Aaron Conant  0:18  

Happy Thursday, everybody, my name is Aaron Conant, I'm the co founder and managing director here at BWG Connect. We're a networking and knowledge sharing group 1000s of brands. It's pretty crazy, you know how big it's got over the past five years, since we kicked it off. So thanks to everybody who's been a part of it, and all the recommendations you guys make around topics, as well as the resident experts that are out there to help educate the community as a whole, we're gonna do close to 300 of these virtual events this year and over 100 in person small format dinners and a couple now large in person full day events in midtown Manhattan, the first being a couple of weeks out. So if you're interested in that, just let us know. We'd love to meet you in person, after all of these virtual events for the past few years. You know, kind of a couple of housekeeping items as we get started. The first is any point in time you have a question, we want this to be as educational informational as possible, don't hesitate to drop into the chat or the q&a, or email me Aaron Aaron@BWGconnect.com. With any questions you have, we want to get as many of those answered today as possible. The other is we start this three to four minutes after the hour and just you know, we're going to wrap up with three to four minutes to go as well. We just want to make sure that you we give you as much time as possible to get on to your next meeting without being late. And so as we kind of kick off this topic as a whole. You know, I spend a lot of my time talking with brands every week, and that startup the fortune 100, it's up every different vertical. And you know, while I'm chatting with them, I want to stay on top of what those real pain points are. And so in this case, you know, the power of influencers, how brands use content creators to drive sales, growth as a whole in what we're looking at across the board. And so we got some great friends, you know, partners, supporters of the network, they come highly recommended from a ton of brands in it and they just been great partners across the board and helping educate the community. And so, you know, Patrick, gonna kick it over to you if you want to do a brief intro on yourself and Perpetua that. That'd be awesome. And we can kind of jump into the content. Does that sound good?

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  2:19  

Yeah. Awesome. So thanks for the intro, Aaron. I am Patrick from Perpetua. I work and lead our influencer innovation team. So to give you a bit of background on Perpetua, we weren't a traditional like call it influencer software influencer agency, but really an ads platform and ad software for retail media. So Amazon ads, Walmart ads, target ads, our core software was built to optimize kind of all the sponsored ads that you're running as a brand right now. We kind of built out our software and realize that hey, like, you know, there's only so many keywords and bid prices that you can bid on. We need to find other ways to allow our brands to grow their presence and grow their sales. And where is that happening? That's happening on social media channels. So about 12 months ago, we began piloting, with some influencers, seeing how we can drive good performance. And we spent the last year building out our software to allow our brands in tandem with their sponsored advertising. I leverage TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat influencers to drive sales growth, share voice growth, as well as rank growth on any of the products that they're looking at to expedite. So the point of this presentation is to kind of like share the learnings that we've had over the last year from going someone and you know, who had no knowledge on influencers to like now, we're running over 100 different brands, campaigns on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat. So really where we think the market is going and how you as a brand should be thinking about leveraging content creators to drive sales growth on those marketplaces. The

Aaron Conant  3:57  

so I'm excited. Couple of things are coming to mind. And I know if you have a deck to get through that, that would be awesome. So it's interesting the pivot that was made. But also a big question I get is, How am I how do I launch new products on Amazon, on any of these platform in the most time efficient, cost efficient manner knowing that, you know, on the vendor side, if I upload it, there's no P O anymore. Like it used to be they'd immediately order a case or an Enter. Now there's none. And you gotta have to get traffic. And there's no paid media, if there's no inventory. I get this one on a regular basis. Are brands using this to help launch products on Amazon and Walmart to like leverage the startup and maybe we'll get into that? That's a question I'm answering

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  4:44  

every other day. So like, you know, as mentioned, we were sponsored ads, you know, originally and like still is the bread and butter of our platform. But, you know, we realize that it's very tough, as you mentioned, to kind of get traction on one new product launches where Amazon does doesn't have a lot of data and is now looking for signals that your product is good. But to like if you run out of inventory and use rank on super high volume keywords, it's super expensive to win that back just to sponsor your DSP advertising. So 100% new product launches and regaining rank on products is really really one of the best use cases for social media. So we have a network of over 200,000 influencers. Basically, when you want your product, we can look at the product demographics that you're going after, our algorithm will match you with influencers who kind of have people who fit that profile, and then they actually go and buy your product. So we want the influencers to be like, kind of partners, we call it cobranding, we want them to be partners in this experience. So they'll actually out of pocket your product, and only be reimbursed once you have a final piece of content that you like. So they're incentivized to make something that's great. They're incentivized to make something that resonates with your brand. And then you on the on the brand side one, if they like your product, and are good brand ambassadors will probably leave you a review as well. So you're gonna get already organic kind of growth from the influencers, in addition to all of their followers, and organic reach that you'll get long term. So people used to do search, find buys, that's definitely like, you know, red flag Amazon world now. But instead, you should be building brand partnerships with people who want to support and grow your brand.

Aaron Conant  6:18  

No, I love it. And then they're the micro influencers, you know, across the board. And then they're driving people within their network within their influence circle to go by as well. Awesome. Now, that's a key thing.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  6:33  

Awesome. And cool. One, one thing to note as well, when you kind of like look across different retailers, like your rank is obviously based on just overall sales volume. If you can imagine Amazon obviously has a ton of sales volume ranking on like Target or ranking on Walmart is much easier because the volume is so much lower. So when you're thinking about omni channel strategy, it is also important to think, hey, where am I actually going to send the traffic, depending on you know, where you're ranking, it's like, you know, magnitudes easier to rank on these other things, because the volume is so much lower. So think about product launches, or re ranking. We also asked people to think about what is the overall volume in that category? To give you an estimate of kind of how many influencers, how large of a budget you should be putting in to these different campaigns? Yeah,

Aaron Conant  7:17  

awesome. Thanks. I didn't mean that. There's a deck here. But others, if you have questions across the board, don't hesitate to drop into the chat or the q&a or email them to me, Aaron aaron@BWGconnect.com. And we'll get those answered.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  7:31  

Awesome. You can see the sides here. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Awesome. So while the title says building, you know, sales on Amazon, just actually, you know, applies to all the different retailers that we work with. So we don't work DTC. We're not like a Shopify software or anything like that. We're exclusively retailers. So Amazon, Target, Walmart, CVS, etc. So our influencers promote, basically, for any of the retailers that we have. And I want to start things off by like, you know, when we started 12 months ago, what did we think of influencer marketing, and something that is still you know, is broadly defined as the phone. So marketing is kind of the things that you see here. So these are kind of the halo of influencer marketing over the last five years, you know, product reviews, where you find someone who resonates with your brand, and you get them to like, have a hook display a couple value props, and show off the product. And this is kind of what everyone thinks of when you think of influencer marketing and still is very effective. But it's not really the way that we think influencer marketing is going it's just one of the tools that you should be using. So why influencers? Everyone's here is like, Oh, you got to start using influencers on TikTok or Instagram, whatever. And sure, like the overall high level metrics look great. There's a ton of traffic. So this was from 2021, TikTok had more traffic than Google, which is like absolutely mind blowing, because I didn't even know if tic tock like two or three years ago. So to see the amount of traffic that social media is getting is obvious, but we wanted to break down why it's actually getting that traffic to help us understand how we should be approaching it. So two definitions that I heard of, or I read in some article recently that I really resonated with was signal liquidity, and talent liquidity. So signal liquidity is the relative ease or difficulty to analyze data from content and turn that into like useful KPIs that you're hitting. And then talent liquidity is like the relative ease or difficulty to convert creators of celebrities, micro macro, whoever they may be into, like actual content for your brand. So how does that actually play out? So like signal liquidity? This is something that we were talking about Aaron is like, how much data can you get and how can you turn that data into like something useful? So is this person likely to buy my product? Is this a good video? Should I be diverting, budget or not? And TikTok specifically has a ton of that data. So compared to Netflix, it has just over two times more minutes watched. But when you think about it, the average TikTok is much shorter than the average show on Netflix. So if someone watches you know, one and a half shows per day on Netflix, you're actually averaging about 26 episodes on TikTok, so 26 different kind of skits. And that means the algorithm is really good at picking up on what you liked by looking, you know, how long you stayed on that video? Did you like that video? Did you share it. So they are able to understand exactly what you want, and be able to serve you relevant content. So super, super liquid when it comes to signals. Then talent liquidity. So this is another study, like there's actually 1000 times more creators than there are actors, actresses, and producers in the entirety of the film industry worldwide. So there's infinite, basically amount of people that you could use to create content for your brand. And then also, like geography wise, like previously, like, I don't know, you wanted to launch into UK or Germany, finding, you know, celebrities or actors or actresses in those regions required you to find like, you know, a talent agency, you had to negotiate find super long process now, you can just geo get your search from influencers, find relevant craters in that geo, and all of a sudden, you have brand representatives worldwide. I'm so super, super liquid when it comes to talent. So what do you do you put these two things together, you know, a lot of data, a lot of talent, it means there's a huge opportunity for brands to go out and create you uniquely personalized content for different audiences for their brand. But that also means it's like a massive, like marble block. This is kind of kind of how we viewed it originally, as like, you know, there's so many things that you could do, how do you take everything, and then like, refine it into something that is like beautiful, like a viral piece of content statue of David, take that block and like, make something that is a value. And that's really what we're gonna try to discuss here and show kind of our path to creating value through to creators. Awesome.

Aaron Conant  12:14  

And just a reminder, as we go along the way drop questions to the chatter or the q&a, we'll get them answered.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  12:20  

Awesome. So we don't like to think of influencers anymore. We like to think of CO branding. So what is CO branding? Basically, we define it at Perpetua as the convergence of two or more parties, between their content, commerce and communities. So you know, your brand, it could be, you know, two brands coming together. It could be an influencer and a brand, it could be influencer, an influencer. But basically, you're kind of creating this new micro brand that's in between everything that you have. So your content, the influencers, content, your community, the influencers, community, and then the ability to purchase, whether it be you know, your website, marketplace, etc. So, finding that sweet spot is basically where we want every piece of content in every campaign to go.

Aaron Conant  13:07  

Yeah, and I'd like that from the standpoint of, you know, from an influencer standpoint, a lot of people think, you know, they're getting, they're being used, right, just for cash. And the next time around, you know, an influencer today is taking money for you promoting your brand tomorrow is taking money from your competitor in promoting their brand. And, you know, sometimes semantics or everything, right, and the fact that it's co branded means they're on board, they're on your team, I think it can be a different mentalities a whole of how you're viewing these people. And then, you know, you're more than happy to compensate somebody who's enhancing your brand, that if, then, it's just somebody who's trying to take your cash.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  13:49  

Yeah, it's, it's becomes less transactional. And like, the future of where we really want to go long term is the ability to co brand product lines with influencers, and then have them incentivized by you know, instead of get, you know, traditional celebrity co branded, like, aviation, Jen and Ryan Reynolds is like the he got a percentage of the company. But if you could find a way to quickly build product lines, alongside celebrities, and macro influencers, who are aligned with your brand, and incentivize them by some percentage of sales, we actually think that's kind of like the future because that way, you know, they're fully incentivized to grow up, because this is passive income for them if they, if they're building that product line. And you're actually seeing that out of China, like China is kind of leading the way when it comes to influencers, live streaming, all of that. And they're leaning very heavily into these like CO branded product, product lines, but they're able to, you know, get those products out really quickly. So you can create, execute and see if it works very quickly. Or here we still you know, most brands aren't able to launch a product within, you know, two to four weeks. So we're working on a way how can we make that happen quicker, but for the time being, we focus So how can co branded content? Yeah, it's the that

Aaron Conant  15:05  

slow movement away from influencers into more of affiliates, right? Where I'm not going to pay you a bunch of money up front. I'm going to pay you money as you convert and how much you're driving traffic, and you can share in the profits on that side. As long as you're continuing to drive traffic and sales rather than here. I'm gonna give you a bunch of money, and I hope it all works. Yeah.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  15:27  

Yeah. 100%. The one thing is you're obviously, if you're building a co branded product line, you're investing in that inventory. So like, affiliates, so easy, where you give the link, and it's just some percentage. So it's like a mix of affiliate slash, like more upper end influencers that come together. So like affiliate for higher end of influencers? I guess, we got

Aaron Conant  15:47  

to come up with a new. Yeah, we can, we can coin it. So questions that come in, what system do you use for tracking codes? You may give influencers?

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  16:00  

Yeah. So we use Amazon attribution, by default for driving any traffic to Amazon. For Walmart, we use one of our sister companies called White spider, they're a connected content partner at Walmart, they have the ability to track referral traffic to any given product page. And then for the other ones, we're actually kind of blind. Like, if we're sending traffic to target or something like that, we really have to just look at the downstream effects. So is your rank increasing? Does your total sales increase and look at basically that as the kind of key KPIs but Amazon attribution, which we'll get into has its pros and cons. And same with Walmart. So driving to these marketplaces is never kind of fully attributable, but it's something that we work towards, in our software to, to kind of to hopefully give you a better a better and more holistic picture of what performance is, is being had. Yeah.

Aaron Conant  17:01  

Any other question? Any experience with grin? Or refersion? Yeah, okay.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  17:08  

Yeah, so I know grin. I know, grin. I think when we were building our software, what we realized is like, a lot of these software's are just like networks, meaning they don't help you kind of ideate and come up with the content that you should be creating. So trends, and social media happens so fast, basically, every two to four weeks, there's a turnover and what's popular. So a lot of these sufferers, I think are great for like finding influencers and like engaging with getting them the product, like we thought that is, basically that's great. But that should just be kind of like a check mark, every software, you should be able to find influencers, get them the product easily, how payments, all of that, where we wanted to build on top of was one measurement. So looking at share voice, and sales and attribution across all of these these different retailers. But then also engage with the current trends. So making sure that people are aware of what's trending for their brand, their product category, and just TikTok as a whole. And then using that information to power your influencers, so that they're building on trend content all the time. And then lastly is like Spark adds integration, and whitelisting integration. So I know grin. And the other ones don't offer it but we are again, like an ad platform and add software. So we've integrated directly with TikTok and Instagram, so that we can whitelist and boost your content directly from our software. So you'll get all of that just in one spot. Versus right now you might hire an influencer on grin, get the content up and running, then take the post go into Instagram or or TikTok and start running ads and then look at performance on Amazon or something that we wanted to bring that all into one spot. Awesome. Awesome. See? So commerce, you know, that could be a whole separate conversation. We're all eCommerce experts here. I think everyone you know, knows have good product listings that have you know, good fulfillment and all that. So everyone here is an eCommerce expert, what we really wanted to focus on areas content and community. So with great talent, liquidity comes these fast moving trends. As I mentioned, you have to be creating content quickly and it has to be on trend and relatable, or else you know what performer and then community with infinite different craters that you could choose from, you have to find vendors who resonate with your brand and can create the content that is on trend and relatable. So there is kind of the two core concepts that we tried to solve with our approach. So here's a step by step guide to co branding in 2022. This is still unread from TikTok. They say don't make ads make tiktoks I think that just holds so true when it comes to all of this different influencer type marketing I've screen is freezing a little bit here. But so the benefits, why you should be creating tiktoks and other social media is one, you build long term relationships and you get a lot of great UGC, too, you can actually repurpose that UGC, posted on your own social channels. Part of our platform actually allows you to get custom sponsored brand video, OTT and Facebook ads generated from the content that you've you've created from influencers, long term ambassadors, again, kind of like seeding your seeds. It's like, how do you build people on how to grow together. And then last is obviously driving brand awareness and sales. At the core of it, everyone wants more sales. That is kind of the key to all of this. So it a great content. Something that you can do through TikTok, and also through our software is basically look for trending content. So here, we recommend that, you know, whenever you're launching a campaign, whether it be weekly, bi weekly or monthly, you're basically time gating, what are the top trending videos right now? Additionally, you can see like, what are the top trending sounds are the top trending effects, what are the top trending duets, and you can use all of this different kind of trends to think about, hey, what's a great campaign for me to create right now. So within our software, we allow you to search and save trends within it. It also will just populate trends for your product or product categories. And then additionally, if you already have like a large brand, you probably have a ton of great organic content that's been created by creators already, you can find that here and actually save it and reach out to those creators who are already creating for your brand. And be like, Hey, we noticed you like our brand, like, you know, if it already is organically performing well, you should be sparking that content. If it's proven, it's done well organically, it's like you're going to do well with ads. So just find and save and communicate with all of the things that are organically happening on TikTok. So, here's an example of how that manifests. So you know, two different campaigns run one traditional product, you know, traditional product view. The other was like, you know, more long the pimple popping trend. As you can see here with no ads, the pimple popping one, even though it's still a product ad garnered over one and a half million views, versus, you know, one that is still a good video and like you can tell the person who's like showing off all of the product benefits and things only garnered a mere fraction. So what did that tell us to do for future campaigns is basically like, you know, things that are gonna go viral are these pimple popping trends, like people who are into skincare and pimples, and things are likely the same people who are going to end up buying our product. So let's get our craters aligned with craters who are okay with showing you know, their skin, their real skin, and get them to just show close up pops or moisturizing and all that. And we're going to get much more reach than we would if we just had them, you know, showing the product. So a great way of seeing the trend, seeing the data and then informing future campaigns based on on what we've seen organically.

Aaron Conant  23:12  

Awesome. So a few questions have come in here. Next question, is it valid, that really should be a type of content you push with your influencer partnerships. Now, instead of static static images, or a healthy combo

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  23:26  

to both? Definitely a healthy combo to both. Although I would say reels, and just like overall video content is definitely becoming more and more popular. And I think there's been a lot of fatigue in the post kind of world. But at the same time, almost all influencers will do post and reel and or TikTok all as part of one campaign. So there's no harm in doing it. But we're definitely seeing a lot more virality with video based content. And that's really where we're pushing most people to go, but again, doesn't hurt to have static image content created either.

Aaron Conant  24:08  

It'd be interesting to see, you know, just as trials is if you turned off, you know, the static images, if it had an impact on the real side. You don't I mean, just to test and learn, like how symbiotic is that relationship. Are there next question? Are there specific social platforms that you typically attribute stronger KPIs to, for example, is a high level YouTube influencer worth more than a high level tic tac influencer, if they achieved the same amount of views? is obvious audiences key but there's a different level of follower dedication for different platforms to take into account. We see different costs for different influencer partnerships and different platforms who want to see through that fog

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  24:51  

Yeah, that's a great question. Um, the funny thing is that like a lot of these influencer prices are based more off of demand than performance is like we saw TikTok basically two acts and costs over the last six months as because more and more people are trying to get content created. So creators are now charging more and more of a, of a fee. So short answer is we don't have great data on that yet. And it's a problem that, you know, we're aware of, and looking at the future set is basically we're tracking performance and prices to all of these different influences across all these different platforms. And in the future, once we have enough data, we basically want to be able to say like, what's your best bang for buck, depending on the KPI you're looking for. So if you're looking for views, CPM is probably the most important. And it's like, hey, where can you get the cheapest CPM? But platforms? You know, sales are the most important than, like, hey, use these ones. But yeah, I would say no one has a good answer for that yet. A lot of it's conflated with demand versus actual performance. But the more and more campaigns we run, the better data we'll have, hopefully, the better answer I'll be able to give you. Awesome, love it. Sweet. Another great piece of content from one of our brands was the eye lips face song that was created. So again, they went super deep into TikTok trends. And they're like, hey, sound is super important. Dances are super important. But let's just make a song based off of our brand. We didn't run this campaign, but we managed the responsive ads when this campaign was run. And it's pretty crazy to see kind of, again, just the organic performance that, you know, they dived in, they said, This is a trend, we're gonna do it. 7 billion views, I think, ad we gave us like the best influencer campaign ever. So it was a good one to pull from. But you can see the impact that, you know, it had just from creating a simple song with some relatively unknown artists, all the way to like Ellen DeGeneres, Kevin Hart, using that sound, and creating skits around it. You can imagine with 7 billion views, their sales also were able to see quite a nice uptick. So again, shows the value of thinking of your content being on trend, and taking that risk of like, is every song gonna work like this? Probably not. Definitely not. But if you're thinking of what's on trend and building content towards it, you're more likely to have a hit than not.

Aaron Conant  27:31  

7 billion views it's actually absurd. 

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  27:34  

Finding the right creators. It's freezing here. So like traditional way of matching and something you know, we still do is basically like taking product demographic data from Amazon. And then matching it with the audience demographic data on TikTok. So we know you know, what percentage of male versus female by your brand, what's the age demographic, what locations etc. And then we can see that for all of the audience of the influencers as well. So our matching algorithm, as you can imagine, is based somewhat office, or it's okay that, you know, people who buy this product or like this, you know, influencers have audiences that are identical. These are good people to try to bring into your campaign and get them aware of your product. It's tried and tested, steady performance is the kind of best in class. But we also think of like this other new type of new type of matching, which is actually matching based on the content. So if you're thinking of trending content, what is the content we should be creating? It actually doesn't matter about the follower account or the like people, it actually matters, like who can build content that is, you know, on Trending going to be successful based on what is happening in the market currently. So we actually track we look for people who can build content based on the trends you're looking to deliver. And why is that the case? We want the quality of content to be really good people who are able to create based on again, the trends that we're looking for. And then with I'm sorry, I forgot to put the slide first. But basically, how we view it now is that like, the content isn't for the influencers audience itself. But the content is really like a creative for like a Facebook ad. So the same way on Facebook, you know, you're testing 10s, if not hundreds of different creatives, you should be doing that with your influencers and getting them to create really good content. And then from their screens frozen in here. From there, you can actually spark this content. So for those of you who don't know what sparking is, it's basically the ability to launch ads directly from the creators profile. So you it's like super targeted, like you can get all the way down. So that was like a hair growth shampoo. We're able to target men between 30 and 60 in the UK who are interested in harrow shampoos. So we were able to get to such a level of specificity, that all that really mattered is the content. It shows up organically as if this person was just scrolling and TikTok knew this is what they wanted. And then from there, if it's good content with good engagement, you're going to see good performance. That actually manifested itself here. So this was a organic. This was a organic deodorant campaign. This wasn't the actual video. But there's a video of a creator with only, you know, 11,000 followers. They showed how they use this campaign it was on brand for like, summer sweatiness all this thing like go for a run, but don't kill the environment, that stuff. And with less than $1,000 in budget, they actually hit over a million dollars a million views. All because one, they spent that money and showed the video to highly targeted people. But two, you're actually going to get a boost in the TikTok algorithm. So if you have that right video, the good content created, you spend a little bit of money on the right spark audience, people are going to engage with that video, TikTok’s algorithm is based on likes, shares and comments. Once they see like, okay, the people are showing to our liking and sharing and commenting. It's gonna say, Okay, this is a good thing. And organically, it's going to start promoting that content into for your page. So the same way you try to kind of hack other algorithms, the best way to hack the algorithm, they just get the best content and get it in front of the right people. And from there, it's going to organically kind of take a life of its own. So with a little bit of money, you can add a lot of fuel to the fire, which is why we say like really focus on the content. Because if it is good content, you're going to be able to get that reach a lot cheaper than on other platforms.

Aaron Conant  31:47  

It's another question that comes in. So what's the right approach, as many as possible, are very targeted. Yes, usually you want to take a ton of the shots on goal but you don't know what's going to go viral, right? You don't know what is going to people are going to respond to you. It's kind of that that balance, you want to take as many shots on goal as possible. But you don't want to waste time, effort money either.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  32:10  

We like to say it's like targeted, like shots. So like basically identifying these trends. And typically the same way with Facebook, you know, if you have anywhere between five to 10 different creatives, you're going to be able to like test all of those. And if it works, you're going to see at least one if not more of those begin to trend. So again, the trends turn over once every two to four weeks. So we do for better or less monthly campaigns, where every month we have the trend that we're going after we get 1010 different creators, the beauty of our software's, were able to automatically match and get creators to create content within about five business days. So from the time that you accept the Creator, so yeah, this is someone that it resonates with our brand. And you know, we think they can build the content we're looking for, then they'll have a piece of a draft piece of content in our software within five days. If it looks great, it goes live, if not, they'll get a turnaround with those within another 48 hours. So with about 10 pieces of content per campaign, you're you know, you're set up for success if success is to be had. So the many shots on goal we suggest just doing free product, like you don't need to put all the time and effort into like many people know the kind of best practices of like a product review, you can standardize a brief and send that say if you have a good product hey, here's your product, you can probably get 15 to 25 influencers a month just wanting your product and gonna post about it. For like actually highly targeted campaigns we suggest about 10 and 10 is more than sufficient.

Aaron Conant  33:44  

Awesome, love it. Thank you and just others you have questions drop in the chat or the q&a, we'll get them answered.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  33:51  

Sweet and just on that to kind of like show what we're seeing. TikTok wise in terms of Spark ads, so we like to we like to compare it to like DSPs more upper funnel DSPs again like this is not retargeting This is not remarketing. This is like targeting people who are in market for Carrboro shampoo. When you look at the upper funnel, Amazon and market campaigns and looking at click through specifically, so Amazon DSP is kind of where they view through and click through. So view throws people who saw the ad and then ended up purchasing click throughs people who actually clicked and then ended up doing thing. So CPC is about $21 on Amazon upper funnel where on TikTok, it was about 18 cents. So you know you're driving just insanely cheap books relative to like getting other kind of unknown new brand people into your onto your product page. So super powerful, super cheap. CPMs are hovering like anywhere between like two to $4 as well. So we're still newer to the spark ads because they're relatively new, just in general, but we're very bullish on Spark ads as a complimentary upper funnel tactic, that we're going to be driving people to our product page cheaply. So yeah, once you know you have your campaigns launched, you got the content live your spark ads in like, how do you actually track this performance? So the first is Amazon attribution. For those of you who don't know, Amazon attribution. Basically, Amazon allows you to create a link, the influencers can post this link. And then basically, you can get per influencer attribution tracking. The important thing to note though, is it often like doesn't attribute all of the clicks and sales that we actually see. And why we know this is true, is because we're actually looking at the clicks we're getting from the different ad platforms. And then looking at the clicks that Amazon is telling us. Additionally, we've added another layer since this slide was created, which is the bitly link, and it will tell us the clicks on that link. So it's only actually recording, but 43% of the clicks that we're seeing from these on these different sources. We've asked Amazon about this, there's no real clear answer. There a thing is that, you know, if someone clicks and then leaves the page within like, some level of milliseconds, then it doesn't count as a click. We just find it hard to believe that like half of the people are clicking through and then just immediately like, turning it off. So yeah, you can't fully rely on it. It's a good guess it's a good barometer. But it isn't going to tell us the whole story, but it's definitely important to look at. And like even they're assuming that all links are 50% accurate, then you can see okay, which are which are the influencers still driving the most clicks and the most sales? So as an apples to apples, given everyone has the same constraint? It's not it's not horrible. 

Aaron Conant  37:04  

I love the comment that comes in, we've always had trouble with tracking Amazon attribution, honestly a breath of fresh air to know we're not crazy. No, you're not, you're not crazy.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  37:13  

Yeah, it's like, and like, we're really close with Amazon, and their attribution team. And there's just like, no clear guidance on when or how this will be fixed. But there are ways around it that we're looking at, something we're doing, which I have one slide on, but it's just text and not that like I can just talk about it now is we're doing a quick redirect page, where we actually pixel the redirect page with an Amazon DSP pixel, as well as the Facebook pixel. And then from there, you can create audiences based on all of the clicks. And then you can tie in that DSP performance into the Amazon Marketing Cloud. So you can see okay, of the people who came from the specific, like influencer campaign, what did they then end up going and doing on Amazon. And that is giving us like, more insight. And that also gets around like the immediately quit, because the redirect page happens in like, literally a millisecond. So we basically can create audiences based on these and tie them into Amazon Marketing Cloud, and see a better picture, but it is kind of annoying to set up. So hopefully, we're gonna find a way to automate it in the near future. Additionally, we've asked Amazon to just include attribution data into the Amazon Marketing Cloud, but unclear, unclear if that will be in your term. So until then, we'll just do this kind of like maybe hack around. So what else can you look at? Here we look at BSR so basically, like when a campaign goes live, like, Are you selling more? Are you getting more BSR So here, again, like you saw, we didn't have that many clicks, or that many attribute sales, but we see BSR, you know, nearly halved from 40,000, to about 24,000. So it's safe to say, you know, all other ad spend holding constant, that this probably had some sort of like effect on people buying the product, whether it you know, came up organically doesn't really matter if you know, we're trending and growing our sales. The second is search frequency rank. So again, like within our software, you get all this in the dash, but you can also pull this just from Amazon itself. What we like tracking here is sure the search frequency rank of you know, general category keywords, but really, if an influencer slash co brand campaign is performing well, you should see more and more people searching your brand. to crack the top 2 million you actually don't need that many searches, you know, you probably need like 10 to like 50 a day. So if your brand goes from naught into 2 million to you know, into 2 million and or you see some sort of jump from you know, like 18 at one Point 8 million is like 1.5 million, it's safe to say that more and more people are searching your brand. And that we're having the intended effect of like people not just like if I, you know, did a Gatorade campaign and people go search energy drink, that's actually not that good because they're going and they might see a sponsored ad from Powerade. But if we see people going in searching like Gatorade, zero energy drink, and more people are doing that we can tell we're actually having an effect on people's buying behavior, because they're going and searching specifically for for what we want. That's also a good trick for DSP. If you're doing that, and people are, you know, you're seeing more sales, but they're all coming from unbranded keywords. That's a you know, it's not as influential as you might think. 

Aaron Conant  40:44  

It's just, it's just funny. It's not funny, but like, executive teams are like, Oh, just do TikTok ads and drive more. It's just like Facebook, right? It's the digital marketers who are out there, it's just gotten so much more difficult. With the past two years. Everybody has to up to up their game at the same time, you know, iOS 14, boy, five updates, and third party cookies going away. And then it's not as simple attribution, right. Like with Amazon attribution errors like this is going to be awesome. Wow, kind of is kind of isn't that, you know, we really have to do we have to get a team of data scientists in here to extrapolate all the data and tell me what's working, what's not, oh, by the way, that takes three and a half, four weeks for them to do and I've already missed the trend. So anyways, I saw the next one on content. So I'm really interested in that. Just because I just had an incredible there's a leader in the space Tom , over at a company called around on brand verse off brand content, we did a dinner in New York City on that topic in the divide between brands, you're like, would you use content that's slightly off brand, if it drove sales or not? And how should you look at that, because UGC content is rarely 100% on brand. So, anyways, yeah,

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  42:07  

that's a whole nother combo. I think once you like, people begin to dive into like, the actual content that's trending very often, it's like, you have to push the boundary of what you would consider on brand. But if it matches with what people who buy your product are looking at, then is it on brand just entirely like it's a very fine dance. But we definitely want people to also use the content beyond just having it live on the influencers profile. So here, we actually offer the ability to create videos within our package of stuff specked out for either Amazon, SBV, Ott, or Facebook with no other jobs out. There, here's one we built for hero cosmetics using one of her one of their influencers. So typically turn around about 24 hours for this, you upload your creative brief, and your brand assets. And then something gets created. We're seeing brands again, we're unfriend like basically creating your 10 different Facebook ads based on the TikTok ads that they've generated. And then testing that on Facebook, and just kind of keeping this loop of all the fresh content and creative testing across all of the different channels that they're running on. And we've seen them perform very well relative to content that is more static image based. Love it. The other one is kind of what we talked about, but retargeting uses using pixeled redirect page. So again, fixing that redirect page, Amazon DSP audiences, so maybe they don't cover it the first time, but then you can begin to retarget to people who you've driven to your product page from social media, as well as Facebook. And then the next thing we're looking at is like basically within our network of brands, co branding squared. So basically allowing brands who aren't direct competitors, but have complementary products. And you can kind of look at this data through like the Amazon basket or just you know, overall, thinking about what people buy when they buy your product, and allowing brands to collaborate on content together. So there's like a lot of, you know, more organic content that comes out typically isn't just highlighting one brand to like an influencer saying like, how do I start my morning? Well, it's like, oh, I want some beekeepers like elixir brain fuel, plus my spread love peanut butter. I put that with a banana. And here comes my smoothie. So how do you allow brands to come together to create content with influencers that are complementary to each other? You can split the cost, double the organic reach because of your brand name, and then hopefully benefit by growing together. And that's really like something that we've they'll just slide to show our brands, and basically challenge brands to kind of think outside the mold of being like, Hey, we gotta run our campaigns, like, how do you run campaigns together with brands that you resonate with? To maximize kind of like total performance?

Aaron Conant  45:14  

Yeah, I mean, I think these are the new, innovative ways that brands have to look at media going forward to optimize the spend in you know, crunch time as a whole. How can you find those people that, that are in the exact same customer demographic, but are non competing brands, and just leverage, you know, a, you know, a partnership across the board, they, I mean, we see this a lot of times now, even on, you know, inserts that are happening in packages, right, where you find another brand that does something that's non competing, and you can drop your collateral and their packaging, and they can drop their collateral and yours and using that as brand awareness as a whole. So I love this concept. I love this concept.

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  46:03  

And yeah, that's pretty much it.

Aaron Conant  46:05  

And now is a great time. If others if you have questions, I mean, feel free to drop them into the chat or the q&a at this point in time. That podcast is dropped. I see Pat dropped it in the in the chat there, if anybody wants to check out that content. podcast, and, you know, I don't know, their I don't have other questions that are coming through it. What are you most excited about? You know, we probably got, you know, three or four minutes left here, if others questions drop in the chat or q&a or email me, but what are you most excited about going forward? What are the new things that are coming around the bend?

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  46:41  

Yeah, that's a that's a good question. I am super excited in this like CO branded environment, I really think quick product launches. And building co branded products with influencers is like, going to blow up. I don't know if in America, you saw this, but Justin Bieber just launched a coffee line with Tim Hortons, which is like our Dunkin Donuts, called beeps brew. It's like, literally, you know, the everyone is drinking it. And it just shows you like, sure that's a case of like, you know, two top powers coming together. But there's a way if there's a way to quickly create co branded products, have it fulfilled quickly, you know, houses listed on Amazon as a variant, and you can go live in four weeks. I think that's going to be really powerful. And like a lot of cool. New types of partnerships will come from from brands and influencers slash labs.

Aaron Conant  47:41  

Yeah, I mean, is testing and learning. And that's the kind of advice I would have is if you jumped down that path, and the first one doesn't work out, don't, don't call it a failure, right? I mean, just tested, learn, test and learn, test and learn. And I think that's kind of going to be the theme of digital 2.0, which I think is where we're at right now. Right? Which is the next level everybody has to up their game. It's, you know, paid media, you can't just do it on your own anymore. You need some kind of tech partner on the back end. Traditionally, how you look at you know, UGC is changing. I think you pointed out like, you can't make ads for TikTok users sniff it out immediately. Right? It's you make TikToks? And how you do it and how you approach it. And then are you partnering with in the space? How can you leverage all the assets you have and you know, have a one plus one equals three. So

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  48:33  

one cool on that our partners, like one of our sister companies in China did was Nick Cafe slash dove. So like, we're all pulling these kinds of ideas from China. So they one made a dove centered coffee. And then two, they made it make Cafe scented dove. And it won like some crazy like sold out in China within like seconds. So like, you know, the American version is probably like crocs Justin Bieber, like, crocs is one of our customers. And we're like super bullish on like, all the drops that they do. So it's like now how do you make it available and accessible to everyone to kind of activate these types of like, one off product launches,

Aaron Conant  49:13  

so it shouldn't be like crack Justin Bieber Tim Hortons?

Patrick Quaggin-Smith  49:16  

Yeah, we started adding people on

Aaron Conant  49:18  

I love it. Well, you know, I don't have any other questions that are coming in here right now. Just a couple people like to have a follow up conversation with you again. You know, Patrick in the team at Perpetua they're great friends, partners, supporters of not only that network, but a lot of brands in it. So we encourage anybody if you want to learn more about this or what they do, they're just leaders in the space and it's worth setting up a follow up conversation. If you're looking for any other kind of service providers whatsoever. Don't ever hesitate to reach out this one I spend a lot of my time doing it doesn't matter if you're your startup or your fortune 100 chat with all of them. And that's up every different verticals love to have a conversation just shoot me an email Aaron aaron@BWGconnect.com if you're in New York City a couple weeks from now, she wants to know, we'll sign you up for the event. That'd be awesome. And with that, I think we're going to wrap it up. Thanks again, Patrick, for your time today. Everybody have an awesome rest of the week. Everybody, take care, stay safe and look forward to having you at a future event. Alrighty, we'll see everybody