relationships.
Like, if you're a dad, you're probably gonna wanna follow me because I'm a dad. So, like, there's something that we can relate on. How does someone from a brand perspective, like, actually consider those things?
So we look at pillars and what can succeed almost the opposite. We look at it tactically. So it's not about the category wealth, health, any of those.
It's about the format. For top of funnel pillars versus format, the killer is the one I use all the time. Was like, can you compare things and say that they're good or bad that people then form an opinion on?
Uh, big dentist, we had come out of cut 30 did this. We're literally like toothpaste, mouthwash, dental trends, something you consider to be really boring. And he's just like, I'm a dentist, and no.
You shouldn't do that. That's bad for you. Like, this is a horrible product.
Okay. This is exactly what you should do. He's rolling down a list.
So versus content comparison as a format is great. Can I say on that? Because like I think the way I think about it too is, like, if you do a versus format, that's within the health pillar.
But then at the same time, if you say, like, if your hook is something like,
your wife will hate your bad breath if you use this, that really like, that adds the relationship dynamic of it where it's, like, anyone that has a wife because then, like, it separates and tribal tribal. A qualifier.
Right? Like Yeah. Like, I had a video that did really well once about, like, introverts need an extroverted spouse.
Like, this thing say and then all of sudden, you're like, okay. Your people are putting themselves in tribal buckets. But I do end up thinking about Rally, like, either it's a versus video or it's a, oh my god.
I didn't know that story. You know? Uh, or it's a a tribal belief is the other one.
Like, that coffee shop video is just a tribal belief. Maximalism is better than minimalism. It's an inherent thing we hold, and, like, I I can lean in it can lean into that.
And we have basically a few of those where I'll be like, alright. These are the top of funnel, like, things that that work or not. But then adding in the personality to your point, like so qualifiers is a huge part of content and hooks.
Qualifiers and curiosity gaps. And you've probably heard these terms if you watch videos like this. But a qualifier to your point is like, if you, in that hook, go from, okay, the best dental floss for whatever to the best dental floss for wife guys, all of a sudden, you've, like, niche that down, and it's a qualifier.
Right? And then in the curiosity gap is, okay, in this hook or in what I'm expecting to hear, I'm gonna stay to the end because I really wanna see x happen. Right?
Like, was a like, someone wants to see the fur the person finished getting ready or what the final fit's gonna look like, whatever. You're you're opening that gap. For brands who want to inject the personality and things in there, there is basically overt and, like, overt and covert ways to do it.
Like, the covert way is just like the setting. Right? You can learn a lot about a brand by the things that are in the background or the set or what's on the YouTube.
Like, my YouTube set has a bunch of, like, medieval helmets and gauntlets and shit, and it gives you an idea of things a certain way. It's like, alright. What can we do just by setting and the way people dress and look?
I'm dressed in a certain type of streetwear. Right? Like, other marketing gurus do not dress like that.
That's a signaler in itself of, like, this person knows a certain world that the other people don't. And it's like, what can you do? Like, that's covert.
And then over it is like, what can we actually say? And so I recommend if you have any of those personalities on camera, like, let them talk about, like, real life, like, as a dad, as a father, as whatever. And it's almost like it's always anecdotal.
This is something I encourage because so many creators copy. Okay. I'm just doing another format this other person already did.
It's like, okay. How do you either at the beginning inject your expertise? So instead of, like, things in Paris, find It's like, things in Paris, I find chic as a first year interior design student.
Now I already know something about you. Then there's the back end. Okay.
Once I made this video that people already like, it's like, anecdote can I put in there? Like, about the end, and it's like, yeah. And it's actually really funny because I'm going to Greece next month, and I've been thinking about x and y, it's and just give it a tangent.
And basically, we call that a it's like a video within a video. I I do a lot of this now. So if people watch my content, they're gonna see it where it's like, okay.
I made this video. Okay. Now here's a second video.
Why not? Let me just talk about where, like, this trip I'm going on or this whatever because I think we're longer content's doing a bit better. And then it gives you a whole opportunity to introduce people into that.
And if you hook again and then you just give it a different kind of format and you're still sitting there talking, it works really well. And that's like your opportunity to inject personality,
especially when you have a format you already know works. I think you glossed over something that's really important, which is that the initial concept still has to be interesting. Right?
So it's like because, the average person's life is not very interesting. And so if you're thinking from a brand perspective, it's like, okay. Uh, travel content.
There's an aspect of travel content that could be really interesting. There's an aspect of travel content that's, like, not. In the personal brand spot, I'm like, Ryan Trehan is probably the best at this where I'm like, you can make going to Target sound like an interesting endeavor
versus, like, the average person is like, that's just Yeah. You either have to be actually exciting or you need the personality to make it exciting. Yeah.
And I encourage a lot of people don't let their personality shine in content. It's like, you gotta make jokes. I try to have at least a joke of video.
Not everyone, like, likes my humor, but, like, it's way funnier when I had a video and I'm calling out, like, you order a seed oil cortado versus if I'm just saying you order a coffee. Like, just having some of those those jabs or those pieces is is really, really important, or it has to be exciting. So, basically, you have to do one or the other.
And if you have both, and if you can make jokes and you're, like, in the rare fish market of wherever, that's gonna go even better. What do you think about, like, trend hacking? I think that's a lot of what companies are trying to do because they're saying, okay.
This worked. We want what they have, so just we're gonna do exactly what they did. And once you already have a successful strategy, you can start thinking about trend.
You can't start as we're trying to hack a trend to get a successful strategy. And that's a really important thing for brands to think about. Feel like our social media sucks.
We're gonna hop on these trends. You're never gonna get your social media good. You need to have your formats and the things you have tested into that are unique or least unique enough to your brand that work.
But once you're there, trend becomes really important there because you already have a basis. You have a fan base. You know how to make good content.
A trend happens. Now you have the ability to, like, really put some gas on the fire. One of the the brands I I work with, we were just working on a strategy for this where they're basically their internal team.
Approvals take too long, and they don't have enough bandwidth ever to hop on trends fast enough. And the trends in cosmetics are done in seventy two hours. Like, you gotta be on it.
And so they're like, cool. How what do we do? It was like, okay.
We need a quick turn creator. We need one of the girls we work with for creation needs to be like, we will give you x amount of money if you have this done and back to us in thirty six hours, and it's good. And we will do that at all times, and that budget is preapproved.
The marketing leader is like, anytime you see a trend, you can go spend $1,200, whatever it And then that creator knows, like, I I want that work. I'm ready to go. You know, like, this is I'm getting more than I usually get, whatever.
And then everyone knows that relationship exists, they can sit in that meeting or get that Slack that everyone shares and be like, oh, shit. Should we hop on this? And it's like, okay.
Yeah. Cool. Send it to Carly.
We know what the cost is. Or no. We don't.
It's not the right trend. And so I think that's kinda how you have to think about is, like, do we have enough of a framework? And then once we do see it, do we have a framework to act on it?
You need to be able to say we're gonna prioritize this over our regular work, or we have a way to actually execute it. How important is it to be the trendsetter versus the adapter? I think for personal brand, it is very important to be the, uh, the setter.
Right? Because everyone can copy so easily, and those people I see it, there's lot of people that copy my content, but none of them get a fraction of the brand deals or whatever. Like, is it something to be said for being first if you keep your foot on the gas?
But for brands, I think it's about where your customer is in the cycle. I always use Aritzia as an example of this. I remember remember when the TSA bin videos were going viral?
Aritzia did that shit, like, six months later during Black Friday. Right? They know their customer is not the coolest customer.
Their customer wants to be on trend, but they're not paying attention. They're working working women for the most part who are like, okay.
Maybe I'm on on trend, but, like, it's if I'm a couple months later and it's still cool, like, it's still cool to them. It's probably new to them coming from that company. So they're like, cool.
We're late on the bell curve. They did, like, the big three d object stuff later than everybody. Doesn't matter.
Still ripped for them because their customer is at a certain point in the bell curve. So I would think it's about acknowledging where it is. If you have an ultra trendy brand, you have to be setting it.
Right? If you or you have to be right behind it. Burga is a great example of a brand that's right behind it.
So they're a iPhone case brand. They do every kind of visual trend that's happening. Like, they they I think they're probably shooting every week, if not if or at least twice a month.
And they are just like, if it's a visual trend, it is in there. They are on it as fast as humanly possible. I I don't think they're ever setting it, but they're always one degree behind.
So that's like level two because they're trendy, but they're not, like, the trend setter. And then all the way back to cool. If you're a brand that, like, if you're selling to people that are behind that bell curve, be like, alright.
We actually can take advantage of this trend two weeks later. No one's gonna care. Yeah.
So I think it's really about mapping where you are out. It all comes back to that customer persona exercise, right, which I think is underrated, and I'm actually shocked. Now you have so much better data than you did, like, years ago on it.
You know? How do you prevent yourself from, like, being perceived as corny or stealing? Because I think creative stealing is gonna be a big thing in the next few years.
As someone whose content gets stolen absolutely all the time, it's like, okay. I I even hate saying stole just because ideas sort of belong to the Internet. A, some people may not even know they took something because they're actually taking from a copy of somebody else.
Like, so it's like three degrees removed. And then also, it there's no recourse.
There's no anything that's happened. So I feel like we're in this kind of odd world where the consumer might not know who the origin was. They may not have seen it.
They may not have ever that, like, everything is, like, both feels icky, and it's up for grabs. Now I hate saying this because I know it's just gonna make more people take my content, but, like, it's sort of just like every anything goes. It doesn't matter.
As long as it's not egregious, as long as you're not copying a word for word script or taking whatever. If it's an idea, ideas belong to the Internet for better or worse now, and you either embrace that as a creator in terms of, like, what's gonna happen to your work or you don't.
But, like, we're never gonna hunt down the original references. Everything's a reference of a reference. Think we've lost the ability to track human creative, and there's kinda no going back.
When you're a smaller size,
you're more willing to use, like, AI in creation versus when you're a larger marketing team, it's almost like that you hate it. It's almost like the there's like a there's like marketing teams that are like, oh, you're taking away my job
by, like, using an using AI in this. And this is a that's a fascinating convo to have right now because, like, if you have a full time job and you're actually like, and your company's actually growing, you don't have time to keep up with this shit. Keeping up with the AI marketing tools is is for the unemployed.
Yeah. Right? Like, it takes so much time.
I'm a I work as a creative director at a PE firm. There's a mandate at that firm that we spend time on AI.
And then we document our AI processes, and it is a huge component of, like, of that business. That biz we we are in on it. You you should spend time on it.
And, like, that's been very effective. Like, I set up yesterday a whole new project in, like, the BrandVoice, one of the brands we have that we query copy for and loaded in all the docs, and everyone has access to the project now. And that's a valuable tool for everyone everyone at org.
And now also, not just that we created this thing, but everyone in the org now knows that that function exists that they could do for their own ideas if they're an MBA or accounting or have a different use. Without that mandate, I wouldn't be spending that time on it.
And so I think we're in this really awkward point where they don't even know, and they don't feel validated enough to go into it and can get, to your point, smaller teams that will spend that time early. It's just another edge that these small businesses have, and that's a, uh, really
hard thing everyone's gonna have to deal with. Do you think that there's gonna be a distaste for the usage of AI if it's found out that it's used? How do we maintain
a standard for creativity? There's two levels to it. There's like, is AI used in the visual generation of something, or is AI used in the flow of the marketing team?
Every marketing team I'm working with is using Claude in some advanced level.
Right? Some people are generating whole landing pages. Cody from JonesRubb is posting.
He's going right. Like, designed to code generated. Like, was posting that on x, which is is crazy.
Like, where their LPs are fully done. Ashwin, um, is doing full LPs generated from Claude. Right?
So, like, all their landers are just like, that's a function. That's done. That's gonna happen.
Every brand is gonna who's smart is gonna do that because it's a waste not to. Two, okay. We generate copy.
We generate whatever. Two processes. Like, even now, like, I do social audits and diligence and frameworks for briefing.
I still brief a lot of creative strategy. I have a whole tool suite for that. Colin Lemfors on the Cutthirty team built an entire video database that gives us frameworks and trending videos and outliers, and then breaks down the hook status, identifies if enough of them are there for a trend.
I get that in an email. So now my briefing time for project work is a fraction. Like, any brand that's not leaning into that kind of stuff is that's a waste of time.
And no one's gonna be feeling bad about it because it's working all I want to do, and no one's gonna see the other end. Now when you get to the generative side of it is where it gets interesting. I did a video the other day about all these luxury collabs happening.
So Stanley Loewe had a there's a collab that went ultraviiral. Same thing with, uh, it was like MewMew and Smeg. They don't exist.
Just AI artists, but no one could tell. They get reposted by the aggregator accounts. And once they leave that first AI account, everyone's like, oh god.
Amazing collab. And I think we've hit this point where it's like, if you can tell it's AI, you'll get some negative customer sentiment, but honestly, you'll probably still do numbers.
And so it really comes down to if it actually impacts your sales. I've talked to some crisis level brands around this. We're like, my god.
We got a thousand bad comments. And it's like, okay. Did it impact revenue?
Has it impact subscribers? And the answer was none. And so it's like, okay.
Then how much hate are you willing to put up with on social media? Which a lot of brands don't want to, but at some point, if revenue doesn't hit, maybe you'll live with. And then also, is it recognizable?
That's the problem we're gonna be dealing with is, like, everyone's gonna assume. Every time I write anything verbose in a script, people are like, AI. I'm like, yeah.
Okay. Gen z, do you just not hang out with people that read? Because, like, this is just words.
You know? Like and so I think there's a status of, like, people are gonna try to find it, but then they can't tell, and that's gonna gradually make it kind of shrink away. I would basically look at it, like, don't even deal with it right now.
Don't even think about having to go, like, I you know how get some alpha using the AI content right now. When in six months, it's gonna be so much better, I would just, like,
avoid entirely engage in, like, going closer to 27. I wanna talk about distribution probably at the next level a little bit more and really dive into it. But for this, I think there's a big push to saying, okay.
It's annoying to try to get influencers, and it's a lot easier for me to spin up personas based off of look alikes that fit my target demographic, especially because the influencer doesn't have to be famous.
So I just need, like, volume of content on this.
Do you think that that's going to get out of hand? Has it already gotten out of hand? Marketing teams, especially bigger companies, the agencies don't wanna do work.
If you are in that scenario and if you're on the team and you're, like, kinda coast by and the work from home, like, you are fucked. Yeah. Because the people that do wanna do work and who are now AI enabled to some the stuff they don't wanna do are, like, fucking superpowered.
Right? And you look at the difference. The influencer example is what brought that up for me, where it's like a lot of people want the biggest influencers.
Right? Because they're deploying the most amount of budget in one place where they can guarantee a return. Because you know what sucks?
Having to go find 10 influencers to add up to the same thing is 10 x the amount of work of just contracting the one. And so lazy teams will go to the biggest things. And, uh, and that's the case for all marketing.
Right? We talked about that budget. Oh, cool.
We just put together the trade show program. Oh, that's half the marketing budget? Great.
I don't have to think about all this other stuff. When the real answer is always all these micro things have to add together. What's happened is people are so removed from that.
They don't understand the scale. Back So to what you asked. Like, okay.
Should we be hunting a big influencer or a bunch of micros, basically? Or creating our own micros with AI. I think creating your own micros with AI is maybe gonna be effective in the ad account, but won't be effective in real life.
It's always gonna be like the hunt down. I I get I would basically throw some creative in the ad account.
Make a couple posts if you're kinda more on the fringe. But if you're a brand with, like, standards who's worried about it, fucking wait till the end of the year. It's gonna be so much and then evaluate.
Because it's gonna be so much to do differently better, and it's not good enough now unless you're really that that amazing. The meta right now is having an army. You have an army of creators, an army of UGC, an army of clippers.
Your media output and volume is shocking. Like like, if you are a brand, I know brands are doing thousands of pieces of creative a month in tree, and that's organic in the ad account.
When I look at the core project we I I work on at at Amvest where I work is seeding thousands of influencers a month with seeding packs and getting, like, 50% plus post rates. Like, the volume of content is unfathomable.
Even from when we started working on that project, it was hundreds, and we keep doubling it being like, when does this end? Right? And so I think that if you are a team that's not doing that, there's has to be some culture shift or some moment where you go like, oh my god.
There's so much more work now, and there's so much more volume. Because the answer is a 100% versus getting the one big influencer. It's like, Maybe they anchor a campaign so people get excited about it, but you're adding on you wanna have the 60, and you wanna be taking those shots on goal with them because you're gonna get more results.
Then you wanna be calming those down and adding the next 60 and then building out your team, and that is what's gonna get you the results. I worked as an IT project manager for about six years,
and I think it was in 2021. I would get on these calls that I would call, like, you know, $50,000 meetings. It was a Fortune 500 company, and in this call, it was the VP of marketing, two directors of marketing, social media manager, VP of ops, VP of IT, and I think VP of revenue management.
And This is why I left traditional work. But yeah. Yeah.
Go ahead. And I'm over here as an IT project manager, and I'm I again, like, you've you're on Teams, and you have to, like, you have to show up for the call. It's what it is.
The entirety of the call was on for the, like, the marketing department initiative was what shade of green should be the the confirm button on this, like, success page on a, like, five page flow for customer, like, ordering.
I left, but, like, I imagine that company's still at that kind of pace. Because, like, at the time, was like, this is insane. People want me to join calls all the time if you do some kind of work or whatever.
It's like, oh, there's 18 people from the marketing team on this for the creative review. It's
like, this is not this is not it. Yes. It's not bias for action.
Who are actually the important people that should be making these decisions on these things? Yeah. So creative enablement is probably the biggest thing where it's like, okay.
If it's a button color, the UX designer, that is their idea, and they should have some KPI around conversion rate and what they're improving or not. A choice that can be made with data or made and then measured, leave it to whoever is doing it, and make sure they have something measurable in place.
That should be the rule for everything. I include social media. If you guys are running a pillar system and doing analytics every month and, like, all that stuff, let them post whatever it is they want and bring you the quantifiable data that you can have an opinion on every month or every week, like, from that.
When you're having a meeting, is this a meeting where politics may help determine the outcomes? So let's bring up that creative review scenario as a a good one where 13 people are on a creative review for content. Do all 13 of those people have enough of a basis in what is good content to be able to have a voice there?
Absolutely not. Maybe there's two people that own content. So what's gonna happen?
Someone who has a strong personality or is a strong arguer or a group of people that are lobbying for some specific thing are gonna take control of the creative, and then your creative is gonna get fucked. And so this is like this is what you have to avoid in all cases. It's like, are these people on there gonna have an opinion, or can it get swayed by politics?
And you can have as many decision making meetings as you want when it's people with a genuine opinion on the thing who aren't gonna get swayed by it for a result that you can't measure at a lower level. Run as many of those as possible. And if not, you gotta just let it fly.
I think some of the best ones are, like, these very nimble teams where it almost Feels like it's like a spitfire. Like, think, again, like a multi jets, I'm like, there's probably, like, one person reviewing it.
And they're just running. Yeah. That's the future.
Right? The less teams than you'd think. And then when you grow it, it is that it's that writer's room mentality.
That's how I'm trying to treat the teams we have now where it's like, we have as few calls as possible. And when we do, it is idea murder boarding. Everyone puts their stuff up on the wall and all the references.
What is our should we do it or should we not? Oh, I like this or I like that. And it's like, there's no bad ideas.
Um, and it's like and everyone needs to be positive. And if, like and if I say that we kill something, there's no more conversation about it. Yeah.
But, yeah, human collaboration should be around that, not around, like, anything tedious. But, yeah, to your point about the $50,000 meeting, if people that don't know what that means, it's like the hourly salary of everyone on the call and then the the cost it is for the company for that meeting to exist. Like, remove as much of that as possible and force them into bias for action.
Right? Like, those people could have been hunting down the 10 new influencers for the campaign, briefing a new piece of creative, doing that thing that's been put off, presenting you the data to feedback. And the way that you get around doing that is having accountability of what people need to present, what metrics, and what results, and whatever to their managers, and then what those managers then present to the CEO, and having like a regular flow for that that's weekly or whatever that people actually read and respond to, like, that's the only framework you need.
Well, this is level four, and I think at level four, we're talk about marketing budgets that are over $1,000,000 a month. Something that's really key here is we're in the big leagues, and the amount of testing and established, like,
proof that people are good at this, like, least the amount of money being thrown at this provides a lot of opportunity. Also a lot of room for waste. What's the most important thing if a marketing director is watching this right now and they're saying, okay.
We have this amount of budget, and then we wanna be on the cutting edge of this. What's the most important thing for them to factor in
for this next quarter? In the previous level is where people start to you enter into the chaos theory of marketing. Right?
You can't measure things in the same way. You need to enter into brand awareness. And to get to that, this level we're talking about, you have to have had some degree of success.
Right? You have to have, like, made those things work to make that jump. And so the key thing here is that your business is bigger, more is happening.
And it's like, how do you not lose the momentum you have to new process, new people bringing in a bunch of MBAs or people from old orgs? Like, how do you retain your edge while the org grows?
And that's a genuinely hard problem. Do you think that there's some
companies
that are legacy that are doing it well? When you look to people like VaynerMedia's clients where you'll get a lot of people that will come there and be like, we wanna stay cutting edge. We wanna work with one of the more cutting edge agencies.
David's a good example of someone who's done this, not legacy, but who's done this quick. Like, I imagine they're somewhere around this this size now. They've zipped up to that level, and it's like they are they're still hammering there in TikTok shop.
They're still like, they're doing in their, like, high end interesting campaigns. They're seeding influencers. They have, like, Julia Fox out there.
They are like, they're launching more stuff. They they're running, like, a grip of paid ads. They're one that's, like, gotten there really fast, I think, is interesting because they're democratized across media.
Like, I see their ads on x. I see the stuff that hammers on TikTok shop. I see, like, full level campaigns.
I see seating going to influencers. I'm like, oh, they are methodically executing
every single thing in that playbook. Is this a place where it's becoming essential to have a popular person associated with your brand? Extremely helpful.
And this is where you'll see, like, you know,
Supergoop signed, you know, like a chief creative officer who is an influencer. Cottagee's, they're a candy company, I think, from Germany, signed a big influencer, a comedian influencer for their launch into The US to have them be like a face of of what that looks like.
In cosmetics, etcetera, it will really get you to, like, have that big high end makeup artist that now represents your brand or whatever it is. So I would look at it like this. One big face is great if you have the right person and it's perfect, But I think the team strategy is almost better where it's like, what are the five or six people that really represent this brand to our different target demographics?
I used to work with a surf company called LiftFoils. And I loved about working with them is they all had the pro team, the old school skateboarding pro team.
But they were smart about it. It like every new market. Like, Australia was becoming a new market.
They had a great surfer in Australia. They had, like, a pro guy who also did all the Red Bull stunts. He was had to be, like, viral stuff that came from him.
They all serve these different purposes. It was eight or 10 guys, and I was helping manage the content. And it would be a constant, what are you guys making?
What can we do as a collab post? Here's some ideas that are working for the other guys. We need these tutorials.
And then I had content coming in from, like, eight amazing people that helped me serve different levels of the scale and different regions. There is no excuse when you're in that million a month to not have that network of it that basically makes everyone's job easier.
Companies stop letting creators be creative.
And so, like, this is that place where, like, the marketing brief ends up becoming, like, really strict and specific of being like, hey. We need to make sure these things are on brand.
We can't do this. We can do this. The bottlenecks of those things.
How do you manage that from a marketing team perspective where it's like, we want to work with creators, but we have to also just let them be creative? The other thing is I actually dealt with this on the influencer end. So I
got contracted to do a series of videos with Cash App, which I was really excited about. And they had and they came to me basically solving this problem. They were like, look.
We have determined internally that we need to have more breadth in what we're allowed to do and allowed to say and be more interesting about it. And we also wanna be able to talk about these, like, kind of hard topics. Right?
Like, how Bitcoin is involved in the Cash App ecosystem or about, like, okay, we have an AI money bot that will give you, like it it's not financial advice, but it will give you basically, like, AI feedback on your portfolio or, like, or what you could be doing or if you move this or or that or, like, you have this savings account access, or this is what you spent this month in the breakdown, and that could all happen in the chat.
And so they were like, cool. As a more intellectual creator, I can go into some of those more, like, complicated concepts, but they had to build a framework. They had to say, we're not approving these like the other ones.
We have a different standard of that. And I think that two tiered system, I think, is really important. It's like, cool.
We have our standard for we need to run through legal. These do x or y. But, okay, if we don't wanna do that, what are the parameters?
Okay. We can't talk about these three things. That means no legal review, but we can't touch those.
Great. Here's these. Here's the standard.
Here's, like, where where our threshold is, and they just widen it up. And then basically say, hey. A certain amount of content or a certain amount of creators or this one campaign is gonna live inside the secondary set of rules, and that makes it so that everyone at least knows the goalpost.
Does the influencer have to have leverage in that conversation? It's more important for the team. Right?
Like, because, basically, the influencer is going to their performance is often gonna be how restrictive they are. Like, I get some of these briefs, or they'll change the brief last second. Or, I mean, I have one for a big brand deal idea where I made an amazing video.
They decided that it didn't reflect how the company wanted to be seen, and we made, like, a not as good video later. And you're like, it's demoralizing. Right?
But, like, you will still do it. And I think that's where, like, it had to be internal. Right?
It was their internal choice not to accept the first one even though they accepted the brief. They have to come up with their standard. And because the influencer is gonna go try to make the best content they can.
I'm not ever trying to make a shitty ad. I'm trying to make it the best thing humanly possible so I get more ads. Right?
And it doesn't look bad on my feed. And so I think it's a lot more of, like, how can we, as a team, give the guideposts that are actually realistic?
And the other part is they're hiring some of these agencies. I see that in some of the briefs I get. Some of these big agencies write these briefs that are just corny.
I think it's more important to have a creator or influencer that's like an adviser to the marketing team. Like, that's, uh, or an adviser to the agency that's actually just knows how to make content. So you're like, that doesn't work.
No one's gonna do that brief. Right now, they're trying to hire influencers in house and be like, you're gonna be our little, you know, you're gonna be our our little doll that you're we're gonna roll out every single time we wanna sell something. Do think it's smarter for people to actually find creators and influencers in their niches that are successful and then say, hey.
Can you advise us to, like and just pay them a returner? Think it's both. It depends what changes your issue is.
Get creators on longer term. I'm making eight episodes, making 10 episodes. I'm on your feed three or four times.
It's gonna work better for everybody because the repetition really helps. It actually builds brand value. And then the influencer has some like, okay.
I know I'm spending a long time in this relationship. I need to make this matter. I have security around it.
Like, that's still critical. But if you are if you are struggling with briefs or struggling with what if like, you brief well and there's no complaints and everyone likes everything and the content's good, you don't need to worry about it. But if you have you struggle with the briefs aren't good enough.
Creators don't like the briefs. The content that we brief doesn't perform. Just get in get that person you already have to advise or bring someone in to advise or make sure the agency you have is is tapped in.
Are we entering a phase where
creatives
and creators that actually have platforms already are gonna get bought entirely? Yeah. I'm interesting to see how that works.
Because I've been know, starter story got got by HubSpot. I'm on HubSpot Media Network. I'm like one of the creators in there.
And I thought about that because of that where I was like, okay. I have a newsletter that's branded separately. Someone could buy the newsletter.
We've had offers to buy it, but no one could buy my YouTube channel the way you could buy Starter Story. It's different than if it was a Patrick Wallace channel. And so I I actually think that's really interesting.
I think it's gonna be more like athlete deals. Because even what I'm seeing now, I have year long deals with multiple brands. That's what's gonna kinda basically turn into.
It's like, oh, I'm signed to the Clippers for three years, 8,000,000, and then, like, it's just gonna go to the next.
I think that's a better way to look at it because it has to evolve. I don't think you can necessarily buy that access, but what you do see is, like, equity or positions or whatever that is. It's like, look.
I'm a creative director at a PE firm. There was no influencers doing that prior, but it has value for everyone involved to be able to, like, have partnership or have equity or do x and y. It's gonna be prolific.
It honestly matters more for some of these folks to have, like, where mean, Adidas did that collection with that. I think it's like a Swedish girl, uh, influencer English girl. More sales and more awareness in their athlete collabs.
Right? And so I think not only are the numbers gonna get to that level, but also the importance for across the board will be like that. And they're gonna print it and announce it, campaigns,
rollouts, like treat it like a real deal. What's the primary metric to track in this? For a lot of these awareness campaigns for these levels, it's like you're not really looking at direct conversion.
You're looking at brand awareness and association with things that we really want for the people we really wanna be associated with. So, like, for example, I'm thinking, like, normally in the podcast world, like or, like, a podcast slash creator world and law firm world, it's like, you want to see the conversion that came from that episode.
Alright. Sweet. This many people came from that episode.
We saw that this many people used the code that was associated with this creator. I'm curious if it actually is gonna pivot into, like, hey. We just want this creator to be associated with us, and what we're gonna pay for is x amount of impressions.
Two metrics there. So, basically, you're either a
a broad creator or a targeted creator. So broad creators, you're there to get views, and you are wanna be tangential to the target market or the core consumer market, but it's like your job is to put up views at a acceptable CPM level that has more affinity than ad would. I think he's probably a micro influencer for them, but, uh, Gannon Meyer for ManyChat and 100%.
Yeah. His job is to put up views about ManyChat to the target demographic of ManyChat. But then I do ManyChat videos, and it's a different thing.
Right? I he'll probably put up more views with his editing style or whatever to a wider range of people talking to creators. I am talking about ManyChat to brands about how to use ManyChat as a brand.
And having integrated that in businesses and it crushes, they don't want the same amount of views. There, the metric is probably significantly different. So that's what I mean by a targeted creator.
The saves and shares and intent are way more important there. So even like, I'm always encouraging brands to look at that. Like, I have some, uh, I do a bunch of content with Amazon.
Doesn't put up huge views. Right? No one who on we're trying to go see a viral video about, like, of the Amazon FBA changes.
Right? Uh, but it's like, okay. Does that video have, like, 300 saves?
Like, that is 300 people with an intent to contribute to a change in the existing Amazon business they run because there's no other reason that you would do that. Are they happy at the cost they pay to get 300
intents on that at what those people are worth to them as a lead rate? Absolutely. And so I think that's where, like, the targeted metric to me is saves and shares for these really hyper important people.
That changes the communication structure for how influencers and creators would communicate with brands, I think. Completely. Because, like, that's the biggest complaint that I hear is so many people say, like, oh, there's not a tangible ROI
to content because you're not able to directly attribute a sale from Yeah. Saw this video. Anyone that's thinking of that is, like, operating in a world that they're so, like, old school.
Like, it's it's like that's like a extremely boomer mentality. It's like meta ads boomer mentality. There's like a four levels of influencing that's really interesting.
It's like, okay. Cool. We have our core influencers.
They appeal to our market. They're gonna make sales. We can do directly measurable.
Every brand should have that just like you have your core meta marketing. Then there's, like, new market. If you're a cosmetics company and you want to acquire a male consumer and you come to like, it's not your core, but you work with an influencer there.
It's gonna be less ROI, whatever, but you're hitting a new market. Then there's just, like, message awareness to trendsetters, the right people. I did Super Bowl campaigns last year.
I did Rocket Mortgage's Super Bowl campaign last year. They're not marketing the Rocket Mortgage campaign to the masses with that. They're marketing it to other marketers and agencies and making them an attractive person in that space to attract talent, to recruit, to retract agency, to be the agency of record.
Now people look at them differently within just the space that I occupy. And I think it's like looking at those levels of, um, of influence, and then looking at the, like like, the moonshot angle of like, okay.
Can we invest in lower level stuff that might give us like a higher level of ROI? Influencer's holistic now. Influencer's not like a channel you attack on the way you do like a single meta ad.
Right? We're kind of dancing around this, and I think this is probably the key part at this phase, which is distribution. That to a lot of people can mean a lot of different things.
What does it make you think of? How far you take an asset, the amount of platforms and things that you are pushing to. I think of quantity, but very similarly, I think of, like, beyond just, like, how far and how many platforms, it's, like, how much can you squeeze the life out of this?
Yeah. That's what I'm used to about about the asset, and it's kinda good to tap into. So for instance, like, you made a great video with an influencer, and you have rights to put it wherever.
It's, like, okay. Do you have TikTok, LinkedIn, Snapchat?
One thing I encourage every company to do is, like, if you have active people on LinkedIn, have them post your organic influencer content on their LinkedIns. Be like, look. Look at this cool thing our company did.
It hits a really specific demographic and, like, more b to b and stuff in an excellent way. Um, but it's like, alright. Have we pushed this as far as we can?
Have we tried its variants inside the ad account? Are other people talking about it? Is it on our LPs?
Are we highlighting that top content inside our email marketing? Do we have segmented email marketing with the data we have, and the influence we're supposed to appeal to that persona is showing up in the content to that persona. If you have a good agency right now and you have that outline and you have frameworks,
what I just described is not intimidating. It's just the process. Are there things that you could perceive as, like, steroids?
Because there's that because as soon as you talk about distribution I think I mean, Gary Vee's talked about this a lot because he's like, oh, I'm like, I tested posting a lot on my main feed, and then I've even caught him sometimes where his team accidentally posts on his main feed, but it was intentionally, like For the for the other account.
Yeah. It was either for the other account. It was for trial reels or something like that.
And he's like, oh, I'm like, it was, an accidental thing, and then they deleted all of them. So, like, I saw him post, like, times. The script accelerator.
So this is something we did when I was
still working at Jailblasters. We're doing FPV content. You could see people's hands with playing with the blasters.
And that content is then repurposable to any number of languages. And we had a far bigger Spanish speaking TikTok account than we had US because there was a lack of Spanish speaking content at the time. And so the creator was making these, and we're doing the English voice over version, the Spanish voice over version.
And then it's the same thing as we do in Beauty Now. It's like if there's a banging script, then you break it down by look. It's like, oh, we actually need someone with dark skin.
We need a younger person. We need person with skin issues. We need a person with whatever.
All your TAM is based on the language, the look, the whatever. And so if you have a fucking winner, your job is to multiply that.
It's the same way the TikTok shop creator, like WhatsApp groups and Discords will then share the winning video so the other creators can, like, replicate the winning video, but especially if they look different, have a different style. And so concepts burn these concepts to the ground, right, until they fucking they stop generating money.
When you say FPV, do you mean, like, first person? So in that same sense, it's like an it's like a meta glasses kind of Yeah. Exactly.
So we we were shooting with the iPhone rig. They're playing the game, like the the game we're promoting. And and it's just the hands content, and that was, like, the core of it.
Someone picks it up or they unbox it or they do it. It's almost like a video game. With a with a voice overlay?
Or Yeah. Exactly. One of my go to techniques, you if you go look back at every brand I've worked or if you start to wonder if I worked for the brand, then you see this, you'll know, is, like, is it the under the inaction tutorial?
So, like, a good example of that gel blaster is, like, people are firing little gel blasters at each other, and then they're explaining to you, this is how you do this function or reload, like, while the game is going on. Right? We did this with the surf brand where the guy was on the wake he was he was wake foiling, and he's explaining how to wake foil while he's on the foil.
And then he's got the mic on. He's over the water. And, like, that's such a compelling, uh, format to be like, okay.
It's not just I sit down and tell you how to do It's I'm doing it while the thing's in action or there's like some other variable. It's like such a great way to make a product tutorial hit. I think I saw a variation of this where it's like someone it's a it's a guy that's like he's skateboarding or longboarding down like a long thing, and it looks like he's about to crash.
And but his tone and his voice is, like, so calm. So calm. But you're feel like, hey.
If I'm explaining if I'm telling you about the new Pirelli tire Yeah. And I'm in I'm standing in front of the car, cool. If I'm telling you about the new Pirelli tire and I'm driving at 90 miles an hour, that says a completely different thing.
And that's the same with basically any level of product. Right? Like, even if you're selling a supplement and it's like, cool.
In like, on the bench, like, in between sets being like, this has helped me get my eight rep max up. It's just inherently more interesting watch. A lot of those types of styles
can be awesome for brands that don't care about having a personal brand. At this scale, do you think it's important for some level of founder to be
present in most of the content? No. I think that all that matters is that there are faces.
You want faces associated with your brand. It's gonna help you reach more people, help you develop affinity. It does not to be the founders.
Doesn't really matter who they are. The easiest way is to get influencers in the space, like I mentioned, someone really credible. The more successful you get, the more likely your founder's a psycho, and you probably shouldn't put them on camera.
I'm just saying, like, is this is what it is, and those stakes get too high. The other thing I wanted to ask you on this is mister Beast is talking about how all of his best short form content doesn't include any communication because that TAM is larger. The TAM is larger.
TAM is a whole whole thing. If you have a truly widespread product, like, you need to be able to watch it without any voice over, any communication, have it still, like, appeal to anybody.
Right? I'll never have I don't have any content you could just watch, and it would have that same appeal. So my TAM will never be mister beast.
That's totally fine. But I would basically think I look at rules like that are only useful. Like, if you're selling brownies, if you're selling water, if you're selling, like, whatever, think of content like that in that TAM.
But if you have a if you are selling anything that requires, like, intellectual end of it, it's a very different game. Right? Because then you wanna be able to use your intelligence to build brand affinity.
We're at that point where it's like I mean, money doesn't feel like very important in this. We can kind of throw money, whatever. We can test whatever.
What is the core team,
and what types of campaigns? Like, what budgets should they be setting for some of the aggressive campaigns they're wanting to do? I mean, this is like nuanced by business and nuanced, like, by size, but this is where you usually end up with, like, you have your core team, and then you have, like, special projects.
And this is what you'll see now in terms of recruiting is it's no longer we have the social team. It's like, we have our social team, and then we have, like, our head of Twitter or head of whatever. And so this is about, like, you get an expert in to run this thing you're gonna do.
Content kind of situation. Yeah. But also but now it's, like, even by network.
Right? Like, you don't go get your head of social isn't now gonna go own Twitch. Right?
You probably need to get a Twitch person. Right?
So there's a lot of that happening, whether it's contractor or regular to get, like, this person that helps out the change of the director of marketing? Like, is the director of marketing being pivoted by The director of marketing changing a lot where it's like, okay. That person is kind of either a director of content and social, uh, or they are a also the creative director, and they're across everything and ads and all that.
And they're, like, briefing, and it's, like, way more tactical than it used to be. And and it's look, it's a hard job because the VP and CMO is so now most likely disconnected from how everything works and are lost and can't report and describe the same things.
You end up with these, like, director level max roles that have all this responsibility that then usually end up leaving because, as you know, we can all make way more money in this, like, in this alternative world. And so the it's like a there's a really hard gap in this.
And so the savvy people are, uh, and if I'm a CMO and I know I don't know my answers to this, your answer is like, okay. You get your hitter, your your director of marketing, whatever. They're more tactical than ever, and they are either a head of content or they are, like, basically a creative director where they're basically influencing how good everything is inside your org because it's no longer ability to be a glorified product project manager role.
Right? Like, that can't exist in this new world. And if you're like, we're doing a new initiative and that person doesn't have the bandwidth or the understanding to do it, like, we wanna go conquer x and that person doesn't know it, then you hire a specialist for x.
Describe this person to me because I think there's a lot of people that are like they're looking for what they perceive as a unicorn. They have to have a a breadth of experience and be a subject matter expert on a bunch of different things. Likely, they don't have any proof, though.
Everyone's looking for I don't need a social media manager. People used to wanna hire social media managers. I need someone who can do the social media strategy, and they can then hire the creators, hire the social media, hire the whatever.
But, like, if you really understand social to that level, either you are have been in the game for years in the trenches and are probably director of marketing, VP of marketing because you moved up in your career, or you are also a creator, in which case you probably make a lot of money. And so you end up with these, like, okay, we need a creative strategy.
We have to have spent all this money, done all this. Creative strategy is like a before creative director, basically, is what's turned into. Where it's no longer I write this copy or do extra why.
It's like either brief and help organize organic or I brief and help organize paid or I do both. And then when you can do that on a campaign level, when you're in, like, basically entering into and you facilitate everything, you have the ideas. You can think ahead.
You can enter into CD territory. But, yeah, the, uh, the the job for that is so hard to do.
It's part of why we designed this thing we have now where it's like, cool. Let me train you on everything you're missing. Okay.
Do you know a few of those, you don't know email marketing, or you don't have x in your portfolio? Can we do have you give you some assignments and some feedback and some ongoing to do? But, like, that's the gap.
And, like, it's a gap so big. It's like, selling into that gap, like, actively right now because you would just see where that Um, look. And that's the hardest part is marketers now understand because they're so tied to the money what your skill set means.
If you're a good media buyer, you can also craft some ads. You have a few relationships. You're like, okay.
Wait. I can do the math. Like, two x ROAS, we're spending x amount a month, like, x amount of profit.
Okay. If I just had $5 in six months, I could do and then all of a sudden, they don't work anymore. We're separating two different things.
There's a tactician, and then there's a strategist. Does that person have to do the same thing to do this role? No.
You have a creative skill set, you bolt those things on top Create a strategist. If you bolt those things on top and you have a network and you've done experience, now how you can be a creative director? What's a personality trait that's gonna be consistent in the killers?
They are creative people that have found a way to organize. You have all these creative people that, uh, they don't have process. They don't wanna have whatever.
But Cortex is is pretty is pretty cooked. You're yeah.
Yeah. You say so, like, basically, it's like, okay. I can go I can do these things or I'm good at this whatever or I'd love to be a video editor.
And then there's the people that are like, this is my reporting framework, this is my three spreadsheets, and I have a list of the influences I've ever worked with. And as soon as you get that person, no matter what level they're at, you just, like, put them in it. If they have any degree of creativity and they've learned to organize like that, you do it.
What's the budget range for this? All the offers we're seeing is, like, $1.20 low. It's, $1.52 plus.
It's so funny to have, like, a role that's, like, not necessarily it's not full leadership that's, like, in this. Right?
And people are look. Info product people are hiring for that. Creators I know are hiring for that.
They need those people to support them as influence. Like, it's so in demand. And when you were asking about what how do you attract that when they know they can go make their own money?
And really, is like, are we doing creatively interesting things with other interesting people that are really that can really blow up? Like, every creative wants to work on that environment.
When I go work on a project now, it's because I'm like, this is sick with sick people, and it's gonna get far reach, and we're having a bunch of constraints. And as soon as any of those things aren't true, it's like goodbye. Right?
Yeah. And then the other part is unlocking real levels of money. Right?
Like, we we were spiffing a strategist, other an organic strategist on if the organic post would also scale on paid, like, giving them, like, a big carrot on the other end while they were learning paid, that role is worth a lot if it's actually generating revs. Do you think that you're gonna see a lot of people arrogantly think that they can do it by themselves?
And how do you separate that gap between someone identifying, I can do this by myself in an agency format or a freelancer format versus a people will sign up for it because it's hard. I don't think people that are unequipped to do that strategy role will try to hop into it because, oh, now all a sudden, oh, yeah.
Give feedback to the media buyer. They're like, fuck. Yeah.
That might be a question where, like, I'm in my moat where, like, I know a bunch of heads of content of people, and I'm like, it seems like this, like, very attainable type of thing. You'd have to perform. That's the biggest thing.
It's like, you need to be confident enough in your ideas. And that's why so many of these people have ended up being creators is like, that was my biggest thing once I started making content while I still worked. And I was SVP of marketing.
It was like, oh, like, I know. I can tell you what a 100% for fucking sure that's a bad hook or not. And I didn't have that conviction before.
It only comes from making it. You know? And then all of the once you have that, then you're like, oh, I have complete confidence in anything social related.
And if you and then start doing it on a second network, and then all of sudden, like, of course, I can crack Twitch. What we're talking about here is, like, there's a certain level of I say arrogance. I think it's confidence, but, like, it comes across sometimes in the wrong people as arrogance.
Creative people. There's these issues with creative people as a whole, right, where creative people aren't confident. They don't wanna be confident in their work, afraid to post on social media, whereas this insecurity is rampant inside creative people.
And then the most loudest are often the most insecure. Right? Uh, and then you get this idea that creatives also are afraid of money.
They have been taught for so long that if you monetize your art, you you sell out. Right? And so that's one in their heads.
And then the agency infrastructure has manipulated and taken advantage of those people for decades and put them in their place and said, yeah.
You deserve 68 k a year as a junior copywriter. We're gonna lay you off first or as an art director who does whatever. And and then they say they've been locked into this when right now, at this moment in time, that is the most rewarding job.
If you are a creative who can make stuff move on the Internet at the same time, you are worth significantly more than likely your boss or your boss's boss. And but you're too timid to go about it, and it's a there's a cultural dissonance there.
And it only gets solved, at least for the people I've met, from having, like, enough ego to put your stuff on Internet the and then getting success from that and then realizing how much people get paid because you're talking to other influencers, then you're like, fuck. And then you do it, and there's only so many people that make that jump.
I wanna make this podcast something that's attractive to companies.
I really want to. But because, like and I don't even know how to broach that conversation because at the same time, it's like, at what level am I focused on the CPM of what's valuable?
On what level am I thinking about the distribution of, you know, like, people have already used my content, like, clips from this content as ads. Right? So it's like, that's already happened.
I don't know how to answer that negotiation because my focus is like Views has been probably yeah. Even that. Well, look at TPP is a perfect example.
Right? Yeah. People were talking about, oh, every ad slots a million dollars, and they only and people are talking shit.
They only get 5,000 listeners. It's like, yeah. Who are the people?
What is the decision level? And then what is the average deal size? What's a ramp customer worth to ramp a lot?
Because some of the people are always wondering about certain ad deals I do. And I'm like, look. Some of these SaaS companies, if it's a you know, if their first year AOV is $10 and it's software, like, like, the the the financial implications are, like, very different.
Like, their cost per leads are so much higher than anything else. And so it's just about, like, really, like, do you speak to that audience that appeals to it, and can you articulate that? And TBPN articulates it in purely in the like, you can see it in the talent of who's interacting with it.
Right? And then x is a great network for that. It's harder to see on the other networks.
Last part of this section. What are some companies or brand pages that you think are really at the top level that everybody should be looking at? Bad Hombres is a great one.
They're a food brand, like a burrito brand. They're like a smaller business, but they've just done a great job of, like, the narrative of their business. They have the story of the founders.
They have the story of the things they do. They were up for an award in Phoenix, like, where they're based. But they tell every story in video, and they tell every story in Carousel, and they reiterated on their stories.
You feel like this narrative that you've belonged with of how the brand has grown, they're a really good example of, like, a small business that does not have a lot of money that is doing it excellently by being, like, content first. Epzotic, they're a perfume brand where the founder is, like, extremely active on it. He has this, like, set in, like, his area, and he's breaking down his preferences.
He's talking about, I don't buy this type of perfume bottle. Here's my favorite fragrances and how he develops and debuting the new stuff, like, centered around one personality. Another good, like, they probably don't have a team.
It's like a person. Belmont is interesting. Belmont's a hospitality.
Hospitality is notoriously bad in social media. Belmont's done a good job at embracing, like, the carousel trend at embracing, like, making creative around their experiences they have and the really elevated experience.
I've seen AI content from them that's been solid. They're they're doing, like, little vignettes. And, again, no text or overlays, just that visual style.
That's a good example of, like, a trad luxury hospitality company that's doing an excellent job. Burga, like I mentioned before, they do a good job being being on trend. Shein has a makeup brand called She Glam.
Their content is incredible. The production value, the level of quality, how they choose to do it, the sound and audio editing. Gisu is another good one in the cosmetic space.
They have influencer slash, like, kind of celebrity founder, and but they are just doing the way they do their event recaps, the way they do their collabs. They do these big food collabs.
Very mister beastie where they're like, they collab with a big celebrity chef. They have these huge kind of displays, and they're moving all the content fast, and they're like huge piles of vanilla. And you're just like, it's so perfectly built for the Internet.
But I just also appreciate the little things. Like, their event recap videos are just edited immaculately, and, like, that's that's another good one. Sunny's is a smaller they're a Filipino
or Philippines based cosmetic brand, and they have, like, a sunglass brand and stuff as well. They have, like, kinda pretty elevated, like, mid tier brand content. Ideally, you have someone in your marketing department that is chronically online or at least intentionally online.
Right? But more likely chronically online. And usually, they're able to identify within the niche of their interests.
This creator is going to be popping off. Like, usually, you have someone that's like, okay. They have a good gut, and they see someone that has, like, under 20 k followers.
And you're like, the odds the mathematical odds of this person is gonna get to a 100 high. I had that recently with someone that launched a brand new account, and I could just tell this person he's a he he was golfing with his wife or something like that, and he was he's Yeah. And you're like, this is gonna go.
Insanely creative. Just like in insanely creative challenges, like and then be like day one of this and always doing, like, ten day challenges. You know, like, whatever it is.
Making it seem impossible, but, like, just really funny.
How quick should a company be to say, like, dude, I want them? Get on it and, like, and be, like, either to give them a really simple structure or be like, what's your dream scenario? Yeah.
You when you get to a 100 k, what would the sponsor that have helped you get there get there? I'm doing, like, upfronts now, the way people do TV, where, like, I'm pitching the content to my sponsors, like, far and ahead of time. It's like, yeah.
I'm going to Japan and x, and we're gonna do this content. Are you interested? And I think brands should be looking at their creators.
They do work with it or good like that too. Be like, hey. Are you thinking about doing YouTube, or what's what's coming up new for you that we can get involved with early?
Like, I still have, like, one of my YouTube sponsors was there since day one. I've never even asked them to up the rate. Yeah.
Like, they they're still paying, like, a fraction of the others because they were there when I didn't have anything and, like, sick. And so I think there's, like, a lot of that to to worth looking at. The upside is is the juice.
Right? Like, get anyone that you think is gonna have that upside performance you can get in ahead of time, like, that is the win. And look.
You're seeing big brands doing it. Chanel's doing it. I'm right here.
Yeah. Grant's right there. But it's funny.
Like like, even Louis Vuitton, Chanel, all these luxury brands are doing the same thing now. They're they're getting these celebs. Like, who is it?
I I don't know my movie stars as well, so I was learning this from my wife, but it was like, they're getting these actors that are, like, new. It's no longer interesting to have Timothee Chalamet. You wanna get, like, the person that's gonna be Well, know both.
Like, Louvoutin has Zendaya, and then they have, uh, like I think it's, like, Chase Infinity or one of these, like, new wave, and it's like, oh, that did not happen before. And it's like, make the bet and, like, have the star. Right?
And that's a good transition point to to level five where it's this unlimited budget.
Uh, you're doing crazy marketing campaigns. You're getting insanely high level people to come in and just do it for that one commercial.
You're saying, I want this creator to run this whole thing and do a specific project, and they're gonna give them infinite amount of money just to be able to do that. Who is doing that well, who is doing that bad? Claude is the best example of doing it well.
And this is the truly like, I'm sure the budget's unlimited,
but also the TAM is unlimited. Yeah. And it's new, and they're just hammering it.
When I'm doing, a workshop in this level or whatever, like, the challenge that people are going on is, everyone thinks, why doesn't why don't these brands do this hip new thing? Why aren't they involved in x and y? And it's like, to do an initiative at a brand at at that size, you basically, uh, you have to have scale.
It has to be able to scale into some huge TAM. Doing something small is almost like a waste of time, or they're gonna or because it's gonna require so many people have to be involved at a brand that's in the billions of dollars to be able to, like, do anything and so many layers of whatever that, like, it's almost not worth it.
I love the Claude example because they are doing a few things well. First is the scale of the campaigns they can do. So Claude is influencer marketing.
I did one of the early it's one of the first ones when they started influencer. I I did that, and they scaled into, um, like, Instagram girlies angle hard. All these female creative, like, really smart, making really great content, more intellectual, they basically sponsored all of them, it looks like.
They were like, oh, this kinda works. We got 10 or 11 of these. They still sponsor other creators, but they went and they just dominated that TAM.
Yeah. They said, oh, this audience is converting for us. We're reaching someone who's not.
Like, we're reaching, like, a way our competitors aren't, and it works. And we can now get hundreds of creators. Like, I've seen so many in that campaign.
That was a great example of, like, we did influence. We found a niche our competitors aren't in, scaled it. And now you're kinda seeing the same and, like, it's like, not only you're doing a 100 initiatives.
It's like, that is an issue that is hammering, and they run paid behind it, etcetera. But, also, they're doing monoculture. And these are the two things worth to think about at that level.
Like, if you are functioning is like, what can we of these what are these new things we're doing? Streaming, influence, can we just really scale? Can we just do use our size to operate at a level other people can't?
And then there's the monoculture aspect, like, Cloud launching the keep thinking campaign on mass television the way Apple would use to launch an ad so it has all this conversation around it, and then following up with another high level concept at the Super Bowl. What are those moments we still have left?
Which is really Olympics, Super Bowl, Black Friday, like, maybe Valentine's Day.
Like, maybe some huge thing happens. There's only so many monoculture left, but you have to participate in it. That value, I think, is now undervalued.
Getting a Super Bowl ad that everyone talks about and also having a whole rollout campaign, like Carl's junior, Alex Earl. I love the Carl's junior, Alex Earl because she was over posting. Her like, her boyfriend at the time was posting the behind the scenes.
They were ripping so many posts because it was big for her. And you're like, cool. I bet a bunch of that wasn't even paid.
I bet that's just like she's trying to make the most of the moment. They're making the most of the moment. It's a multipronged campaign.
And, like like, there is it's actually underrated, uh, attention even at that high million cost for how being able to actually, like, get into the culture. And so I think, like, that's where those brands really focus.
It's like, yeah. Can we be the brand at Coachella? Can we scale into influence and do a huge like, we're not gonna get six marketing creators.
We're gonna get every marketing creator, and we're gonna do it every month. And, like, you just like, that's where I think the thinking needs to be there. How much do you think MrBeast changed culture in this in this game?
I
don't know. Think about all the like, he he just did Salesforce and Slack, and then before that, he was running Shopify. He was one of the first creators to be like, we're gonna hand you a million bucks for $500,000
just to be in one video. Yeah. But I think it's also like, he's just a celebrity.
That's like the intro they're using him the way they would use Tom Cruise. It's almost like bad to me.
Like, I don't wanna give mister Beast $5,000,000 to be in my Shopify ad. I want mister Beast to make the most viral piece of content that we've ever fucking seen that, like, has our brand in it.
I so I think it's, like, almost like an oddball usage. He's just basically crossed over to being utilized like a celebrity, and I almost don't think that's right. You think it's more intentional for, like, you know, like, Adobe Creative to be sponsoring Colin and Samir?
Like, that's a more Exactly. And then if you're a brand of Adobe size, which is what they do, get everybody.
Right? As many people as you can. That is a scale game.
We want all of them. We wanna be able to enable them to do good creative. And then can you tie that to some big campaign or some overarching idea?
And then how do you optimize all the stages of that funnel? It's funny how much brands at that scale lose of the more traditional marketing process. Like, what's the LP?
Is there a download? Can we get email metrics from this? Does the email campaign work over time?
They often just lose that to the core. Like, we just need to promote at this high scale. And I feel like if you're able to execute some of that monoculture and you're able to have, like, the economics of, uh, like, the funnel that comes from that, you are, uh, you can operate in a really, really, really interesting level now.
How do you not come across, like, all of the gambling ads? The guerrilla marketing for gambling is insane right now. No one's enforcing the rules on anything.
So how where do you wanna operate in that? Yeah.
The the gambling portion, again, that's just eyeballs. They're just like, they are just seeing what are cheap eyeballs, what are expensive eyeballs. And if you have the budgets to do it, you can think like that.
We did audit on a massive company. I'm sorry. We're get any detail on it.
But was it was about the marketing spend. And you're just like, oh, it's just lost in the sauce. Right?
And without any quantifiable metric. And, uh, and, like, let's use, uh, let's use Salesforce as an example. Salesforce runs all these huge super rollouts.
They roll these influencer campaigns, but it's not going to a to a funnel. It's like, oh, they ran the whole thing with Matthew McConaughey about, like, agents. Yeah.
That and, like, I don't know. Woody Harrelson was in there. They're like, we're just gonna get But guess what?
If that same campaign, which made no sense, was like, get the ebook that explains agents at salesforce.com/x, and they have a email value per lead.
They just treated it like a traditional funnel, which they should understand more than anything. And then you actually got, say, a couple 100,000 business owners to understand what agents are because they got the free course or the ebook, and they just treated it like some more direct response marketing.
A a brand who sells that kind of thing, activating at that level, just attaching it back to the funnel so you're both getting the brand awareness you're already getting, and you're actually getting it you're getting people into a flow and their whole marketing team. You could have look.
A 100 people could work on that, honestly, like, org that size, and it would probably be ultra effective. I feel like that's where this gap is, like, getting reaches. Like, you can no longer kinda operate in that pure awareness.
Like, Klaus is doing this. These are campaigns. Those UTM links.
Like, it's like, they're functioning at that scale in an incredible way. What's really interesting is is once you get to the point where you're doing commercials, there's not really a value to the commercials anymore, especially for some of these SaaS companies.
It's not about being nimble. It's like you can hit more people by just hitting the other platforms. It just needs to be very campaign centric.
It's like, okay. Instead of just putting up some weird ad. God, I saw an ad.
Was for Waterloo. Uh, I was on streaming the other day. It was just terrible.
It's like whatever agency they had should just get asked immediately. It was like, were dancing or whatever. It's like, no.
Like, it like, that's not how ad what is the campaign? What is the overarching thing that Waterloo is trying to do to position themselves against LaCroix or whatever? Oh, we're a Texas brand or whatever they wanna do.
And then it's like, how do we then express that across all these mediums? And because the campaign is getting like, it's it's a one plus one equals three scenario. We're resonating on influencer.
We have all these ads going out. Okay. Now it's on streaming television.
Oh, it matches our, um, our aisle interrupters at retail, the the standouts you have when you walk. They have, like, a little graphic.
Like and all of that ties together to create a moment that gets a message across. Like, that this is the best time ever. I use that Carl's Jr.
Campaign or the Clog campaigns as an example of this to then add on all these these things they have, add up to this overarching idea that can permeate
consciousness of of their consumer. I wanna get tactical and and have people see how your brain works in this. Is there a big company that you would love to work for?
Yeah. Mercedes. Let's go.
Mercedes. Yeah. Okay.
So say that you came into the Mercedes department and they said, alright, Oren. We're gonna give you this unlimited budget.
You can do whatever you want,
and our goal is broad awareness. What would you do? What's the first step?
Based on the personas, what insight can we get? Either a consumer pain point or a thing happening in culture, etcetera, that is interesting enough and big enough that we could anchor a campaign to.
Like, we need we need an idea. And I think, uh, maybe it's a handful or whatever, but we need that, like, a clause, like, to keep thinking idea where it's like no.
It's not the best idea, but it's an idea, and it's based in a consumer fear. Oh, uh, we're gonna lose our creativity because of AI. It's like there's a thought through concept that anchors the core of their marketing and how they approach influencers.
We need that insight. And I don't know if I can brainstorm that insight that fast, but it's like, you know, the we were marketing the mini g wagon or whatever, and it's like, there's there's something around how people are perceived or or culture or the Instagram ability or whatever.
It's like, okay. We have some core insight there about, you know, the lifestyle that sells the thing that we wanna sell.
And then it's you. Then it's like, Okay. We have that insight.
Then it's like, what what avenues are we going under? Like, Okay.
We need a we have our core campaign on our social. We have this really optimized video.
We have the photos to come from. We have all the assets to roll out. We have the teaser that comes in front of it.
We have the unveil of the actual campaign. We have how we promote that campaign after. Okay.
Then what are anchor influencers we could have involved? They could actually be in the content of the ads and help multiply it and tell that backstory to the Alex Earle point. Then what are the influencers that we have that then multiply the campaign once it's live?
Then what does it look like if it's successful and it hits our metrics? And what are those metrics? How hard can we push the gas pedal on it?
Okay. We could do 5,000 influencers with, like, this this type of brief, and if it doesn't hit the metrics, we don't do it. If it does, we do.
And then, like, what is the, like, the TV spot look like from there? And then what are, like, the international, like, variations on it?
And how wide can it go across? Like, we'll be going out all these pieces. Like, alright.
Does this also make sense on TikTok? Does this make sense on streaming? Like, what's the x out?
What are all the places we advertise or want to? And, like, how deep can we go? And what are the metrics that unlock the next stages of it?
And, like, that's basically how any major campaign would get built. Maybe
Shelby sat buying Mercedes like a G Wagon was like Sigh up. Oh, shit.
Yeah. No. But, like, maybe that did more for Mercedes than it did for her.
And I'm thinking, okay. Well, so if I'm of this massive brand, this, like, this margin like, this massive thing and a smaller,
like, influencer did this, but got a lot of cultural Attack attaching to it. Yeah. Like, there's brands do this very well.
Like, I think what was the one Stanley where the girl's house burned down, all this ride was a Stanley. And then, like, they, like, the CEO responded, they, like, hopped onto that.
You know, because Shelby Sappon may be a bad example because I don't know if Mercedes wanna be associated with it. But say that it was, like, slightly more wasn't a make money online influencer.
It did the same thing, and it was just as popular. Like, you have to ask yourself as CMO or whoever's in charge or whatever level be like, okay. How big does this resonance go?
Back to the point we had earlier. Is this does this only appeal to, like, a certain level of Internet culture? It only goes so far.
It's probably not worth our time. Like You don't think that the the tribalness of it actually expands?
At that level, see at every level of the four up until this one, potentially. But then when you're at this level, it's like, okay.
You need mass market. You need every single person Every single, yeah. Basically, like, that's how you start to make decisions.
That's I think what people don't understand is, oh, we could just do a thousand of these moments. And it's like, can you? Like, I've it's just not set up to be able to review and work through those and be worth the time.
In the perfect world, yes. Yeah. We're gonna activate every one of those moments.
We actually we built a framework that anytime that there's a viral Mercedes moment, we now have an infrastructure to plug that into. That is an example of being able to take advantage. Like, say Mercedes did the influencer Mercedes campaign.
Like, every time an influencer buys a Mercedes or buys a G Wagon and get some level of virality, they're like, oh, actually, we're gonna build around this. We're gonna go send them this custom package, and we're gonna launch this ad campaign, and we pay x. And then we're gonna have like, the Mercedes team's gonna show up and do x and y, and we're gonna do it a 100 times with every influencer.
That becomes useful versus we're just activating Shelby's app. Now, again, if it's Nara Smith, that's different. At that level, though, is it like is your thought process how fast would it go to, like, okay.
You're gonna do a car podcast where you have a personality doing it, and then you're gonna go get all those influencers and then interview them just within the Mercedes? At that level, it comes down to, like, do you have the talent that can execute that at that level?
Right? Like, if I have someone if they have you, and you're like, oh, I know how I'm gonna make sure every one of those clips is viral. Great.
But if, like, if you're like, we're not that good at that, and we don't know if those clips are gonna hit, like We have unlimited budget. That's a that's a thought process. Yeah.
But, also, you only have unlimited budget if you don't have unlimited time. And then what does it do for Mercedes if they, like, launch a podcast and all has 900 views or it's all, like, sponsored and paid? It's like, there has to be some level of, like, we have a comfortability, like, on this or it works We can put Aspen behind with everything else.
Right? And could that be one element of that influencer campaign? Like, yeah.
We get them on the podcast. I did a campaign for car gurus, which I love doing.
They were like was literally like, cars from car gurus and, like, talk about, like, why you buy them and using their the feed, the functionality, and YouTube content for car guys. Right? Where that gets a perfect they got the right people, built the right team.
Mercedes could totally do that. But it's just like having that confidence in the team members to build that together. The very last thing I wanna cover, what would you say are the things we overemphasize when it comes to content marketing?
Being on brand. Always having to have the product front and center. Like, this is a storytelling world, and and that needs to be fluid.
And if you're trying to live by any of those old standards, you're like, you're gonna lose to a team with bias for action who doesn't have those same standards to have to sit with. What's underemphasized?
The
size and scale with which you can operate at, even small. How many accounts? How many angles?
How many pieces are creative? How many things go in the ad account? How many influencers?
How many creators? The scale you can really operate at even when you're a smaller team is absolutely staggering if you just lean into it. And if you, like, need you if wanna like go down the rabbit hole on that, like go to any brand that's really scaling on TikTok shop and look at how many they'll have 3,000 affiliates, 5,000 affiliates every month, and they're communicating with them and they're operating it and they'll have multiple channels and you're just and then you'll go, oh, how big is the team?
And it's like three people. And you're like, oh, this is like, we're in this new era that people came and wrap their heads around because the scale is so much bigger than what everyone's been doing for years. And do you think that people settle for like one creative a day when they should be going for like four creatives a day?
It depends on if your one creative isn't even good, it doesn't matter. Mhmm. But I think people who are making good stuff, you probably could have five x the velocity without if you were just taking it that serious.
If you like that was the priority.
But but I think it's a waste to think about scale before you're good. Warren, I just wanna say I appreciate you. Your wisdom in this is, like, evident.
It's like something I love about you is, like, dude, you're you're so ADHD. It's comes through in all of your communication, and it's so obvious. But it's at the same time, I think, like, this is the type of marketing brain that's required in order to innovate.
And I think that's like that's why you're at the top of where you're at is because like your awareness, not only to take stuff in we didn't even really get into your organizational process, but if other people wanna watch other people's pieces of your content, talk about how you've organized or other podcasts. We talk about how you've organized your your structure of the day to make sure you're receiving all the stuff you need to receive to make good decisions.
It's obviously live and breathe this. That's the thing that's required from every marketing department. So I just wanna encourage like any person that's in any any level of marketing whatsoever to you're clicking on this video probably because you already know of him, but deep dive because the gap of your awareness of how fast things are changing, Oren can help, like, dramatically, like, bridge so that you're able to come kinda come through it and say, yes.
I understand what's happening, and at least I understand what happened forty days ago and how that's gonna impact what's gonna happen months from now. I just really appreciate your wisdom in this.
I've I've learned a lot, I think it really was It was it was good to chat. Like, uh, we we just pushed the table at some point, I interrogate you about the podcast scaling. Yeah.
We'll get there. Yeah. Sounds good.
Sounds good.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Every marketing conversation eventually collapses into the same argument: organic or paid, brand or performance, big influencer or micro-army. This one doesn't. Instead, it builds a five-level framework keyed to budget — from the founder with an iPhone and no money to the brand writing Super Bowl checks — and the answer at every level turns out to be the same mechanism running at different voltages.
