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we're here in the in the birsh Khalifa in Dubai not that anyone can tell it's like pretty uh indistinct but yeah tell us the story as yeah well we're here in the B Khalifa surrounded by beautiful imar properties in the background I don't know if you actually know the story of the the gentleman who started ebar I have no idea told he used to work in the central bank and then he started to develop a taste for real estate and got close to one of the shakes in Dubai um and so over time he slowly positioned

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himself to basically get into the good books of the of the shake and then when he started um getting into real estate he got all the deals for the big properties that were being built around the bu so it's a uh it's a classic case of uh networking classic case of positioning yourself which is what which what Dubai is all about Dubai is about it's about positioning it's about positioning I'm very disappointed with our positioning at the moment but that's a story for another day

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[Music] so a and I work together a is on our growth marketing team a what do you what do you do at the agency yeah so I'm a director of growth what I do is I basically help scale our clients that come on acquisition So Meta ads Google ads Tik Tok ads largely through Rapid creative testing understanding pnls um working with media buyers to to optimize Channel performance and yeah I mean I have a deep specialty in in meta ads I think um specifically when it comes to creating content iterating on content

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and then um scaling ad budgets yeah and I think the I mean some of the performance in Q4 of the accounts you managed was insane I think the most interesting case was sculpt and just what they were able to achieve why don't you tell us a little bit more about that that business yeah so sculpt is a atome Pottery kit brand so they make Airy air dry clay kits uh for people and and their positioning is really as like an alternative to a date night or an alternative to a movie night you know kind of basically leading into those

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altruistic values of like creating memorable experiences um making someone feel appreciated right and and it's typical use cases you see it you see the product perform really well during gifting Seasons like Valentine Day Mother's Day and then going into Q4 Black Friday and Christmas and so yeah we we ended up helping grow their business by almost 100% in Q4 um largely dominated through their US market where um where just the the messaging that um we honed in on with the creative really

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resonated with audiences so couple of the things we did there um the first was specifically with content so I think they had a really good strategy when it came to uh when it comes to creating content when it comes to understanding their customer but they weren't very well versed in distributing that content so they kind of understood what kind of creative they needed to make but I think they needed a partner that could help uh really scale that both in terms of the velocity of creative that they're doing and then

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also how they're iterating on winning angles winning Concepts um so a couple things we brought to them um I think ugc was probably the biggest element there um ugc was a was not really a part of their strategy before what were they doing before um from a Content perspective yeah largely they were partnering with like professional Potters uh people into arts and crafts and just people who had a general interest in in their category and they were kind of filming uh overhead shots of people making cool pottery pieces and

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then they're largely leveraging organic social to grow actually I mean I think their Instagram has um a couple million followers if I'm not mistaken yeah I didn't realize that I mean the product is like it's so demonstrable like it's the ads are really fun I think it's a fun product it's something that you can really get behind we were talking about this earlier but it's like products that you can gift or things that I think bring you Joy Joy or will bring other people Joy I I think it's such a

00:04:33 - 00:05:33

powerful category because everyone is gifting it's something that you know is very cyclic cyclical you can deliver it to a bunch of different people but I think that's like really powerful but if you can show it through creative that's every that is everything yeah 100% I mean I think um I think the interesting thing about their business there you go I think the the interesting thing about their business is and I know we talk about this a lot they grew through organic first before really

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scaling up paid right so they built such a robust organic program to the point where you know they could spend no money on ads and still bring in a decent amount of Revenue each month and basically meta became this amplification device for what was already a very strong business model a very strong content flywheel I think to today that is the that's the Playbook like you need to have a Content machine for organic I think to just like understand angles and what works and like you get traction

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that way just because you can have organic amplification and you can reach net new colder audiences that don't know the product so if I'm starting a business and I get really good at creating short form content in their case it's like short form video with Potters um and people start to like it and like there's signal there you're like okay I have something that people want if you're driving sales through organic then meta and meta just becomes all upside it's all incremental but I do

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think that's really important for Brands to have a solid organic program first and then to your point like meta becomes an amplification engine one of the things we don't talk about enough is um what is the goal of meta ads right I think a lot of people expect that the job of meta ads is to bring you sales but that's not really the job of of meta like it they're not in the business of acquiring customers they're not in the business of bringing sales they are in the business of Distributing content um

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like all social channels I think where where meta works the best is when you've already um we've seen this with with numerous examples when you've already validated a winning strategy from the content side and then you kind of just leverage scale you leverage the AI you leverage machine learning and you leverage the massive audience on the platform yeah I completely agreee with you I think it's like you have a solid business it has you're generating content um and you kind of want to

00:07:08 - 00:08:23

unlock that next stage of growth and meta is an opportunity to do that it's a channel for that I think where a lot of businesses get into difficult circumstances is when they view it as like a it's like a sales Channel and they're over optimizing and they're they're they're kind of like the they get two in the weeds they like forget the purpose of the of the channel um so okay let's going back going back to sculpt though it's basically they had a strong organic program and how are they thinking about

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meta ads when they came to to us I'm actually not even really aware of this because I wasn't really involved in those discussions yeah I think when I first took a look at what they were doing on um on The Meta side I was just blown away by the efficiency I think it was one of the most efficient meta advertising programs that i' had seen and and efficient in terms of uh not just what they're doing from like an me and CAC perspective but being able to maintain that efficiency at significantly higher levels of spend

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right so they were able to maintain the same efficiency spending a couple thousand dollars a day when they spent 30 or $40,000 a day during certain Peak gifting seasons and um um sales Peri perod so right away I think what it told me was they probably weren't spending enough um and this is something we we talked a lot about with them which was how can you be a little um more aggressive with projections I think they uh I think they redid their projections three or four times during Q4 because of the uh

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because of the scale that they were seeing starring starting stting in October November and December um I think fundamentally there's a few really good things about that business one uh their website is super optimized so if you go through their website you look at their funnel um they've really dialed in pdps like they've they've kind of nailed that format of talking about pain points and then demonstrating how sculpt is like the perfect solution through ugc content and through like video content and then

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give us an example of that yeah so like an example is like they would create specific skews that were tailored towards the main pain points that they were addressing so like they um they saw that the date very early on in their business they saw that the date night use case was really like uh a winner for them in terms of creative creative that kind of leaned into the this is an alternative to date night um sort of messaging so they actually bundled together a few of their hero SKS um into like a a double date night bundle

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product right and then all of the all of the messaging on the product page and all of the kind of ugc content uh customer reviews testimonials were all geared towards that use case and then they understood that because of the success that they were having already promoting that messaging um creating a skew that aligned with those um with those pain points would probably work well on meta and and that's like one of one of many examples of the kind of content that they were doing how do you think about

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when you have multiple use cases and angles for a particular product like whether it's personas or value propositions that you kind of want to highlight in sculps case I think there are so many how do you think about like the prioritization of of developing then running creatives for those use cases I think this goes back to like a broader thought that I have on how to run ads on meta successfully um I think if you look at a lot of businesses they're focused on trying to create a ton of new original content every day

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and with the rise of like Tik Tok you're seeing more and more of this like people people want to create new original content every single day they kind of want to flood the internet and flood people's feed with just original brand new original content and I think when you take a step back and look at all of that from like a 30 day 60-day or one year perspective you realize that there isn't there isn't much of a theme that uh kind of comes across with all that content it's a lot of different things

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that are addressing a lot of different use cases products pain points what I saw with sculpt was an opportunity to double down on the two or three use cases that were really working for them anything that had to do with like gifting whether it's times like Valentine's Day Mother's Day or it's just birthdays things like that um how I have let's just to give perspective here yeah when you started how much was sculpt spending and advertising spend on a monthly basis they were spending um 30

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to to 40K a month wow okay and then when was that that was like July yeah July okay and then December they spent about a million dollars yep that's great scale the marketer being able to open up that spend and communicate with the CFO or the CEO who's kind of looking at the p&l and trying to project out advertising spend and expenses I think when you're dealing with a consumer business that's scaling on meta you need to have a different way of approaching scale because it's more of like a a CPA

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efficiency Target and if you're hitting it you can kind of endlessly scale if your inventory is there so I wanted you to walk us through how you kind of worked with the client on that how you worked with those guys on that were they did they see the business in that way yeah it's pretty interesting because when you look at a a seasonal business and you look at their like Shopify charts and you kind of understand the patterns and sales that occur throughout the year it became very obvious to me

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that we would just have to get two or three moments right to end up having like a successful year um specifically in Q4 once you get into Black Friday and then and then kind of those 12 to 15 days after Black Friday to um shipping cuto off dates for most brands which which is mid December so the way I kind of looked at it is I an we analyzed their creative program the year before which I think they they would say was like probably lacking in v in like variety of content they they did a really good job of

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finding the two or three use cases that resonated with customers but they kind of just didn't have a very good way to create many iterations of what was working and then also hit it from many different angles as in you ugc content short form video Statics um whatever it is so I kind of took a look at the content and I projected out what we would be able to provide them the lift that we would be able to provide from a Content perspective and based on that I started to understand how much we could

00:14:19 - 00:15:23

scale the business so I understood that if they were able to scale budgets to 10 to 20K a day with only like five pie pie of content that we're performing on meta if we could give them 15 or 20 pieces of high quality content in a week we could probably double or triple their budgets with the same efficiency so it was really just about playing that numbers game when it came to content yeah that's really interesting do you have the same I have a very similar approach with thinking about the funnels for

00:14:52 - 00:15:56

businesses in general even those that have like hundreds or thousands of SKS it's like let's focus on the the core products and the core angles or creatives that are going to get people into the program and then I think the power with high volume from a skew perspective storefronts is the cross sell opell Potential from there like if you have products that are complimentary or kind of within the same ecosystem so I I resonate with what you were saying on like look at you know isolate a couple of things to focus on and press

00:15:24 - 00:16:23

on you kind of need to simplify the the creative program or the new customer acquisition program I think um in general the the approach that we that we took with them and that we take with a lot of brands are successful is we validate winning pieces of content and then we scale it through as many different Avenues as possible I think we're going to touch on on um tools like firmat that they kind of help amplify that process but that's really where we brought a whole different level of scale

00:15:53 - 00:16:56

to that business they had already done a really solid job of of building up the content fly through organic building up a good ads program and we kind of just took it to the next level by by Distributing it very effectively across uh multiple Avenues both on the ad targeting side and then mainly on the content side yeah I think when you're able to unify all of those pieces it's like okay from a business strategy perspective you isolate core skes creatively you figure out the angles the creative angles that are going to work

00:16:25 - 00:17:27

for that for those SKS and then you align creative with Landing page with eventually the customer retention program you have this like great alignment that can be very simple and elegant with direct consumer I think this is exciting for marketers we were I was talking about this at at the conference the other day is like the tooling that's coming out is just allowing us to be so much more effective and quick at our jobs in ways that you just couldn't beforehand like I think people people

00:16:56 - 00:18:02

actually forget this um when you're building a a market infrastructure that's meant to produce creative at scale and to be successful on organic on paid in B2B you need to be producing a lot of content um at different ad formats video Statics it needs to be on brand landing pages that just requires a lot of resources requires designers video editors creative strategists or creative director and then your media team now we have these tools that are just allowing people to operate so much

00:17:29 - 00:18:26

quicker so in the case with fmad it's like you know this better than I do like just how quickly you can spin up LPS and like what that does to your efficiency maybe you can speak a little bit more on that the way I look at firmont is um obviously for for anyone that doesn't know firmont is a landing page tool that basically gives you fully shoppable storefronts at the the point of experience so you have the opportunity to kind of see the messaging of the ad follow you all the way through the the

00:17:58 - 00:19:14

point of purchase which which has really been a a GameChanger in the D Toc space and I think is probably um the future of of content and landing page experiences in particular I think what firmont does is they provide a really good vehicle for just Distributing content effectively so the the way that we've primarily leveraged firmont is we've been able to take winning pieces of content and test them to the different sort of landing pages and PDP formats that are available through the platform so we've got a

00:18:36 - 00:19:43

winning piece of content it's running to the Brand's PDP with fermont we can create a shoppable storefront that someone someone can purchase directly on the ad we can create a long form lisal page within within a day you know kind of leveraging their AI um ghost riter on top of their very simple um no code storefronts we can package up some of the bestselling productss and bundles into into a quick firmont shop and run creatives there so if you think about creative in that it's capped with the

00:19:09 - 00:20:22

amount of scale that you can achieve before you lose efficiency I think what fmot allows you to do is Achieve infinite scale by taking winning pieces of content and distributing it across all their different customizable templates for shopping experiences yeah and I think this is what's cool about the AI tooling it's like you have a variety of different inputs whether it's creative or skew based things and just able to unify it in a very automated fast way which previously just took a lot of time

00:19:45 - 00:20:53

and effort and and brain power to to put that stuff together in terms of creative and landing pages it just seems like we're going to a place where you're going to have infinite customization potential like like you were mentioning yeah I mean let's let's talk about the bulbhead use case for Vermont right so so bulbhead um you know one of our clients that's really B been around for a long time um in the kind of Home Products gadgets space um pioneered the infomercial rode the this rode their

00:20:18 - 00:21:31

success on on TV ads for over 20 years they kind of got into the Facebook game late um in 2021 2022 I think they approached it in a really smart way they instead of trying to understand instead of trying to reinvent the brand to optimize for these social platforms they understood that they had built up such a good customer base and they had also validated winning pieces of content over the many years that they had run that's their TVs that's their that's their business right there it's we can

00:20:56 - 00:22:03

manufacture very quickly at scale and not just like scale for an individual product but like replicate that across different ideas and then it's we can also validate winning long form commercial content yeah so if you look at that long form commercial content that that works very well they tend to have a lot of success with like 2 minute 15 minute 30 minute commercials right and they understood that the core messaging and the style of content resonates with their audiences on any platform if it will yeah if you hook

00:21:30 - 00:22:27

someone they're going to watch the entire video actually let's talk about this like how do you think about long form commercial content for social platforms like traditionally short form video platforms yeah I mean I think I think there's a there's an interesting saying which is if when everybody's doing something what you what you want to do to be successful is to do the opposite everyone's out here trying to find the perfect type of short form content that's optimized for these

00:21:58 - 00:23:04

platforms and these guys come on to Facebook and they say let's do the opposite let's bring our 15 minute 30 minute spots two meta ads they're like we know this works yeah let's get it and I think what they figured out is like if you're interested in something and the pacing is right you're going to watch it so theyve mastered that format and then I mean it was it's just little tweaks to get it to work on IG so for them it's like introduce a ugc hook on top of a long for commercial video yeah their

00:22:31 - 00:23:39

their content strategy in general is to take winning pieces of content and infinitely iterate on it so if you've got a two-minute commercial that's working find a dozen Clips within that two minute spot that could act as the hook of another variation so you could take one base unit of creative and have 10 to 12 unique ads that are running on meta you can then amplify that further by taking ugc content and putting those hooks in front of the commercial you can take Statics that are that are working

00:23:06 - 00:24:19

and Performing well on the platform and kind of put those as the intro card to to the commercial and then with fermont you can take those creatives and run them to five six different landing page experiences so already you're looking at one piece of content being able to potentially run as a hundred different ads on on the platform um each one of them with with the opportunity to scale because the the core piece of content is has already been validated as winner I mean for that subset of bulbhead products

00:23:42 - 00:24:52

that we're running how did growth look like for that business yeah I think um they have a very rigorous product testing strategy um mainly through TV ads so they'll introduce new products into the business every quarter and they'll try and find winning pieces of content and validated through um their TV TV ad strategy and so what we found was I think a couple of the products that we worked with them early on showed some potential to scale but weren't really weren't really like hero products

00:24:17 - 00:25:28

or weren't really winners so to say but then they introduced a couple of products one one's a carpet cleaning um spot and stain remover another bullsh shot another is a one of my uh favorite products yeah it's a and and the creative for that is just it's brilliant very dialed in it's brilliant um and so once they introduce that to meta ads it um it just it resonated with the same audiences that they that they saw on the TV side so what type of creatives are are we running on App 11 for that

00:24:53 - 00:26:00

business it's it's really the same strategy that we take across all platforms um it's taking the core commercial piece of content that's working and then just iterating it to the best practices of of app Lovin so with app Lovin kind of showing on on gaming gaming networks and and kind of just hitting a a different niche of audience I think in particular um their content really resonates with older women they've just adapted that creative with certain intro cards and end cards

00:25:26 - 00:26:33

that match the best practice practices and the interests of that Niche that are that are on the ad networ the thing that I worry about is like platform saturation but when we talk to App 11 they're like we have a ton of AD advertising inventory You know despite having 140 million active daily active users yeah I mean I think the the interesting thing about app L is a lot of people are saying it's the new meta I think they've sort of really effectively just rode the way like the the interest

00:26:00 - 00:27:11

in gaming and the the boom that that category has witnessed over the past couple of years I think there's some elements to their ad targeting algorithm which also align very closely with meta in that unlike a lot of platforms they see the most success when you broaden audiences and when you kind of let the creative do the targeting which is really just really what made meta the uh Goliath that it is in the digital advertising world a I think you embody the spirit of what the director of growth at at dark roomm is really meant

00:26:35 - 00:27:50

to be honestly at the agency but also just in general talk a little bit more about that role and why it's uh not the best fit for everyone or actually not the best fit for most people the the interesting thing about servicing client accounts and running growth marketing for these businesses at dark room is there's very little oversight that happens from senior members uh senior leadership at the company which I think it affect helps some people and isn't as valuable for others so I think in my

00:27:13 - 00:28:20

case what I found really interesting was the ability to have like full ownership over these client engagements and kind of full autonomy to try whatever I wanted to without worrying about like any implications in terms of in terms of what superiors would think in terms of what the client would think I think that just gives you the opportunity to take risks and and test test rapidly and take chances I think it's so important for marketers to be able to actually take chances and kind of bet put their name

00:27:47 - 00:28:43

on the line you need to be creative you need to kind of go outside the box in order to see what works for a business I think where people get trapped is when they just start running things for the sake of running things they're not thinking critically or strategically the director of growth role at dark room in the way that it's envisioned is you're acting like an owner not only of the p&l of the businesses that you work with and how you're growing contribution profit and eida but you're also acting like an

00:28:14 - 00:29:12

owner of their of their marketing and creative program so what should we run where should we be investing and to tie that back to the tooling that we have today it's like investing in media has very much been an art where you're kind of making guesses based on gut feeli of like hey I want to increase spend by X percentage in this Channel or I want to invest here I want to test these Concepts that I think is incredibly valuable for a marketer to have but I think now we're starting to see a lot of

00:28:43 - 00:29:47

the tooling develop where you can make more accurate bests B Based on data to me that's the beauty of Performance Marketing that's how it should be done in its Essence it's data informed creative and financial marketing you creative you have finance and you have data kind of enriching everything that's hard for everyone to get right you have some people that just want to stay in the creative Lane you have some people that just want to stay in the in the data Lane and be more of like an analyst

00:29:15 - 00:30:15

reporting on metrics the ability to act and have the the elbow grease and be able to put in the hand toand combat to do all things is actually that's what I think what we want to achieve what we're trying to get people to engage that's a lifelong process of like learning and understanding how to grow and scale businesses I think something you mentioned before is also bringing the lens of economics and business to to the marketing role so um you know I think there's a new term out there like

00:29:44 - 00:30:52

the the marketing Economist type person rashab and I were talking about that a year and a half ago it's true yeah and I think that's I think that's a a new dynamic in the in the agency world you don't you don't find a lot of people that can effectively merge analytics General macro understanding of D Toc businesses with creative and with like tactical um media buying knowledge on on the ad platforms and if you can combine all of those together then you've really got a very like

00:30:19 - 00:31:22

well-rounded holistic Market yeah I think being a holistic marketer I think the risk today it's a lot easier to do it because the tooling is Bec more advanced you can leverage platforms like firmat icon just launched their ad product so I think you're going to get a lot of stuff like getting outputs is going to be easy understanding the quality of the outputs I think is is going to require a dis a Discerning Eye and critical analysis and I think previously the way to actually understand that and get that was by

00:30:51 - 00:31:49

doing like you have to go and make the creatives you have to go and make the landing page you have to run it and experiment and see what works traditionally one of the hardest things for marketers to understand was Finance pnls I just think it's recently with indirect consumer as like the platforms become more expensive and margins have become compressed marketers have had to start to learn what is contribution profit what is iida what are my costs um so these are all really positive forcing

00:31:20 - 00:32:18

functions and developments my hope is just that like we can keep marketers really close to the work and then give them that that perspective like that 30,000 foot view perspective too and when you're like when you're in the market and you're kind of looking for um a director of growth role do you do you find that people lean towards one or the other like heavy on the data side heavy on the creative strategy side or have you started to see more marketers um kind of come up through through the

00:31:49 - 00:32:49

agency world that are well versed in in both aspects it's very interesting because we've tried to hire for all different type of type of people to figure out who's the best fit for the role I think what you find most often in the market today is really proficient performance markers they understand channels they understand marketing metrics they're even comfortable operating pnls like I think over the last three to five years that's become more common but those are senior individuals and they're expensive

00:32:20 - 00:33:22

because they know their value that they're bringing to the organization for Consumer businesses this is one of the most important roles it's much less common to find creative who want to engage in like thoughtful discussion around p&l and Performance Marketing and what I found is I think the finance stuff is a lot easier to teach so I wish creatives would engage in those discussions I think a lot of people have these like invisible scripts where they're like I'm a creative I'm

00:32:50 - 00:33:48

not good with numbers listen to yourself like you're that's a limiting belief that you're putting on yourself our marketing team at darker I was talking Le about this last week I prefer to work with designers that have taste um that know what looks good what feels good to the consumer what creatives work what angles to test they like have produced they're comfortable producing that's not a new motion for them and then I educate them on on Performance Marketing on more technical applications of of marketing I

00:33:20 - 00:34:22

think that's a lot easier to learn because you once you get into the the data habit for three to six months you're you're good to go and that's what I was talking to you about like you're a great performance marketer you can I think you like scaling it's fun and it's exciting and this is almost advice for myself too because I'm not a creative by trade once you start engaging in the development of the creative the and what I mean by that is like creating copy for ads scripting ads designing v1s of ads

00:33:51 - 00:34:55

like running Those ads seeing what works I think that getting into the cons the psychology of the consumer that unlocks like a a a totally different um skill set that is a huge asset I think for marketers in general to more directly answer your question long-winded answer here but I don't actually think it matters if you come from creative or performance I think it matters it's your attitude are you willing to put in the hard work like with anything are you willing to apply yourself cuz marketing

00:34:23 - 00:35:21

is really hard and you're going to need to be comfortable holding multiple ideas in your head at the same time grappling with Finance grappling with creative which are two things that have been traditionally disjointed what do you what do you think about the role that AI is going to play in sort of helping these marketers hone their skills when it comes to merging creative and in data yeah I think it's going to be a lot easier like I think it's very exciting that's why I'm saying like it matters

00:34:52 - 00:35:50

your attitude if you're the type of person that genuinely is like a truth Seeker you're trying to like figure out problems and problem solve and think critically you're going to be able to upskill yourself learn and deploy a lot faster with the AI tooling you can spin up landing pages faster you can spin out creative faster you're going to be able to automate spreadsheets and financials like that stuff is happening right now I think the risk is that people get lazy they don't actually try and understand

00:35:21 - 00:36:15

they let you know the machine start doing the thinking for them and I I think that's where people can be at risk but I mean generally I'm really excited and when I first started to like recognize the writing on the wall with AI like I think the natural response for anyone who's in an industry that's being disrupted by AI it's to be afraid to be scared I think that's a natural human response is this going to replace my job am I still going to be able to be valuable and contribute advertising is

00:35:48 - 00:36:49

not going anywhere we're still going to be advertising 15 years from now just the way that it carried out is going to be more efficient and different I I actually think even with with what's happening with agents it's like there might be advertising for agents to like influence them that have you seen some of the um video there there's a couple of video tools that have popped up in the space where you can actually upload upload a script and then create an AI Avatar to basically have like recite the

00:36:19 - 00:37:31

the script and and create like a fully you don't have an AI Avatar yet no I think I think we I think we should all like you could train I could train an AI Avatar myself and then have that person speak with my uh cence I ugc AI Avatar so does Jackson I was looking at a a a short form video the other day for our LinkedIn and our editing team they just replicated my voice like there was an AI speaking I didn't even I it wasn't me but I was like oh it and they said I think they said they

00:36:55 - 00:37:53

said something they said a word differently than I normally pronounce it and I was like w that's not me the world that we're living in what are you most excited about this year I'm excited about some of the new uh channels that that I think we're exploring U we talked a bit about Tik Tok shop we talked about a bit about getting um into the affiliate side really scaling up the Creator program that we already have at dark room because we've seen a lot of success with the kind of Scopes that

00:37:24 - 00:38:28

that we do on the performance marketing side where we're getting ugc content um each month so I think scaling that up in in sort of kind of layering on on top a ugc agency element to the Performance Marketing skill set that that we already bring to the table I think is going to be really exciting and I also think just looking at some of these product C winning products and and winning categories that we've identified over the past few years that we're going to look to scale into um just in terms of

00:37:56 - 00:38:57

the the kinds of business that that we work with and and look to replicate some of the success that we've had over the past couple of years I think your perspective on on growth marketing is the same that that I have going back to what you were saying what categories do you like for direct consumer I mean like the perspective we have is very interesting we see a lot of Brands we see Founders that struggle we see Brands like sculpt that scale really fast like bulhe head this is why I love this

00:38:27 - 00:39:26

business model is you get so much exposure you learn so fast because you you see so many other entrepreneurs in the arena like you know cutting their teeth trying to make things happen um what have you learned and how does that inform how you would think about categories and and launching products in different vertical I think it's really important to keep a close pulse on just general macro trends that are happening in the consumer market right so we talked about this before but I think you

00:38:56 - 00:40:02

saw a real boom in in household products cleaning products during um during the first covid wave in in 2020 and then leading into 20121 and that's kind of carried all the way through with like categories like cookware and then um HomeGoods kind of seeing uh a really good stint there I think right now if you talk to a lot of people that are in the older Millennial and and Baby Boomers U segment and you kind of ask them what are the what are like the one to two things that you're thinking the

00:39:30 - 00:40:36

most about I think it's all like lifespan longevity you think we're going to live forever I mean I I think if you're in Dubai there's a there's a chance um yeah because of the safety of course no way but I think I think I think uh I think those two I think those two I think those two categories I think products in health and wellness specifically focus on lifespan longevity are really hot right now um and I think the other category that works really well specifically on on the The Meta ad

00:40:02 - 00:41:13

side is like highly giftable products um products with an element of seasonality where you can take the time to build top of funnel and build awareness to then really execute in those few seasonal Peaks that a business has which I think on on the agency side we really appreciate because it does take us some time to get into our work and to really start to optimize these campaigns um versus a a business that maybe has a more even distribution of Revenue throughout the year and you're almost always under the microscope when it

00:40:37 - 00:41:40

comes to Performance and hitting numbers yeah how do you deal with that stress that pressure because it is it's always like never enough you know I think it's really important to develop the skill of the ability to communicate why performance was down or why performance is bad during a certain period I think most people have a pretty good sense of uh talking about why something's working why performance is good but I think in the you know in our space in particular we run into a lot of situations every

00:41:10 - 00:42:15

week where we have to be able to communicate why something isn't going as expected we've got a lot of pressure on us as well um kind of acting as the as the marketing team de facto marketing team for a lot of these Brands so what I've noticed is I mean one really important thing is to not panic and and be able to develop a narrative that you can kind of communicate during your next like regularly scheduled client call or or meeting update so as an example if performance is bad and you know why why

00:41:42 - 00:42:38

that is take the time to drill down into what metric is lagging and then kind of just work your way down the decision tree and just keep asking why soon you'll get to a conclusion right like you a lot of times you'll see that cpm's on Facebook Facebook or through the roof during U during a holiday period look at some of your other creative metrics quickly identify is it a creative problem or not if your ads are still getting a really strong click-through rate and they're still getting um good

00:42:11 - 00:43:14

watch times and it's probably not a creative problem test a new channel or spend more on a existing channel that you were not leaning as heavily into to see that if you can counteract the high cpms on meta and just just that sort of thought process is something that I've used to try and kind of deal with the the pressure of navigating a lot of different businesses at one time the Bitcoin experiment first of all the math irrefutable it's it's it's quite brilliant it was an experiment to see if

00:42:41 - 00:43:55

people would adopt and basically agree hey this is a new form of of of digital gold effective that effectively happened last year uh and then I think meme coins are super fun so I I participate just in terms of uh for for the excitement I've got my Brazil meme coin house chat right here with my there there you go you know what I love about meme coins it's uh it's kind of flipped the traditional investing game on its head right where it was like the institutions got in early and then by the time something

00:43:19 - 00:44:20

came to the public market you were almost too late right like if you look at like an Uber for example if you bought Uber in the public markets you are probably flat on your on your gains whereas if you got in early yeah you 100x and I think meme coins are really interesting because what you're actually seeing is the retail is getting in first and taking the big profits and then institutions are trying to follow afterwards uh once once it kind of becomes part of of the the popular culture and kind of becomes part of the

00:43:49 - 00:45:02

broader narrative well I think that's one of the benefits of of crypto in general just for like the general population those who you know were eager enough to venture out and like figure out trading and buying Bitcoin on a centralized exchange it's kind of like a a slippery slope where you then just kind of get wrapped into investing at large and I think that's that's been a huge positive for I think retail investors obviously there have been negatives there's been sums of money lost but uh I think

00:44:26 - 00:45:44

it teaches you about the market what what about alt coins is there anything interesting you're seeing in terms of use cases and um potential kind of competitors to to eth and salana oh my God you're gonna get me into trouble um I mean we spoke about suie I think that's interesting nothing I want to share on the podcast on camera I know you're a big pudgy Penguins guy no comment dude the look the look in your eyes no comment there a was giving me investment advice earlier that that was that was not my

00:45:07 - 00:46:10

finest investment advice that's for sure listen this was my experience coming to Dubai you know before I came I think you I think you bet on winners and uh Luca the guy who started pudgy Penguins he's he's just a winner like he just knows what he's doing I I agree I agree with that I agree with that philosophy all right sweet well there you have it I think this is like a a meta ads master class I think it's a meta ads Master Class um a crypto Master Class oh we we didn't get into geopolitics we didn't

00:45:39 - 00:46:07

get into geopolitics we'll have to do one in South Africa we'll have we'll have some geopolitics uh talking points all right there you have it thank you [Music]