Aaron Conant 0:18

Happy Tuesday everybody, my name is Aaron Conant. I'm the co founder, chief digital strategist here at BWG Connect. We're a giant networking and knowledge sharing group of 1000s of brands. We kicked this off six years ago with this idea that we could network and now share together to stay on top of newest trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it might be that shaping digital, I spend most of my time during the week, when I'm not moderating educational events like this, just talking to brands would love to have a conversation with anybody on the line today, catch up with anybody that I've already spoken to, and just, you know, kind of share what's going on Strategy wise, we see the winners are doing what the losers are doing more than happy to take some time love those conversations. A couple of things we're getting started just three to four minutes after the hour, we're going to wrap up with three to four minutes to go at least we're gonna give you plenty of time to get on to your next meeting without being late. And the other thing is, we want this to be as educational and informational as possible. So at any point in time, if you have questions, feel free to drop them into the question, drop them into the chat or you can always email me anytime during the call tomorrow next week, Aaron Aaron@bwgconnect.com. That's Aaron@bwgconnect.com. More than happy to answer your questions in the digital space. With that, I want to we're a topic that's been coming up for a while. And it's it's interesting because it's evolving, right? It's been we need content, we need content, we need content. And slowly as people got content, they realized what they had was necessarily what they wanted. And so we've got some great friends. Partner Support is the network for a long time now with both Blue Wheel and Retail Bloom. Now, you know one company together which is awesome. In this one is around digital first grade, what should we be thinking about? How should we be getting the biggest bang for our buck? So anyways, Nicole, you guys are great friends. And you know you've you've educated tons of people. So really appreciate your time today, but they don't mind you jumping in, you know, brief intro on yourself and Blue Wheel and everything. That'd be awesome.

Nicole Reich 2:26

Yes, absolutely. Hi, everyone. Thank you, Aaron. I'm Nicole Reich previous co founder of Retail Blook I now lead our marketing efforts at our new full omni channel digital service company Blue Wheel we'll get into our capabilities and the agenda in a second. But before that, I want to pass it over to the main star, the main contributor of this webinar today, she leads our digital production here at Blue Wheel. Awesome, amazing, very happy to be working with her. So Lindsay, I'll hand it over to you to introduce yourself.

Lindsay Kean 2:58

Thanks, Nicole. Hi, everybody. I'm Lindsay Kean. I'm the Senior Director of Creative Services. Here at Blue Wheel. I lead our incredibly talented team of creatives, which includes our graphic design and production teams, we do a ton of creative assets, a wide range. Over the years, I've worked really extensively in creating digital first creative content and through you know, throughout my career, I've worked with a lot of diverse range of clients and I really look forward today to really discussing the strategies that I've seen proven successful in you know, really achieving those creative goals. And I'm excited to share you know, all the insights of grading omni channel creative with you all today.

Nicole Reich 3:45

Awesome. So before we get into the agenda, I just wanted to briefly touch on our new capabilities. As we mentioned, Retail Bloom and Blue Wheel merge earlier this year. We are now officially known as Blue Wheel. So we kept the Blue Wheel name but as you can see on the right you can see our full wheel of capabilities. If you are familiar with the Retail Bloom side of our business, we now represent the bottom of the wheel that is related to full front end back end marketplace services. So anywhere from brand protection to content management, advertising, we have our own warehouses. We are a three P seller but we also help brands manage their vendor central Seller Central whatever business model works for them on the marketplace side. Related to now, mostly today's topic. We are merging with the Blue Wheel side which is a full full service marketing performance marketing agency. Everything on the DSP side related to lifecycle SEO, creative production, obviously for the topic of today's today's webinar, but also omni channel advertising. So with the two companies now combined, we now manage over a billion dollars in revenue for our partners and we truly believe that this omni channel approach to being able to bring together the marketplace and the DTC to one place, and not have those two divisions siloed has worked really well for us. So moving forward, we are officially able to do everything from click to ship meaning back end front end for e-comm efforts, run it on DSP and marketplaces. So with that Lindsay I'll just go through the agenda really quickly, and then hand it off to you. So there's four things that we are looking to accomplish today. One, we just want to talk through the difference between creative production in the traditional sense versus digital creative production. Beyond that, we want to talk about that we know sometimes our traditional creative production is all we have. So how do we repurpose that to the best of our ability for digital efforts. Beyond that, Lindsay is going to speak to getting the most out of your digital assets, and then also how we help our partners test those approaches. So just like the rest of the eComm efforts, you are able to test the creative assets that you are showing to your customers, right. So putting up with a particular image or a particular video, all of that is great. But if we're not able to see the change in conversion, the change in ROI, we aren't able to make decisions about how we want to change our approach going forward. So those are the four topics. Like I said, Lindsay has put together some really great information today, I hope we can get through it. And with that, Lindsay, I'll hand it off to you.

Lindsay Kean 6:29

Thanks so much. All right, getting into it, traditional versus digital, first creative, really understanding and knowing the difference of what this means starting it off. So for traditional productions, these are usually planned with one overarching concept or campaign in mind. It's a campaign that usually tends to be more about brand equity and brand building. And though there is a place for that, you know, thinking about digital first productions tends to not necessarily be just about building brand equity. And then it's typically long form content with one concept that you cut down into smaller form content, really keeping that same concept throughout all of the cut downs, and thinking about one specific output for that content. So this is going to live in one place think like, we are shooting content for CTV, and it's only going to live on CTV. When we're thinking about digital first productions and digital first grade IV, we're really wanting to focus in on the omni channel efforts of this. So being able to use that content, not just for one specific output, but in multiple different channels. And thinking about it from a full funnel Strategy approach of capturing different kinds of content to fill in that marketing funnel. And then it is more performance driven. So we're thinking and looking at data and performance and conversion and metrics. Those are different depending on each channel you're looking at. But really having that as our main KPIs of understanding performance, and focusing on a lot of the benefit of the product or the brand and really dialing it into that versus something that might be more about brand equity.

Aaron Conant 8:23

And how do we introduce this to the current teams? Right, because you're saying the first one traditional is not going away?

Lindsay Kean 8:31

Yeah, so this is something that if you're looking at something that is more a traditional campaign that is more about one overarching concept and campaign, what I think is good to think about this, to focus it more towards digital is to think about the which we'll talk about a little bit of ways to change the content and gather more content is thinking about how you can repurpose those into digital channels. So thinking about whether it's adding on things, or maybe having things be a little bit more broad to cover things that can work for multiple channels. So I think it's more about fine tuning, what you're wanting to shoot to shift away from some of that traditional content or adding on stuff that can also be utilized in other ways. Yeah,

Aaron Conant 9:23

I was thinking about it, because the traditional like, we're still gonna do the shot. But oh, by the way, before everything's done, we were still going to do this production effort. We need to think about these four things off the side as well. That doesn't mean you know, there's going to be people a worked up, say, Hey, you're taking over what I'm trying to do or like No, I'm not taking over. I'm just trying to make sure that we maximize the use of the company's dollar right now, as long as we've got all this stuff here. This add on all this other stuff to get it done. And it may might make sense to you in the traditional mindset, but that's fine, because on the digital side, we're gonna need all of this.

Lindsay Kean 9:58

Yeah, absolutely. So ends up being a lot more cost effective from a long run of having multiple productions. And it ends up being a lot more about communication within your team and having less siloed teams focusing on very narrow efforts. So it's a lot more about communication collaboration within your team and really filling those buckets. So when we're thinking about omni channel, and we really think about, you know, this is just a small example of the different channels that you might have, they're vastly more and it will obviously depend on the brand and what is important to your brand and what channels you want to focus on. But really looking at all of those different channels, what the hierarchy of needs are for those, and then being able to take those needs, and put that into a full funnel approach of what type of content, what part of the funnel, marketing funnel and what different channels are most priority. So it might be saying, we want to spend, you know, 80% of this production really focused on paid advertising, but 20% on organic, or, you know, maybe all of these different channels and having a small percentage focus for each, and really thinking about how that works across your brand, holistically from omni channel. So when thinking about omni channel as well, we're really wanting to understand what performs well on what platforms and that's going to change depending on the different platforms that you are focusing on. I have just a few obviously, as I said, there are many different platforms to focus for different channels. For meta advertising, it's really understanding that it's sound off, that you're really wanting to capture people's attention within the feed. And the type of content that works for that photo or video and moving content performs really well on those platforms. So every brand having some kind of moving video content is really important, but also having a mix of photography gifts short form content for Tik Tok, as opposed to meta advertising. This is a sound on platform. So while that might be secondary for meta advertising, understanding the content that you're capturing for meta, if you want to use for tick tock, you need to be able to balance the sound on and sound off aspect of it. This kind of advertising can sometimes be a little bit more trend focused. It can follow the traditional kind of meta ad of content that works in it. Think of UGC style content that works really well. Versus stuff that's a little bit more traditional and polished or photo and give content that you might be able to repurpose on that advertising. If you are on a channel like YouTube, for example, a lot of these ads, again, are sound dependent. So just like with Tik Tok, you want to make sure you're really having that be a focus of the ad that you're putting out. And it will depend on the type of advertising you have for YouTube. But a lot of times it can depend on wanting the qualified viewers to watch. So again, having that first thumb stop hook and getting a viewer to watch so that they're not, you know, clicking skip, they can be a little bit more narrative in nature, or it can be similar to a meta style ad. And then for CTV advertising, this you have more of a customer's attention, they're not able to skip like you would with a lot of platforms. But that doesn't mean that they're not going to tune out. So you still have the same ideas around other advertising of wanting to keep their attention. But you have a little bit more real estate to play with the the narrative aspect or you know, different kinds of things you could bring into that type of advertising. I've also seen within this industry in the last, I want to say you know, two or three years even I can tell that a lot of brands are looking to do kind of paid social first ad campaigns that they then push out to CTV advertising I've been seeing a lot of UGC content have you been seeing stuff that's in you know, 916 aspect ratio, the vertical you'd see on Tik Tok or or reals. And Instagram ads being pushed as CTB as and being repurposed that way. So it's interesting to see the way that you know, a lot of companies or brands would think of CTV first and repurposing it for digital. It's now becoming digital first and repurposing it for more traditional kind of broadcast advertising. And then we have organic content. Oh, go ahead Nicole.

Nicole Reich 14:47

Yeah, not to derail us too much here, but I would agree with that. And it's been really interesting to see it even with really, really big influencers that for example, the Kardashians I see it with them a ton. On where I will be on a firestick, for example, and I'll see a commercial that you can tell was made for mobile and then they just throw it on the TV. So it's not like this is a underdeveloped budgets where they're really trying to get, you know, crafty with every dollar that they spend. It's it's also the big players that have probably a ton of ad budget that are still leaning towards doing social and then repurposing for TV.

Lindsay Kean 15:24

Yeah, absolutely. And I see that with a lot of brands have a mix of both, I guess, high production, and I don't want to call it low production, but more you know, UGC, kind of raw kind of looking assets. And I think it's really effective to have a good mix of both. Because depending on the brand, the audience and the type of funnel you're trying to market for, it can change performance. So getting into organic, meta organic, a lot of lifestyle photos, GIFs, video clips, infographics, benefits of a product outlined, you know, holiday content launches and events. And obviously sound off for tick tock organic you want sound on. And when I always talk about tick tock organic, with brands and clients I'm working with. One thing I always say is that you want to add value to a customer, they can keep scrolling, there's an endless feed of content. So what about what you're producing and creating is giving somebody value, even if it's not related specifically to your product and getting really into your product? Are there other things that are happening in the world or happening with, you know, interest that your customers might have that you can speak more to, to really fill, you know, that interest bucket for them. And then for marketplace, you know, Amazon, listing and brand stores having the product and lifestyle photography. The advertising can be similar to meta except because a person is searching on Amazon, they're already primed for purchase. So it can change a little bit the tactics of how you want to advertise. Because a person might be specifically looking for a product that is aligned with what your product that you're selling, or is just primed to purchase more, again, creating for sound off native. And then for eCommerce, and retailers, you really want to have demonstration videos, brand anthem videos, you know, talking about who your brand is product and lifestyle photography, and then designing this for sound on and sound off this demonstration video and brand videos, those are also really great for Amazon, as well, because you can put those in brand store pages, you can also put them in listings of your products and repurpose them not only on your website and retailers websites, but also in Amazon.

Aaron Conant 17:56

So I love that slide. Are we going to send this out to people who eat? And the reason is, like there's a lot of executive teams that need to see this, but also the couple steps before it which is. So is this a brand awareness, a category specific a product specific play? And then based on that, where's the audience at? Right, whereas the actual buyer, and that could be different by product category by product line by specific product by maybe you maybe have three brands, three separate brands that are then going to drive which one of these you actually want to create content for so you can advertise on them? Yes. And when you get to this stage, there's eight to pick from, right. And this is the highest state right? There's 12 more that are popping up on a weekly basis. These are the top eight that should probably demand most of your funding for content creative. And then you can do the campaigns on top of this. And that's where I think sometimes it gets lost with executive teams. Especially larger, you know, mid to large sized organizations is how much there is going on in the digital marketing space. Yeah. And yes, Lauren. Yeah, this presentation will be available afterwards. Yes, for sure. I think if I am getting this deck, I'm taking that one, I'm creating it and then the two above it, which is a, you know, what's the type? And then where's that audience at

Lindsay Kean 19:23

us? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So and then when we think about full funnel, you know, it's two steps. First, you're thinking about the channel, then you're thinking about the funnel within that channel and it's a little different for organic. This is focused a little bit more on advertising and kind of the spend and pay behind that, but really thinking about it from a awareness, consideration and conversion. And these are the different types of ads that I've seen typically work within each of these marketing funnels. There are some changes I know within how As the back end of grouping these on an advertising and that this can change. But for the most part, this is kind of our gold standard of what works across the board and for different brands. It might be slightly different but for the most part and top of funnel with awareness, having product intro and explainer videos really talking about what the product is informing people, a spokesperson video that speaking directly to your customer snackable moments, that's mostly how we just call shorter form content that is like one or two clips, UGC content user generated content and brand anthems or brand intros, which is really kind of letting the audience and customers know, hey, this is who we are, this is what we stand for. This is what the products that we have and giving more information into them. So then under consideration, Problem and Solution videos, in this part you're really wanting to this is like this is who we are, this is what the product is in middle of funnel, you're really looking to prove, okay, this is why you need to buy it. And these are the reasons why. So really diving into it even more than with awareness. So problem and solution, a problem how your product solves that unboxing videos like showing if it's a kit or something, what is a part and the components of it. This can also be on boxing, I think, because we have a lot of skincare and beauty care brands, I also think of it as like routine style videos. So you know, this is my makeup routine. This is my skincare routine. Testing comparison, that's a great one, especially if you have a product that has like a competitor in the space that it does something really great compared to or has something that really sets it apart within this space, UGC style content, and then press and review. So that could be press quotes, customer reviews, anything that leads to credibility. And then conversion, you can typically do a lot of content that's under consideration and conversion. But bottom of funnel, you really think of it as promo messaging. You know, really to drive it, you've you know, customers have seen your ads over and over again, they haven't liked that purchase button yet. So this is where you do sales, any kind of promos that are coming through to get people that might just not be ready to purchase yet. This is where you want to have high amounts of CTAs. So call to actions, wanting to have that throughout the ad or really upfront to make sure people are clicking through to hopefully drive more to conversion. And this is where DPA ads work really well as well, in that kind of bottom of the funnel. So when we think about data and metrics, as a whole, for advertising, we really think about a lot of different metrics. And obviously, KPIs are different based on brand. They're also different based on your goals within the marketing funnel. And we look at things as a whole, like ad spend, obviously, we want to have creative that is spending, but efficiently spending, not just spending and not getting results. And then as a whole Blue Wheel, we look at ner, which, you know, really showcases the kind of overarching how your creative is performing or how your advertising is performing. So ner is the marketing, efficiency ratio, and CPA and Ro as those are kind of the biggest ones we're looking at as as a whole. When we're thinking about creative though, we like to dive a little bit in a little bit more granular. We do look at how creative is performing overall. But we also look at specific metrics, because with creative, there's a lot more interpretation. And it takes a little bit of interpretation to digest it and understand why something is performing and why something isn't. So with stuff like organic, social media, you know, things like likes, comments, shares follows. These metrics are really telling you what's adding value to your customers that they're engaging with. And it can help you understand how you want to plan creative or what type of creative to gather. This can be seen both from organically on your page, or it can also be from boosted social and the data you get from that. So whether you're boosting two different types of creative content, we had one client for example, that said, anytime we do a photo that has a pink background, it does way better than any other colored backgrounds. So we are only going to shoot pink backgrounds for all of our photography and it helped improve their performance on their organic social. So something like that was really simple to see need from you know the metrics and the data. When we look at return on adspend, that can be a little bit of a siloed. Data marker. It is important, of course, but it also doesn't tell you the full story, it just tells you, yes, this ad, you know, we're seeing was successful, but we look at other metrics to really understand what about it was successful, or what was not sex successful, versus thumb stop, obviously getting people's attention. If we don't have a high thumb stop on an ad, it is not going to get a lot of times better performance, or it's not going to get an ad spend, because people aren't stopping to even watch it. So don't stop for us from a creative standpoint. You know, it's kind of going row as first to see if something did well, looking at the thumb stop to see how that is performing. And then looking at the other metrics, click through rate, we can see whether something is getting once we have their attention that thumbs top is high, seeing if they click through. It's important to look at these individual things. Because for example, you might say, Okay, this ad had a super high thumb stop rate, but a low CTR. So that means that somebody is watching your ad, but they're not clicking. So what about this ad makes them not want to click out, you can then go into that specific creative and say, Okay, I saw that ad, five seconds, everybody drops off. So maybe the thumb stop is really great. And then the next part is too slow. It doesn't align people get bored, then you know that something needs to change within that five second mark to adapt it to be more engaging. So you can say this might have not performed well, from a CTR perspective, we know the thumb stock was good. So let's take this thumb stop and try something different to help that CTR. And then conversion rate in the same way that we look at it together and how it performs. This shows people who are purchasing once they click so if you have a high CTR, people are clicking through, and then they're not following through to purchase the really low CTR, it could mean potentially with creative that you have that there is a misalignment. So it could mean that the ad is misleading. Maybe there's something with the checkout process. Maybe a customer just wanted to see more info because the ad didn't give them enough. Maybe the price was higher than they were expecting like this can tell you that the ad work to get people interested. But there was something within that checkout process that stopped them and you can kind of brainstorm on what's bottlenecking that I've had an experiences before where we had extremely high bumpstop exclude extremely high CTR on an ad. But then the conversion rate was so low, and we went to look and there was actually an issue with purchasing through the website with the link that the brand was using. So it's a good way to brainstorm what the issue was. And even though it wasn't creative, be able to flag it. This is an issue in then, so I

Aaron Conant 28:14

want to get to these a couple things, and maybe we're gonna get to them. But I had a couple people ask about AI and you know, ChatGPT GPT. For like, when you're when you're thinking about all of this, are you thinking about that? And if you're like, hey, we're gonna get to that we can put a pin in it. But yeah, well, we have something

Lindsay Kean 28:35

at the end of the deck. And I'll talk through AI for that for for sure. So we'll put a pin in it for now. And we'll get to it at the end of the deck.

Aaron Conant 28:44

Yeah. Okay, awesome. And then others who have questions, drop in the chat q&a, or just keep emailing them to me. I'm going to send a couple more that come in around, you know, adding to anyways, we can get to it, you know, when you have a production, how do you add more content to it? So But

Lindsay Kean 29:00

absolutely, yeah, I'll get to that as well, too. So with thumb stop. So these are some examples of brands that we've created some, the thumb stops that we had for different brands. You can see here, we want to stop this scroll. I saw somewhere that the average person scrolls over 300 feet per day, which is the length of the Empires or that the Statue of Liberty, which is crazy, and that was from 2017. So I can guarantee it's even larger. So there is content upon content, and how do we get people to stop? It's really about psychology and thinking about what will get somebody interested and stop within all the content overload that people see on a daily basis. These are some of the thumb stop solutions that I found. Work the best to engage people and get them to stop first is posing a problem and solution So the problem being the thumb stop, if somebody relates to that, then having your product or brand be the solution, something that is shocking or bizarre that catches somebody off guard, whether they can't tell what it is something that's strange, some kind of interesting product demo, I think that only works. If it is interesting and unique. If it's a product that everyone knows how to use, this will not stop somebody oddly satisfying. So in my case, within the skincare kind of beauty field with a lot of clients, we have this could be product textures, kind of that gooey, gooey, squeezing, you can see in this one, it even has some some of that goofiness to it. So a value proposition or some kind of benefit of what the product does. Authority or credibility, this could be within a press quote, this could be a customer review. Expressive faces, we're just naturally as humans drawn to faces that are having very over the top expressions, and something that builds suspense. Whether that is the way that you are doing it through post production or within what you're shooting. And then when creating a digital first, you know, creative content, we want to think about it from unique selling points, value propositions, and then how you can bust a barrier of why a customer wouldn't want to purchase this product or service. So with a unique selling point, really looking at why would a customer choose this over another product? Why would they care about your product, and being really honest about that, I think sometimes working within a brand, you can become the biggest cheerleader for it, we're really taking a step back and talking to friends and family about it, what they would feel about it, why they like it, or looking at market research and reviews to see okay, what are people actually saying what they, why they want to buy this, what makes it different? Value Proposition is really about the results of what a customer will get. So you are saying as a brand, this is what we promise you will get from this product. So how will this actually improve the customer's life? When they buy this, this will happen? And then busting barriers. So this is how you reduce friction, and pain points from a customer from a customer standpoint. So how do you overcome those reasons why a customer wouldn't want to purchase your product. So that could be for example, if you are a sunscreen brand, maybe one of the reasons somebody wouldn't buy sunscreen is that it's oily and doesn't absorb and sticky and the textures gross. And you can then put that reason before they even think about it into your ad and say, This absorbs fast and kind of beat it before they even think about it. All right, getting into repurposing traditional content. So taking the content URL,

Aaron Conant 33:10

a question that comes in now I want to jump in is, are there people that you typically butt heads with? I mean, you guys deal with a ton of brands? Is there a part of the organization where you come in and say, digital first? Content is how we need to be thinking and it just kind of breaks their brain? I'm, you know, I'm elaborating a little bit on the question. But, you know, kind of the heart of it is, this is different, right? It's more complicated. There's more thought behind it. It used to be I agree, it used to be, hey, we want to show the benefit of the product in this way. And everything is shaped around it. And now they actually we have to think about multiple different platforms. Sound on Sound off? What's the benefit? How are we shaping based on the platform, what we're going to show them to get them to do a thumb stop or whatever. Like, do you feel pushed back? Or?

Lindsay Kean 34:01

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it's it's so strange. Some clients are very, like, we don't understand it, you guys take the wheel, and we'll trust you. Some brands are a little bit more stuck in the way that it used to be. And it's a little bit more difficult to kind of reframe it, I think what it really comes down to is where I've able to convince brands to really think about it this way is that overall is going to be more cost effective, because you won't have to do a lot of a lot of different shoots. And it's really being able to generate a lot of content. And when it comes down to it the volume of content that we can produce and put out and feed a lot of different channels, I think makes more people within the team happy because they're not just being an afterthought, but also being part of thinking about the content that they need. So I think when it really comes down to it, it's a lot Writing on on that kind of goal. Awesome. Okay, so repurposing traditional content. So walking before you run, you have content, maybe it's not digital first and you want to reuse that this is a lot of clients that come to us. So it's kind of what I've laid out here is like a four step process of how we think about it, versus utilizing what you already have, whether that's eCommerce images, previous photoshoots, video, UGC, whatever you have. My background is in post production. So I am used to getting very scrappy, and having very few assets and being able to generate something that is really focused on digital first, second is Frankenstein and content. So basically, taking a lot of different kinds of content and mashing it together. This is sometimes can be a friction point with brands, because they might have a production, that super high production value, then they have some UGC content that was shot on their phone, or some influencer content. And then they have some eCommerce photos. And there's some hesitation on mixing that all together. But it typically works really well to be able to mash it all together to really tell the story and align the visuals with the copy of what you're trying to say with that creative. Next is thumb stop, I talked about thumb stop a lot, I think it's really important. But thinking about thumb stop as its own content. So thinking about it, I don't want to say is its own story, because it's usually only five seconds. So a five second story, but it can be separate from the ad. It doesn't as long as it relates, you know, so we talked a little bit about having, you know, something that's bizarre or strange, it might not need to be anything that showcases the product. So thinking about it like its own kind of content of catching somebody's interest. And thinking about different ways with the content that you have to repurpose to get better thumbs up, I think that's one of the biggest thing, when we have brands come that have more traditional production content that aren't really sure why things aren't performing, I think two of the biggest things is that the thumb stop is not considered or thought about, it's done in a more traditional way of, you know, setting up something that isn't maybe going to stop somebody's attention really quick. And then the second thing is not having enough text on screen, and just having stuff and not explaining why it's on screen or why people should care about it. And then fourth is repurposing and then planning. So doing these three steps first, then once you get to the next point saying, Okay, we repurposed all the content, maybe it's fatigued, maybe we need new stuff, maybe there's new products to shoot. That's then when you go into planning for digital first. So I do have some examples here. I have, this is one client, the well they are a New York based wellness service. So they do you know, massage, facial services. And they came to us really wanting to do a with a goal to raise awareness about the different services that they have. And then ultimately book those services. They had very, very limited assets for their service lines. They were concerned that they weren't able to create any kind of like digital first content with this, they thought they might need to reshoot, we said, let's first use the content that you have, and then we can move forward. So we basically had a eCommerce, some assets from an eCommerce banner video that they shot, showcasing the space, we had a very limited footage of their service line. So maybe like two video clips for each service line, and then some eCommerce photos, we were able to take those and it's gonna take a second to load these. So bear with me while this load, we were able to take this content and repurpose it through post production and text on screen to be able to create a social paid ads utilizing the content that they already had, and being able to do different types of content to test in the different marketing funnels with those limited assets. So we're able to make a brand intro video really talking about this is the well this is who they are these are the different services they have and showcasing the space which is really the really unique thing and selling point about this brand. We have a benefit focused ad that talks really specifically about specific service lines. So this is further down the funnel, getting really into the benefits of the service line itself. And then having social proof which has the press quotes, again for lower funnel content for These different service lines. And we were able to create this not only for, you know, this one had facial, this is for their workout class services. So we were able to take that for multiple different service lines and test those. So again, being able to use those different kinds of tests for different kinds of audiences. Next, we're able with them to say they also had an eCommerce products that they sold online, so we wanted to create some content for their eCommerce products. So we came with a omni channel shooting approach to create a lot of different content that could be used for paid ads, as well as social content. And for this specific we did for multiple products. But for this specific product, we're able to shoot a comparison video that speaks you know a little bit to what it's like within the other types of cleanses, since this is like a cleanse kit, one that's focused on routine with some different talent as well to really see what performs and then one that has, you know, a more credibility and authority base that has a doctor speaking to why this works, you know why to get on the climb. So we're able to test a lot of different type of creative from this, just from this one shoot, thinking about how we can fill that full funnel. Another example is field trip. This is a skincare brand they came to us with, they were working with an agency that was a lot more traditional, and the approach that they had, they came to us really wanting to be digital focused, digital first focused, and they came with it had some more assets than the welded, but had eCommerce photos, product photography. And then they did have a brand, Anthem video, but it was all stock video. So we were not able to repurpose that. So they came to us and we created different content. Their goal was top of funnel, so really getting a high click through rate a high thumb stop, so that people were seeing who they were as a brand. And we created a lot of different content. Here are some with the best thumbs top performers, utilizing those products and other stock content. With a lot of text on screen, the content that they had before coming to us had very limited text on screen. And so I think that is one of the reasons it wasn't performing as well on digital platforms. And you can see here that we have one that's for a quiz, you know, that is to click out to test for that. We have one that's kind of routine based, but the difference step processes with one of their kits, and then one that's more product focused.

Aaron Conant 43:06

So really sorry to jump in. Okay,

Nicole Reich 43:11

I was just going to ask so on all of these examples, right, and kind of the point of this section is, is that you're able to recreate what you already have, and chop it up in different ways that can go after certain buyer personas that can go after certain channels, and then also go in different stages of the funnel based on their intent, right. And I think sometimes we talked to brands and, and not to say that this isn't a lot of work, because it definitely is. And there's a skill set behind it right? But creating digital content doesn't mean you're creating production all the way from the beginning. It's repurposing what you have, and then being able to understand what is the narrative of this type of content versus another versus one channel. But the core of the actual production is already done for the most part, is that correct?

Lindsay Kean 44:01

Yes, absolutely. So this is a good one to see that this is repurposing what they already had. And it's also a good first step in seeing what perform so if you don't want to put a huge budget behind a production and you want to test out an idea, maybe with content you already have, it's good to test that first, then being able to show how this is frankensteining different content. We have a lot of different content from them. We have stock we have images, we have videos, and you can see how we've mixed eCommerce photos with production videos with stock with you know, all the graphics mixed in with it and being able to repurpose it that way. And then us really focusing for this campaign on thumb stop in different ways. So for example, this one we have the you know, like I said the texture shot does well for skincare brands. specifically and really considering thumb stop as a main, metric and KPI for this. And then this was a brand that we were then we repurpose their content. First, we tested we saw performance on that. And then they had some other products and launches of products coming up. So we planned the next production to be a lot more omni channel and thinking about how we can fill a lot of different buckets. So we had a sheet that was both on location and studio, and we captured just a humongous wealth of assets, I mean, hundreds of assets, but I put some of them here. So we were wanting to capture eCommerce and retail video. So you can see here on the left, these are a lot more about demonstration, what's in the product, how to use the product. So we captured some of those, these are being used on website as well as will be used for retail and can be repurposed for Amazon as well, too. We then took those ads and use them to create paid social ads. So you can see here, these are a lot more focused on benefits, different call outs.

Aaron Conant 46:28

Oh, do you see frequency capping is a useful tool in tailoring the optimal sequence of messages through the top middle and bottom of the funnel journey.

Lindsay Kean 46:37

I am so sorry, I missed the beginning of that. Can you repeat that?

Aaron Conant 46:39

Yeah. Do you see frequency capping as a useful tool? And tailoring the optimal sequence of messages through the top middle and bottom? Um, typically,

Lindsay Kean 46:52

it depends. But typically No, I don't think it it does.

Aaron Conant 46:58

Cool. Okay,

Lindsay Kean 47:02

great. And then for field trip, we also captured TGC. That's our UGC, talent generated content. So this is talent that we hired to create UGC style content for us that we script so that they are you know, on like influencer content, they're saying exactly what we want them to say. And then we also captured eCommerce organic and paid social photos as well, too, that we will be utilizing for our design team to create those paid ads with copy over them as well as use on organic social and eCommerce pages. All right, getting the most out of your digital assets. So really planning productions. So this kind of talks a little bit Aaron, with what you were talking about before, I think it leads really well into this is that when we think about planning productions, instead of a traditional production, where you might say, this is our campaign concept, and then we're going to funnel that down into the assets and then maybe not thinking about certain channels. When we plan productions, we really think about, yes, you want to have an overarching idea of what you want to shell. But I think before you even think about that, understanding the different assets that you need to fill, whether it's photo, video, you know, type of assets, and then what channel you want those to work for before you even really fine tune what you want to shoot. So that's the first step is really understanding the different channels, what the different channels you want to post to so then you outline what you want to test. So what the different messaging visuals you want to test, then you think about thumb stop, what kind of thumb stop, you want to capture. And then production. This is where you plan your productions, you know, pre production post, all of that. And then this is where you want to gather more content than you need. So additional thumb stops, you might want to gather and capture at the same time or other stuff that you can repurpose. So when you re edit in the future, you're able to create different content. You can see here this is one that we plan for a cure. We captured photography and GIF assets for photos that were utilized for their eCommerce. And then we were able to take those static ads with thinking about the negative space to create to for static ads. You'll see this headed 2.3 row as as well as gift ads. We also created at the same time so really repurposing and one shoot we're able to create photo content, social paid ads and then also capturing content for Tik Tok all within one shoot. So You're getting all these different channel assets without having to have multiple productions. So then this brand HoMedics. This is another great example of this thinking about omni channel, they came to us for a product launch for their drift product. So we captured, we ended up a big shoe and we captured content that we were able to use for their eCommerce and Amazon Marketplace. You can see we had a brand anthem that we had as their CTV ad, we also use it for paid social, but this is the longer form and we shot a ton of content, mixing up a bunch of different personas and kind of telling more of a story. At the same time, we were also able to shoot an unboxing video, which definitely showcased the how to use the product, and you could use the talent and locations you already had. So it saved on having another shoot and having to pay for that. We were then able to take additional content that wasn't in the CTV ad that was shot and test different personas. So we have a wellness persona party persona person, or family persona tech persona, were able to test all of those, as well as more snackable full funnel paid social ads to have different parts of the funnel, and some eCommerce photos.

Nicole Reich 51:26

So Lindsay, in this time, when you are doing the production planning, planning, it's really trying to totally shift the perspective of how you had to plan traditionally, right? Like, this is not, there's a piece of Oh, yeah, that's going to take extra time. But there's also a piece of just going back to the drawing board and saying, what do we actually need to create? What do we want? Where is it going, right, and then doing that all at once, instead of having one photo shoot missing a bunch, and then certain teams coming back to the marketing team and production team and saying, Hey, you're missing this, this and this. So I have found in some companies where the more you pull in other teams early on to plan the better, because then you don't have you know, you're in q4, the e-comm teams looking to run promotions, and then they don't have the assets that were shot earlier in the spring. So maybe getting more people involved without throughout the organization into this planning session will help. But then also having someone take the lead and saying it, I'm accountable for knowing that we have all the resources, the assets that we need, and I know who to go to, to understand their wish list, right? So I really appreciate all the examples you're showing here. Because it just gives, if you are the decision maker on the org side, it's giving you some ideas of oh, shoot, should I be thinking of these things? Who should I be going to within the org to get their feedback? So that that wish list? List as much of

Aaron Conant 52:54

it as possible? Yeah, do I jump in? Just because we have just a few minutes left? How I don't know, do you want to breeze through testing approach? And then yeah,

Lindsay Kean 53:03

I think I can get through it pretty pretty quickly. So our way that we think about it is through iterative testing. So with brands, where this really kind of boils down to is if you're a brand that has, let's say less of a monthly spend, and you can't put as much budget between testing and iterative testing for this, really having a kind of Phase testing approach where if you shoot content, let's say you're rolling it out to see how it performs. So you might have a couple of ads, you put it out, you test it, you get that creative data back, and then you go back to the drawing board with the same content and retool and repurpose it based on that data. If you're a larger brand that has more of a monthly spend, or you can afford more for testing, that's when you can do fine tune kind of iterative testing approach. So you can have in this model, let's say different iterations that you're putting together against each other to see how it performs. Using that as a guidance of what performed what didn't and then fine tuning those. So I do have some examples really quickly, you can do persona based testing. This is for droplet a brand that we did with different talent to show the different personas we tested against those two can see these are all the same ad using different personas. So you really get to fine tune like what is working and what isn't without the like, interpretation of completely different creative. And then this is for Siena naturals, we did a thumb stop iteration. This is not loading right away, but you can see this was the winner with 2x Ro s. And the only thing that's different about it is the thumb stops so that way when we tested it against each other, we're able to see if this one is working. We know this thumb stop which patent credibility review works and we can then use that in other creative This is kind of speaking more to the approach of really using data to fine tune your results, letting enter their testing, do the hard work, really thinking about what your goals are, you know, for different parts of the funnel and using data inform those. And then not always letting you know brand equity when sometimes using things that feel off brand can perform better and leaning into that, if it is hitting your KPIs. I do have one brief slide about creative AI that I can go through Aaron real fast. I know it was a question. Basically, what's working now is using it for the scripting and brief writing process or planning stages, shot less social media calendars, you can create images for mood boards or reference images, sometimes sometimes they're wonky. And but most assets still need some kind of person looking from a creative Strategy standpoint, and being proved by a human. What doesn't work now is photo creation. For the most part, it's kind of unrealistic looking, video editing, using AI tools, I feel like is not where it needs to be yet, but I think it will get there in the future. And then, you know, creating video content altogether is just an application that's probably pretty far off in the future. So I think it's something to definitely use from a creative planning standpoint. But still having a creative team attached on you know, looking through that content, making sure it aligns. Okay, so let's move into, I think we will have one minute left for questions. So

Aaron Conant 56:49

I think, any follow up soon, we're gonna have to wrap it up, because I do love to end on time. But Lindsey, awesome, Nicole, you know, thanks so much for helping coordinate all of this, you guys are awesome. I encourage anybody you have follow up questions, you need help in this space. They come highly recommended from a ton of different brands in the network. That's why we keep asking them back is because they do such an awesome job. So anything from Amazon direct to consumer, more than happy to share the deck with everybody that's out there? You know, we'll just shoot your follow up connection to Nicole and Lindsay and there'll be sure I guess at this point I'm there's so many people asking, gonna go ahead and have them shoot it over to you. But yeah, again, I'd love to have a follow up conversation with anybody on the line today. Love to pick your brain, see what other topics for calls might be out there. But also more than happy to share digital strategies. Or if you're looking for any service providers. We've got a short list of all the brands that we talked to that we can kind of help out with on that side as well. But with that, we're going to wrap up, Lindsey to call thanks so much for your time today. Thanks, everybody for dialing in and all the great questions, everybody, take care, stay safe and look forward to having you at another event. Thanks everybody.