Aaron Conant 0:18

Happy Wednesday everybody. My name is Aaron Conant Co-Founder and Managing Director of BWG Connect, where networking and knowledge sharing group of 1000s of brands who do exactly that we network acknowledged here together to stay on top of the newest trends, strategies, pain points, topics that are shaping the digital landscape as a whole. I talk with him 30 to 40 organizations every week to stay on top of those more than happy to set up time after this call to chat with anybody on the call today. It's where we get the topics for calls, but also more than happy to kind of do a high level strategy, what's going on across the market as a whole, more than happy to knowledge share across the board, you know, shoot me an email, we'll set up some time for housekeeping items. Just as we kicked off here, we're starting three to four minutes after the hour and just a heads up, we're gonna wrap up with three to four minutes to go as well. So just so you know, you're gonna have plenty of time to get out into your next meeting without being late. If there's anything he has dropped early, need any recaps again, just shoot me an email, we'll set up times every camp that and I think with that, we're going to go ahead. I guess the Ico questions though. If you have a question, hit star five handle go up in the screen here we can you bring you in. And as you ask those questions. If it's easier, you can always just email me as well. Aaron aaron@bwgconnect.com And we'll answer questions that way. And that includes, you know, an hour after the call tomorrow next week. If you have any questions in the digital space, or anything related to this call, just shoot me an email, we'll get you an answer. Usually in under a day, we can kind of get back with you. But more than happy to do that for sure. So I'm going to kind of kick off this conversation from the standpoint of as they noted, talking with 30 Plus, brands a week, a lot of questions around Amazon advertising, still a lot of new offerings that have come out over the past year, you know, the stack on top of, you know, a lot of thought of being promoted by Amazon as far as DSP. Should I do it? Should I not do it? How do I balance that with like traditional paid media? What was the, you know, reach of DSP to balance the brand awareness? I think everybody on the line knows, you know, the questions that and so we're kicking this off full funnel, Amazon, Amazon, Amazon advertising in 2021 discussion as a whole. We've got great friends, great partners, supporters and a lot of different brands in the network. And they've been supporters of ours for over four years now. Over at Orca Pacific. And so, you know, Will David Rob on the line, you know, and I can kick it over to you know, either Will or David or whoever wants to jump in with a brief intro on themselves in Orca Pacific, feel free to jump in and we can kind of, you know, do a round robin of intros and then get into the conversation sounded.

Will Ives 3:04

Yeah, thanks, Aaron. This is Will Ives. from Orca Pacific. I'm a senior business development manager here. been with the company for three and a half years. Just quick background on Orca Pacific. We're one of the leading Amazon agencies in the industry. And we help brands really maximize and understand their potential on the platform. You know, hiring mostly right out of Amazon or senior level folks from from the agency or the brand side. We're always happy to be on these calls and provide, you know, subject matter expertise on a number of topics. And of course, today we're talking about those full funnel advertising strategies. And we got some great other folks on the call today as well, if you could over to David Grill who's our Director of advertising here, David, you want to give a quick intro?

David Grill 3:54

Sure. Thanks. Will, hi everyone. David Grill director of advertising, as Will mentioned, been with Orca Pacific for about four years now. And really helping bridge the gap between advertising and overall retail success for our vendors and sellers at the agency. So it's more important than ever, at this point to take a holistic view of your advertising efforts. Not doing performance in a silo and understanding the true impact advertising can have on a business. So helping to support our team of about a dozen ad managers here based mostly based in the Seattle area. But excited to be on the call and talk all things full funnel, Amazon and retail media.

Aaron Conant 4:40

Yeah, awesome. Rob, you want to jump in real quick, brief intro on yourself and then we can kind of jump into some of the high level things that I'm hearing, you know from brands, but then also feel questions for people on the line as well.

Robert Antolin 4:51

Absolutely. My name is Robert Antolin and I've been with Orca Pacific now for about six months as a business manager. In my role I really work closely with with David's teams and the ads managers, as well as some of our largest clients to kind of pie in the hole, overall strategy on eCommerce side, you know, really building in advertising with supply chain optimization and content. Previous to Orca Pacific, I spent over three years at Amazon as a senior vendor manager, where I own p&l is related to Amazon's b2b service business as well as children and dining room furniture. So at Amazon, I worked with some of Amazon's largest brands and continue to do the same thing at Orca Pacific, really excited to help people get some better understanding in terms of how the other retail components really tie into your overall advertising its success.

Aaron Conant 5:42

Awesome. So we're gonna kick this off with probably one of the top concerns that I have. And it isn't, it is indirectly related to advertising. And this is global supply chain. Right now, I'm hearing a lot of brands saying what am I supposed to be doing with advertising? What do you hear brands doing with advertising? I've got containers, they they're not getting here on time, or I'm waiting for them to open up? And do I turn off advertising? You know, what is? And I mean, you guys are working with a ton of different, you know, industry segments. So I'm sure you guys are seeing this as well. So if I pare that down, how do you how do you guys view current challenges, you know, within global supply chain, you know, how is that affecting advertising strategy? How should people be thinking about it?

Robert Antolin 6:30

Yeah, so I'll hop in on this one. And I'm sure David loves and comments as well. But we're in an incredibly challenging time. Right now, in terms of global supply chain, you know, we're seeing a very pervasive pervasive across our client base, and essentially, anyone who is manufacturing products overseas and having large issues with a backlog of finished goods, backlogs and finished goods in large spikes in freight prices, and obviously, delays in product and making their way to the mass B to the United States. And then, you know, that definitely does present some unique challenges on the advertising. And one because out of stock is so tightly connected with advertising, Amazon, obviously turns off your advertising when you're not able to be in stock. And that also then has that downstream impact of forcing to reallocate your ad dollars and two additional parts of your catalog, where you may not see as effective return on spend right now, especially when you layer in that additional point of the economic reopening happening. It creates even additional challenges in terms of we're seeing wide drops, and overall added mentoree because people are spending a lot less time looking at your screens right now as well. So what Well, last year, we had, you know, kind of a black swan event, which really drove advertising to incredible growth in the advertising eCommerce to incredible growth in the short term. Now that everyone is a year out from that, and we're starting to get a return to normal, we're seeing an incredible challenging environment. And it really requires brands to be incredibly on top of managing your advertising spend on the day to day basis and working to allocate those dollars as effectively as possible, given some of the handcuffs that have on them. Because product isn't available or is stuck overseas or processing at the port right now.

Aaron Conant 8:27

Yep. Awesome. And Will or David, in our comments there, but a question that comes in is, in the past, the idea was never go out of stock. So the question specifically is do I turn off advertising before I go out of stock? Or do you see them just tapering it back until the point where is going out of stock still as dreadful as it used to be?

Robert Antolin 8:52

Going out of stock is something you're always going to want to avoid? It really doesn't make sense to invest additional dollars to pull forward you're out of stock or put yourself out of stock situation for for longer on Amazon given the effect that has on search relevancy. So you know, largely what I what I advise a lot of the clients that I'm working with, is when we as to be one really on top of those inventory levels and actively adjusting and reallocating your ad spend to areas where you have the additional inventory to support because search relevancy on Amazon is something that is so incredibly hard to build, and very easy to lose memory. You know, at its most base level, Amazon search relevancy is based on what customers look at looking at what are they buying, what are they reviewing. And then obviously, if you don't have that in stock messaging available on the detail page, customers are much less likely to click in on the detail pages, and obviously will not have the opportunity to buy review those products. So largely from my view, on the overall strategy side is really looking to reallocate those dollars to places where you do have the inventory to support over the longer term. Rather than rushing into an out of stock situation, where you can start to see your sales rank decline, because you don't have the ability to get those basic activities happen that do drive into search relevancy.

Aaron Conant 10:13

So another question that comes in, and I want to get to budget allocation from a full funnel perspectives, you know, because I think that's important, important, but just, you know, questions around Have you seen an increase in direct fulfillment, to kind of cut out the minimize the amount of honestok time rather than trying to, you know, you get the inventory in and then shipping it into to Amazon, trying to short circuit that or carve out at least another week, or maybe two weeks, depending on? You know, the time of year? Do you see people ramping up, you know, their own fulfillment on the back end? Whether I mean, you're not going to get it on one day? Not gonna get it? Go ahead?

Robert Antolin 10:57

Yeah. 100%. And, you know, when a brand reaches a kind of a large enough critical mass, we largely do recommend that they engage in practice element. One, because it's very powerful from from a new product launch perspective, as Amazon goes in stock out of stock, trying to figure out what what initial velocity looks like on an equation. But it's so incredibly powerful in a time like now, where there's so much supply chain uncertainty, given that, you know, the time for product to go from a vendor fulfillment center to being processed and sellable at Amazon, generally, generally falls in the range of two to three weeks. So having the ability to have that backup directive on offer means that you're not going to have that out of stock for for two weeks and not see that downward spiral on your search relevance, and then also does allow you to kind of continue with advertising activities. Because I'm sure, David will tell you that having always on advertising is really where you see your spend being allocated most effectively by Amazon. So turning things on and off constantly doesn't allow their own algorithms to really optimize that spend, either.

Aaron Conant 12:05

So when we talk about spend optimization, you know, is there at this point in time, is it possible and a lot of brands do it on their own? Is it possible to do it without ad tech on the back end? For? You know, is there a threshold where, you know, after you hit $5,000 a month, or 10, or whatever it is? I mean, from the perspective, I'm hearing from people at having some kind of ad tech, or agency to help you out, one of the two is pretty much table stakes at this point in time.

David Grill 12:36

Yeah, I would say I mean, it's critical to success at this point. I mean, if if you are not investing in those services, or technology, to help further accelerate growth on the platform, your competitors are, and you're just the more you either wait on that initiative, wait on that investment, you know, the farther ahead everyone else gets, and then the harder it is, the more time the more investment it's going to take, even when those initiatives do get rolled out at the company to catch up. And so it's, I mean, what what you do today is going to impact three 6-12 months from now, three years from now on the platform. So I mean, really thinking more mid long term and what that investment can do to help you achieve the leadership position within categories. Not overspending on any given click, optimizations, 24 hours a day, day parting, aligning with inventory in an automated fashion. I mean, the list goes on in terms of benefits. Obviously, you need an incredibly skilled and expert level ad manager, partnered with this technology for the best success. You can't simply just rely on technology to set it and forget it and expect that you're going to profitably grow the business and drive incremental sales on the platform that just won't happen. No platform is that good. So there is a significant human element to it still today. But the technology piece is definitely critical, more critical than ever.

Aaron Conant 14:16

Yeah, I think he had a great point, though, is well is the human touch that's in there, there are a ton of great ad tech tools out there. They're limited by the fact that they need for performance to happen. They need some kind of, you know, human interaction that's guiding and putting the inputs and making the decisions on the back end is that classic pay the the you know, self driving car is fantastic until somebody spray paints the three into an eight on the 35 mile per hour sign for a curve right and it accelerates Oh, no, so awesome. So ad tech is pretty much a must at this point in time. Another key takeaway here is don't be Don't run yourself out of stock, turn that off, allocate the funds to a different spot. When we talk about funding as a whole, you know, in, you know, the conversation we're having about being in early. This talk a little bit about DSP, which I think over the past 12 months has been one of the biggest pushes for Amazon. A lot of people, you know, especially if they're around, you know, way, way, way long time ago, like five years with AMG, got a little burned by that platform as a whole. And so we'd love to hear your thoughts on DSP. When's the right time to do as DSP? Who's the right, you know, what's the right product category for it? And then, as we kind of walk through all of that, and we've walked through, like paid media and PPC, then what is the budget allocation look like? What is full funnel advertising look like? What's the balance by category? You know, you know, pay per click, you know, search versus DSP, or, or anything else that might be coming out there. So I'll kind of kick it over DSP. Like, is it worth it? What's the right time to get invested? You know, anything you have on that front would be great. And just a reminder, people have questions, hit star five, a handle up on the screen here, we can unmute you and bring you in. Or you can just keep emailing me questions as well. Aaron aaron@bwgconnect.com.

David Grill 16:21

I can jump in initially, just with some thoughts. I mean, to your point, Aaron, three, five years ago, AMG was still very much in its infancy. It was, you know, 50k per month minimums, or IO minimums, very little flexibility in terms of capabilities, and transparency, reporting, etc, very much focused on upper funnel tactics to build demand in categories that already had the demand there, you just needed to convert those shoppers via search. And Amazon over the years has gotten better with with their sales pitch. But they are still, again, to your point. This is a huge initiative for them. And they are literally selling trying to sell it into everyone in every brand and every agency regardless of whether or not it's a good fit for you. So I mean, that's suggestion number one is to, you know, hear Amazon out, but truly decide whether or not it makes sense for you at this moment in time. And a couple things that come to mind to kind of understand if it is the right time to begin investing is based on your overall search activity. You know, what percentage of the total business are you investing into search? How does that translate to your ad attributed business versus the organic traffic and sales on the total business? Is that a healthy investment a healthy paid organic split? Whereas the business today by simply investing in search? And is there an incremental opportunity to now bring DSP into the fold? And you know, what do you predict that would do to your paid and organic sales over time, a lot in a lot of cases, search CPCs for category and non brand keywords are really causing unsustainable new customer acquisition costs, right. So if a single click on search for a category keyword costs 5070 100% of your ASP. And you're not able to continue funding that with the long term vision that you're driving organic rank as the top goal in that scenario, then DSD becomes an attractive options for much more cost effective traffic at that upper to mid funnel level. Oftentimes, we see that same click that same Detail page view through DSP, for the non brand, flash category shopper could be 30 to 50% cheaper than it would be on search. So now you have to become a bit more strategic in how these two channels work together IE search and DSP. So in that scenario, you may have more dollars funneled towards your upper mid funnel activities through DSP because you can drive two to three times more Glen, more glass fuse through VSP for the state investment, and searches focused on your longtail high converting keywords on a category perspective and your strong brand defense cross sell loyalty based strategies there. One other thing that comes to mind is just if your search campaigns have reached a point of saturation, right, you're going to know when you are spending as much as you can Within your brand and non brand search efforts before you need to start bringing in additional traffic, more demand. And that's when DSP ultimately makes a lot of sense to more brands and sellers.

Aaron Conant 19:20

So this idea of so KPIs around DSP, how it is, this is a question that comes in, how do you determine if it's working or not? You know, there's a lot of Hey, brand awareness, brand awareness, brand awareness. What do you see? And as far as performance on DSP, is that does that differ by category? And then I kind of want to jump into next a lot of people interested in what is the budget breakdown look like? And I don't know if it is different by category as I'm imagining that it is. But what it what are those categorical differences look like?

David Grill 20:47

So just speaking to performance, it is extremely important to note one major difference between search advertising reporting through Amazon and DSP reporting, is that search is all post click so that everything's a last click attribution model across search and DSP, it's D dupe, de duplicated conversions, meaning the same person, you know, would not have the attributed sale for, you know, a single click on DSP and search. So you're able to have a holistic view in terms of measurements. But the primary difference is that VSP would include view through conversions. And so when people often talk about, you know, a 20x row as on DSP, a 3040 50x row as even a $10 return on adspend, Amazon and don't typically, a lot of other agencies aren't going to break out what the zoo through conversions versus click through conversions are. And we know that DSP isn't meant to drive a lot of click through conversions, right? oftentimes it is you see the banner ad, you go to Amazon or that direct to consumer site, and you do your own research and searching from there triggers your search ads, etc. So I just wanted to call that out. Because when we talk about overall performance, that definitely can skew things quite a bit. And it is important to keep that in mind when measuring the success. That said, I mean, including do through click through conversions on DSP, it is going to fluctuate based on categories, a SPS, a number of different categories and competitive inputs. Right. But I mean, generally speaking, I'd like to at least from a starting perspective, compare your lower funnel DSP to your branded search campaigns, your upper mid funnel DSP to your upper mid funnel search campaigns, they won't be, you know, a one to one relationship, but they should be fairly close. So if you're getting a $10 return on adspend on your branded search campaigns, as a benchmark, you could likely expect to see maybe a six to eight, maybe a $10 or greater return on adspend for your retargeting DSP campaigns. And the same concept would apply to your non brand and upper mid funnel DSP activities.

Aaron Conant 21:05

Awesome, love it. And then the the budget breakdown is question that comes in, like what is the sure it evolves over time? So if we go category by category number one, I guess it there's some categories where you see and it has very little impact on are there ones that you see and have the mass maximum impact on and then what is the blend look like? How do people know how much money to put Where?

David Grill 23:54

Yeah, so I mean, to your point, I mean, DSP is not for everyone and for every category, although that's that's the story that Amazon wants to tell. And there are certain strategies that make sense based on the categories. But generally speaking, you know, your shorter consideration, window type of products, buy more of your impulse purchases. There's not a lot of research involved when purchasing these items. You know, it could be school supplies, or anything else, right, just back to school, Top of Mind at this point. That's going to be more of a brand awareness play than anything. Maybe you are able to drive to your store page to promote basket building, catalog exposure. But from a row class standpoint, we're not going to expect to see any significant lifts or performance from products with shorter consideration windows now those where it really starts to make a lot of sense are maybe higher end items on the platform. Fashion mattresses, vacuums things that, you know, if you're spending 100, couple $100 on an item, you're going to do a bit more research that consumers will do their due diligence, they're going to shop on Amazon read reviews direct to consumer additional content back to the Amazon store. So you're going to have weeks, if not sometimes months to re engage and stay top of mind with those shoppers in these types of categories. And that's where, you know, if you're not investing in DSP, it's a huge mess because others are and they're going to have a far greater likelihood of converting those shoppers when they do hit that add to cart and convert button in the next upcoming weeks and or months. In terms of budgeting, again, gonna vary by category, but generally speaking, I'd say usually a good starting point would be about 20 to 30% of your budget towards DSP, and about 70 to 80% of your budget. Still going towards search. I mean, search is the relevancy driver for your your set list of keywords your setlist of products when you want to drive rank and relevancy on the platform. DSP just doesn't have the same impact from add a keyword level, which is seems obvious, but worth calling out. So search should always have you know your hero strategy, a bulk of your budget. Unless of course, you're in one of these scenarios where category costs are skyrocketing, and it's just not sustainable. And on the DSP side of things with 20 to 30% of your total budget, when it makes sense to get started, you really want to build from the ground up just as you would on the search side of things. So you need a strong foundation in place first, this could be a small scale test 5k to 10k a month for your retargeting, replenishment, cross sell opportunities, really just those lower funnel DSP activities through display ads, video ads, Ott, etc. All this can be accomplished at a relatively small budget asleep, depends on your total traffic to your detail pages, your catalog size, etc. But that's where you want to start and then build from there, moving your way up the funnel to possibly top competitive conquesting. Next, more in market lifestyle targeting and then really starting to, you know, reach the top of that funnel with broader awareness tactics.

Aaron Conant 27:41

Awesome. Love it, question comes in around, you know, driving to a brand store versus driving to a detail page. When do you drive to each? I think it's a great way to like DSP, is that more of a brand store play? Like, I'd love to hear your thoughts there.

David Grill 27:58

Yeah, so it's going to depend on the creative that you have running. So if you're leveraging Amazon's eCommerce ad units, those are only going to be able to drive to the promoted essence Detail page, they do have a new dynamic eCommerce unit available that allows you to input believe it's about 20 ASINs into one creative and then it dynamically outputs the asen that those shoppers were looking at. And that was obviously diversified the detail page. experience within that one agonist. So that's, that's one thing to call out. If you're using custom creatives, banner ads, or videos that you've created yourself on the brand side or from an agency, those can be used to drive to either detail pages or your store. From our perspective, it's good to test both. We haven't found a whole lot of major consistency in terms of performance when driving to your store versus a detail page. What's better, what's right. There's arguments both ways. One of the arguments towards the store is that you're going to have that 100% and brand own experience that is found nowhere else on Amazon. So if you're confident in your store, you know your analytics, you know your ability to convert a shopper when they get to that store environment. That's the direction that we would typically test first just for that reason. It's your full catalogue, you only experienced no distractions and the likelihood of getting them to convert based on the additional content, video resources, etc is far greater than a distracting Detail page with competitive ads and recent browsing history, etc. The argument towards a detail page is that that one ASIN that detail page is getting the glance view each time which would build a greater level of row of NC versus the store where they're sent to a landing page, then they need to click at least 123 times to essentially get to that detail page that would then you know, trigger the glance view. So pros and cons in in both directions, but definitely worth testing each.

Aaron Conant 30:21

Awesome love. And if there's more questions on DSP, go ahead hit star fi, we can bring them in or you can keep emailing me questions Aaron aaron@bwgconnect.com for those of you who joined halfway through just having a great conversation around full funnel, Amazon advertising, you know, in 2021, what does it look like? We've got great friends, partners and supporters of the network and a lot of brands in it over at Orca Pacific. So you know, some resin expert here ask as many questions as you want. The next question that comes up in this space is in regards to video. You know, so Amazon's pushing a lot right now, in the Amazon, advertising space, right? There's the live format, the you know, we'd love to hear what do you see taking place in the video for Amazon's media mix right now as a whole?

David Grill 31:15

Absolutely. So I mean, video in general, obviously, is a huge push for Amazon, they've released a number of new features and inventory for video ads units, obviously Ott audiences that I can touch on in a bit, and different opportunities there. As we saw, in the week, the one to two weeks leading into Prime Day, Amazon released additional sponsor brand video inventory on detail pages. So now you have the ability to not only target that inventory on the first page of search results in an above the fold position with extremely high visibility and engagement, you can now target your own or competitive detail pages with video ads. And we've seen all it's a bit more costly to do so is highly effective. Amazon also is partnering with us on a new beta for viewable impression cost model. So moving away from or giving advertisers the option to purchase these sponsored brand video ads, not only on a cost per click basis, which has its benefits because you get free impressions until someone clicks. But also having the option to test out a viewable impression cost model. So your typical programmatic CPM based cost model, you have, again, just the product education that can be accomplished through a video ad, even if it's 15 to 30 seconds versus a static search ad or a display ad. There's just no comparison to that. Now, the one limitation is that it's driving to that one product detail page through this video ad. So in that case, you know, we would want to try to variate or Twist their items, if possible to kind of build that landing page experience, if you will. But we've seen great results sponsor brand video is not going anywhere. They're releasing a lot of different new reports that are helping us understand, you know, again, the viewable impressions, engagement rate, seconds watched before exiting seconds watched before converting. So a number of new metrics coming down the line for their video ad units as well. And then just real quick on the Ott offering and just DSP audiences in general. Because we find that a lot of brands have missed the opportunity from an audience perspective when it comes to video, right we think Ott, we think big investments, upper funnel and that's just not the case anymore. The first party shopper data that you can slice and dice and millions of different ways at this point, thanks to Amazon allows us to leverage Ott in any part of the funnel so we could run a five to $10,000 Ott retargeting line item we can also now retarget shoppers with display ads based on the shoppers we reached with our occs video as so OTC retargeting through display ads to continue to re engage with those shoppers and tell that brand story. You can create audience segments from you know, add an ace and level of brand level, Prime video viewing habits on the platform, as well as your own first party data. So leveraging your CRM list or hashed audiences as well as pixel data from your direct to consumer site to build About audiences. And this can also be used to exclude audience overlap across your direct to consumer, and Amazon. So really limitless opportunities from an audience perspective and tying that back into video just being one of the most important initiatives at Amazon and for us, on behalf of our clients, just simply given the direction that it's headed.

Robert Antolin 35:26

And that's just to add on to David's point, I think he really hit the nail on the head of speaking about how important the education pieces when it comes to the eCommerce shopper and why video is so effective there. You know, one did a follow up to that is, you know, you'll often hear people at Amazon say, and this is something I send regular was on Amazon as well is the best place to bury a dead body at Amazon is on page two of search results. And that's because 70% of the customers never make it past page one. And widely data says that customers are also starting their product searches directly on Amazon and bypassing places like Google's. So when you take that vide button away from Amazon, it really represents the world's largest product review site. So anything you can use, really educate your clients, whether it's having incredible detail page content, or having those sponsored brand videos that can really help highlight some of those unique selling propositions of your product are going to be very important to driving that actual on Detail page conversion.

Aaron Conant 36:27

So are there other questions comes in so we talked, you know, search, we've talked DSP now videos out there other other things that that people should be aware of the next thing that's coming up? We'd love to hear thoughts there. And then what is the what is this full funnel strategy look like? Like we're putting fuel theme money? Everything costs money, right? It's a pay to play platform. What's the right way to then spread it across now video as well. So first, but there are other things that you see brands investing in, they Viana beta level with Amazon and the media side. And then like with $100,000, for just, you know, a normal like CPG brand. And there we go a normal, you know, you know, Home Goods brand, a normal fashion brand, we're How are they dividing up the that spent?

Robert Antolin 37:28

So, I'll hop in on here, and then let David speak to it a little bit. You know, I think really, when you're talking your traditional eCommerce side with Amazon, there's really a lot of what you do is you hear Amazon, and if you have a vendor manager, they talk about running the Amazon playbook. And I don't think that playbook necessarily translates as well over the advertising just because there are so many moving parts and specify a specific course I guess, of use categories. So it really just say, Oh, you should be doing 10% 10% 20% 10% 50% breakdown of spend isn't the right way to look at it. Really, it's, you know, we went back and talked about all this advertising technology that's available. And that's fantastic. What that does is provide you a lot of data. But what you need to be doing then is working either with your internal resources or with your agency contacts, or whatever kind of advertising contacts you're working with. Just figure out what the best mix is for your brand. on how you sell a carpet versus a walk in through the refrigerator, which both sell on Amazon is incredibly different. And what type of ad units and how that sales process looks in those sales timelines are going to be so different. Based off things like price point, based off, you know, is it a durable good versus a soft blanket versus a consumable? There are so many different variables at play, that I think you really need to start looking at your individual advertising strategy with a lot of granularity figure out what specifically working best for your brand or your product types.

Aaron Conant 39:04

Awesome. Oh, yeah, jump back. Yeah, please.

David Grill 39:08

Just the importance of a strong foundation, right? If you don't have a strong foundation in terms of search advertising and your brand defensive strategies like a thoughtful brand defense strategy that you know, how are we actually leveraging branded search to our benefit? Are we just using it to push our top products and potentially most likely cannibalizing some organic sales? Are we using branded search for our tier two, tier three, or even to promote new products right to our existing customer base? Are we leveraging our own detail pages for cross sell upsell opportunities at a certain level, I mean, not just a blanket approach but really thoughtfully defining what that cross sell upsell. Promotional strategy should look like through As a defensive strategy, so that that's something that is really critical to success owning your own inventory. Because if you don't, someone else will. And they'll accept the lower row as just to conquest that sale and bring them into their funnel. Now they can, you know, we engage with the shoppers moving forward and ultimately, you know, cross sell on their own. So, the foundation is so important that if if that's not there, I would argue that nothing else we're doing is going to have a significant impact simply because you're going to be filling the funnel with mid level or mid funnel type shoppers in that consideration phase or even in that awareness phase. But if we don't have the net at the bottom part of the funnel, either through DSP or search to then capture them when they get there in their path to purchase. We were potentially bleeding sales and bleeding shoppers through advertising, and that's never good. So wanted to call that out that. I mean, where did the dollars go? From my perspective, strong foundation on both search nbsp? And then you continue to build from there as budget allows?

Aaron Conant 41:15

Yeah, I love it. Do you want to elaborate a little bit on the defensive strategy? And how you're like, what's the best way for brands to approach that? We'd love to, we'd love to hear more insight on that as well. from us, I mean, it's part of the full funnel, right? Like, where are you getting people from? Are you retaining them? I would love to hear your thoughts there.

David Grill 41:39

Yeah, so I mean, from a, there are strategies that DSP can accomplish that search really can't right search is a much more reactive approach to advertising. bidding on keywords, you can do some category targeting, maybe not as effective as bidding on those keywords, your conquesting, etc, but truly more of a reactive platform. Whereas DSP, the complete opposite, more proactive approach to advertising, bucketing, your audiences, reaching out to them again, in a proactive way to drive that retention, the loyalty, subscribe and saves all of that. And so really, when it comes to the full funnel approach, from a defensive standpoint, you know, if we take CPG, as an example, right, you're gonna want to drive strong brand defense, through your search advertising efforts, things that I've already mentioned, right, the detail page ownership, cross sell into other categories, or products or brands, or even trying to get them to upsell in different pack sizes, etc. And then on the DSP, front, end, retention and loyalty is super critical. And so we want to make sure that, you know, we are bucketing our audiences in a way that allows us to build that customer lifetime value, the long term value of each new customer that we bring into the funnel. And so you could leverage DSP, display ads, video ads, in a number of other different formats that Amazon provides within those two variants, to drive that risk, overall retention. And so you could An example would be anyone who has purchased from us, in the last seven to 14 days, maybe you know, based on your data that these purchases are made, maybe once weekly, once every two weeks, twice a month, whatever. And you can build your audiences based on these custom look back windows to then proactively reach back out to the shoppers, whether you're promoting a coupon or a deal, or just want to get back in front of them from a more of a brand awareness, Top of Mind perspective. And we find those types of strategies to be highly successful across a number of different categories.

Aaron Conant 44:03

Are there things that you thought would come up today that that haven't I mean, a lot of great questions coming in. Are there other things that are top of mind for you, they're like, hey, these come up with our clients all the time. This is the number one problem that we're trying to solve. It can be, you know, advertising related, it could be content related. It could be, you know, inventory. You know, we'd love to hear, you know, top of mind, what are people trying to solve for?

Will Ives 44:34

Yeah, and I'm gonna jump in here and I wanted to touch on, specifically DSP that the two primary vehicles for management of DSP being AMG or managed service through Amazon or self service, fairly overwhelmingly, I'd say, and David and David can can can attest to this as well over the past year or two. There's been a shift towards self service, even on the Amazon side as well. Amazon Even on the AMD side has gone as far as to encourage certain brands to explore a self service model for DSP. There are a number of reasons for this. And I think David can probably get into some of the more specifics. But the biggest one that I see is, as you know, business development manager speaking to, you know, hundreds of brands over over the past few years, is, from a self service model, you're able to be more nimble and creative and spend more time testing and learning to self service perspective than you are through managed service. Now managed services and inherently bad, it's just that they have effectively have a playbook that they go that they that they run their, you know, DSP off of an attempt to sort of fit that into most categories. What self service allows us to do is be more bespoke and specific to each individual category. And overall, the results that we see managed service versus self service are pretty night and day. And again, look no further than the fact that Amazon is now encouraging brands to explore self service model. So I just found that to be very interesting, David, anything else to add, there are self service versus managed service.

David Grill 46:10

I mean, just a couple other quick call outs would be the flexibility from a pricing standpoint, right? So no, minimum budgets, per se, although, you know, 5k is probably a good starting point, if you want to accumulate enough data to be able to make educated optimizations. And then along the same lines with pricing cpms, you know, through self service, you have full access to bid up and bid down as many times throughout the day, every day, seven days a week as you'd like. Whereas, you know, that's likely going to require new insertion orders, read negotiations with the Amazon manage team. And that ultimately can help us be more cost effective through DSP via self serve, because we know the true market value at any given rate for the impressions and the audiences we're trying to reach. So Amazon locks you in at $4. And they're baking their margin into that their management fees. Whereas, you know, we'll get the same inventory for, you know, 250, maybe $3. And it's going to fluctuate throughout the year, but getting more bang for your buck, from a research standpoint. And that allows us to get more bang for your buck from a sales and return perspective. That was the only thing that that I would add there.

Aaron Conant 47:37

Awesome. Well, we've probably got like three minutes here, before we wrap it up. You know, if anybody has any more questions, shoot them over to me, Aaron, aaron@bwgconnect.com, we can get it last couple here answered. I think the other side is yet you can hit star five, we can bring you in? If you know, I do want to say obviously, you know, a quick thank you to everybody sending questions. Rob David, Will, if anybody you know, has follow up questions, needs more information on any of this stuff, more than happy to connect you with the Orca Pacific team. They've been great friends, partners, supporters of our network for a long time now and a lot of brands in it as a whole. So more than happy to connect you with them. 100% was a follow up conversation for sure. But if we kind of do a round robin here, and the last few minutes, you know, I'll go, Rob and David, then Will you know, Rob, from your side, you know, like key takeaways, you know, he spent time at Amazon, what people should be thinking about specifically right now and heading into q4, and then we can jump to David and then to Will, Rob, I'll kick it to you first.

Robert Antolin 48:42

So, you know, at a high level, given global supply chain issues right now, you know, ultimately, the winners for q3 and q4 are going to people who have inventory. So anything you can do to bring in additional inventory in a way that obviously still margin accretive to you can be a great chance to take away market share away from your competitors, especially given that how important having inventory is to feeding into search relevancy, but then also to being able to run the advertising an effective advertising strategy that's gonna allocate your dollars in the most effective way.

Aaron Conant 49:18

Awesome David over to you.

David Grill 49:20

Just jumping in something that takes far more time than a couple minutes to review. But Amazon Marketing Cloud is something that should have a laser focus on it at this point, bridging the gap essentially, between your search and DSP efforts, multi touch attribution modeling, moving away from these two siloed platforms and pulling for funnel insights. So that's really, you know, the one main takeaway that relates to this call, would be to kind of identify the opportunities there, whether that's through an agency or if you have data Scientists, the data team in house that's capable and experienced with SQL, you wouldn't be able to get this up and running. So that's that's definitely an area of focus for Amazon for the foreseeable future.

Aaron Conant 50:16

Awesome. Mark. It's almost like we should have an entire call on the Marketing Cloud for sure. Yeah, Will, I'll kick it over to you to kind of wrap it up here.

Will Ives 50:27

Yeah, great. I mean, I think the best way I can wrap this up is that again, of the 1000s of brands that I've spoken to over the over my years in business development, I've never run into one that is doing everything they can or doing it as well as they can be from a full service. From my from a full funnel advertising perspective. There are tremendous amount of advertising vehicles available on Amazon, it can be extremely complex and confusing to understand what you should be utilizing what you should not be. And then once you figure out what you should be, how do we best utilize these these vehicles to the best of our ability, it is not an easy task. And it is a task that requires not only you know, cutting edge software, but but but expertise as well. So kind of a parent, you know, what David is saying, either approach agencies or experts or look really critically internally at what you're currently doing, because it is a guarantee that there are things you could be doing better, and that will never change. It's about being nimble and creative in the way you execute your full funnel strategies.

Aaron Conant 51:29

Awesome. Love it. Well, thanks, Rob. David, Will for your time today, thanks for always the the great insights that you provide answering as many questions as we could throw at you. And again, anybody on the line today, these guys are some of the best people around, start to finish on Amazon and great people and incredibly smart so 100% worth the follow up conversation. If you're looking for more information on that. Also, look for a follow up email for me, I'd love to have a conversation with people on the line today. Reconnect or connect for the first time. I love those conversations and more than happy to set aside some time to connect. With that. We're going to wrap it up here. hope everybody has a fantastic Wednesday. Have a great rest of the week. Everybody stay safe, take care and look forward to having you on a future event. Alright, thanks again, everybody. Take care now with you.