Scaling D2C Brands: YouTube, Amazon, Retail Measurement

14:31Brett Curry:store oh my goodness i love yeah those are the flag shops are the original bass pro store now like the flagship store here in Springfield, Missouri, the founder of Bass Pro Shops lives here. So yeah, kind of one of our claims to fame.

14:44Andres Figueira:That's amazing. And okay, Brett, so now that you're 40 people big in the company as a whole, since 2010 until now, how did you expand? And when did you understand that you needed more help and that you needed more team members in order to grow your operation?

14:58Brett Curry:Yeah, such a good question. I've talked to a lot of small business owners and talked about kind of you entered this no man's land where you're growing and you're so busy that you need help, but your revenues don't quite justify paying for that help. And so that you can kind of get stuck in this window. And really the best way to get through is just to power through, just, you know, long nights and weekends and power through. Making those first hires so critical for us. It was me and my co-founder. And so we needed administrative support and people that kind of were both like creative idea guys selling, you know, creating ads, things like that.

15:34Brett Curry:We needed someone to ground us and keep us focused and organized. And so those were our first hires. You know, we've had lots of ups and downs and lots of lessons learned. You know, I will say we've always we've never had a year where we lost money. We've always been profitable. We actually exploded kind of through the COVID years. Probably no surprise there. I mean, the first part of COVID was really, really bad because everybody pulled back. But then we were like, oh, wait a minute. Everybody's buying online. We serve e-commerce companies. And then our clients started to experience explosive growth, and we helped fuel that.

16:05Brett Curry:And so we expanded. We expanded to like between 60 and 70 team members during the peak of COVID. It was actually too many. And so we learned a lesson there where like growth doesn't happen forever. And we didn't think as critically about our growth as we should. We just kind of hired, hired, hired. I think secretly I had this competitive side of me of I wanted a bigger team. I wanted to talk about the number of people that we had. I wanted to talk about top line and things like that. And so we realized through that we need to just have a lean team where we're fueled for growth, where we're profitable.

16:45Brett Curry:And so that's what we've been focusing on kind of since then. And so a lot of the big agencies, good agencies that I know in the space had kind of that correction, whether it was in 22, 23, 24. For us, it was in 24 to kind of right size and say, OK, let's get profitable. And we also found the same with D2C brands because D2C brands through COVID, it was like, I don't know, we're making money somewhere. Just keep spending, grow, grow, grow. We'll figure out profit later. And I think there was a correction there and a correction with agencies as well.

17:13Andres Figueira:Of course. And I think that also came with the COVID and the pandemic bubble and the fact that everybody was at home and remote work was the whole trend at that moment.

17:24Brett Curry:Stimulus checks flowing. We're just buying stuff online. Retail therapy at work. Kind of weird about everything that's going on. We just buy stuff online. So it was the golden era of e-commerce. Unsustainable, but it helped propel a lot of brands and agencies.

17:40Andres Figueira:And so that's something I totally agree with that because I've learned from a bunch of friends that I've talked to that they also started a bit before COVID, but it was usually an online service or a certain product that they offer that was e-commerce. And they really rode on the coattails of what the COVID bubble provided. And once it exploded, they were able to stay afloat just because they had to, like you did, optimize their costs and make sure they remain profitable. But now we're talking that was like, what, five years ago already? And they're still here. So something. Yeah. Yeah.

18:12Brett Curry:And I think, you know, a lot of brands, a lot of agencies didn't make it right when that correction happened, when things kind of came back to earth and came back to normal and brand started saying, wait a minute, we need to make EBITDA. Right. We need to make profit. Help us architect that. Some agencies weren't ready for that. Some brand teams weren't ready for that. We were. And so we were able to really, you know, kind of retool, get lean ourselves and and then serve clients in a way that was sustainable for them.

18:40Andres Figueira:and for us and brett i also would love to know is since 2010 because i won't forget that day because it's been a while um since 2010 you started and you weren't specifically specialized in omni channels and youtube at the beginning or were you already set and and did you know in your own mind that you just wanted to do youtube uh no did not know we wanted to do youtube in fact

19:02Brett Curry:youtube wasn't really even on our radar at all at that point and i think this is this is maybe some advice to somebody that's just starting or they're building a brand or whatever building a service-based companies for sure we knew some of the things we wanted to do we believed in search engine marketing we just we knew that was really powerful but we also kind of liked good website design websites that convert and we so we in the early days of omg we we experimented with a lot of things we found we were terrible at building websites like horrible awful like the worst uh so we did a couple projects we're like we are pulling the plug on that thing but we kind of had to try it to know.

19:39Brett Curry:Tried a few other things we found. Wow, we're really good at search. So we could do lots of things or we can just become world-class in search. That's what we did. I learned Google shopping, had a couple of e-commerce clients. I was like, wow, Google shopping is cool. I was on a podcast kind of like this, talking about Google shopping and talking about this guide that I was creating to crack the code on Google shopping. And oddly enough, somebody from Shopify was listening to that podcast and they reached out to me and they said, Hey, we'd like to partner with you on that guide. And so this would have been 2014, something like that.

20:14Brett Curry:15. And so I retooled this guide on how to make Google shopping work. Shopify published it. It was a huge win for us. Huge credibility booster, drove new clients for us, things like that. So it's one of those just like, Hey, I like them working. I'm declaring things. I'm on podcasts. We're doing good work. And this opportunity opened up. And so I started speaking on stages about Google Shopping. But anyway, so focused on search traffic. Once we got really, really good at that, built a team, then we felt like, okay, now we can expand. Now we can expand to these other channels that we believe will work.

20:50Brett Curry:YouTube was actually pretty early on because of my TV background. I was like, wait a minute. YouTube is sort of like TV and search, like coming together, you know? And so we did YouTube starting in 2016, 2017.

21:00Andres Figueira:So it was pretty early on.

21:02Brett Curry:You know, offer meta. We love Amazon, right? We had clients asking us about Amazon growth because we handled all their Google search and they're like, can't you run our Amazon ads? And so big, big believers in good Amazon strategy. I think you can build a brand there. You can also lose your shirt there or just ruin your happiness by being there. But you can also really grow by being on Amazon. And so we got full service to Amazon as well, but we got really, really good at search, built the team and then expanded from there and so that's that's kind of how we built it

21:35Andres Figueira:and brett i also want to ask about i believe it's trending it'll always be trending for a while but it's it's i've heard less and less of it each time because there hasn't been like that much of an evolution right now i bet something's new to come but how are you guys leveraging ai like what's uh do you have that in your back pocket to help you optimize times and efficiency for your team? Or do you have any weird or different ways that you're leveraging AI to help you out?

22:03Brett Curry:Totally. Yeah, I am a big believer in AI. We've invested in it as a company. We've led our team through some training there. I do believe that a good, smart team, a talented human plus AI is going to be just a talented human on their own. I don't believe, at least for now, that the AI is completely taking over in terms of marketing and business and creative and stuff like that. We'll see, certainly within the realm of possibility. Maybe we're all replaced and all just sitting at home or sitting on the beach and the machines are running everything. I don't really see that in the immediate future.

22:40Brett Curry:But what we're doing, how we're using it in a few ways, obviously we're, you know, I use it for like contract review and some stuff that's just mind numbing or like, hey, here's this version of a contract, here's that version of a contract. Show me what's different. So easy things like that. We record all of our calls, internal, external. We use AI. We use Fathom. We use a mix of Claude and ChatGPT to come up with action plans and executive summaries from those. We can take a collection of client calls and really build some interesting marketing reports from those calls using AI. So it's leveraging time in that capacity.

23:20Brett Curry:We've kind of done something. I'll talk about two things that are kind of unique or kind of new. We just built this tool, and it still needs a little bit of work, but it's called the Client Sentiment Tracker. And so we get a lot of clients, 80 clients across a couple different categories and things like that. But with those clients, our client teams are communicating with them on Slack. They're talking over email. They have a weekly or biweekly or monthly call, kind of depending on the preferred client cadence. We have reporting dashboards. There's numbers in Google Ads and Meta and other places.

23:51Brett Curry:And so how do you make sense of all that to see, is this client happy? Are things trending in the right direction? Is the client maybe losing some happiness or trending in the opposite direction? So we have this sentiment tracker that tracks daily looking at Slack, email, call recordings, reporting dashboards, and it gives every client a score on this is the happiness or the satisfaction of this client. Are they neutral, positive, negative? How is it trending? Are we seeing silence across channels? It could be happy silence. Or is this silence that we should be concerned about? Because maybe it's on the heels of a couple negative calls.

24:31Brett Curry:Anyway, it's kind of cool. It's like ingesting all this data from all these points, bringing it into a dashboard that I can look at, that executive leadership can look at, the client teams can look at. And so that's kind of a fun thing. We're now creating several different iterations or we're iterating and improving that, but that's kind of fun. It's our client sentiment tracker. And then another way we look at it is we get really clear philosophies on good YouTube ads. Like what does a good YouTube ad need to have? You know, here are some frameworks for successful ads. Here's how we do like UGC mashups.

25:03Brett Curry:And then we can take scripts or transcripts from raw UGC video, client videos, things like that. Dump those again into, we're using Claude quite a bit for this, into a cloud project and cloud's going to be able to say hey based on what we see here here's some new edits some new mashups some new examples some new things that you can pull together based on your frameworks based on what's worked in the past and based on what this client has right now and so almost never does that just create something where it's like oh this is perfect let's let's run with it but it certainly can you know comb through a lot of a lot of information and make the process of getting a human editor to work on things much smoother.

25:46Brett Curry:And eventually, I think some of that could be fully automated. And so we're working pretty hard on that as well.

25:51Andres Figueira:Wow, the client sentiment tracker is so cool. It really feels like you can really tackle a possible churn before it actually happens. And that way, you can make sure you have everybody happy. And that's super important. Exactly, yeah.

26:05Brett Curry:And sentiment can change quickly, right? You can be on top of the world, smashing it for a client, have a couple of missteps, and suddenly the game has changed. And so you need to be able to see that, know that, and look at it in a fairly objective way, right? The machine's just looking at all the data based on what you're telling it. And it's saying, here's what I see. And so then with that, yeah, that being visible across leadership, client teams, now we can action on things quicker and have really our finger on the pulse across the entire agency all the time.

26:36Andres Figueira:Of course. And that's what I've also felt that people are using AI for the most. And it's like you do have AI that works with those mundane tasks that it's not like nobody wants to do them, but it takes too long for a person to do. So it's better to have the AI run it and just analyze it like the contracts and everything like that. But then when it has to digest so much data so constantly, then that's when the client sentiment tracker helped by AI really works out because it's telling you every day how the clients are feeling. Right. It just does like a summarization of how it's going.

27:05Brett Curry:And then one last tool I'll mention, because this is one that, as I mentioned to clients and friends, not as many people are using. It's called Notebook LM. It's a Google tool. I'm not sure if you're using it. But what we like to do with it, basically you can give Notebook LM a variety of sources. It could be a web page. It could be a YouTube video. It could be a PDF or whatever. But we use it for, let's say, like, starting a year, year and a half ago, incrementality became a big thing, right? And we're huge, huge believers in incrementality. But some members of our team were kind of new to it.

27:32Brett Curry:So I found a bunch of trusted YouTube videos from people that I know that are really, really good at explaining your mentality. You dump those YouTube videos into Nobook LM. Nobook LM, then we'll do a few things with that. It'll consolidate. It'll create like a mind map of those concepts. It can create quizzes and tests to like help you really learn and explore this topic. Now when you have all those videos in a Nobook LM, you can query it and ask whatever kind of question you want to ask. really, really useful, or maybe you've got a scenario. And actually, I think we did this with incrementality at a topic.

28:06Brett Curry:We had some YouTube videos, some resources from Google, and then like a call recording. And you can just put it all into Notebook LM. And now this becomes a resource that you can use and that the team can share as well.

28:18Andres Figueira:And Brett, another question I do have is in terms of then the clients you have, you told me you love retail brands, omni-channel brands. What would be the minimum requirements for somebody or a customer to be able to work with you guys? Because I'm not sure if anybody can use your nervoses or what you offer, but what would that look like?

28:36Brett Curry:Yeah, so we worked with some really big brands like Native and Mando and Arctic and Organifi. Dude Wipes did a big campaign for Dude Wipes, which was super fun. And so we're with some big brands like that. We also worked with some up-and-coming D2C e-commerce brands that you might not know as well. We really specialize in kind of that higher seven-figure, but eight - and nine-figure retail brands. That's kind of our sweet spot. Generally, these are brands that are spending$100 ,000 a month or more across their media channels online. That's where we feel like we can really add fuel to the fire.

29:15Brett Curry:We can accelerate growth for those brands. So Sweet Spot is really low eight to nine figure brands spending more than$100K a month on digital ads. But we do work with some brands that are in that mid seven or high seven figure a year range. If it's the right brand, like it's a cool product, got some traction, got some unique positioning. We feel like it's got all the right components to be able to scale using kind of Google, YouTube, Meta, and Amazon. But yeah, that's kind of where we focus.

29:45Andres Figueira:Nice, nice. No, that's why I asked, because I know that it's not easy to just bring a brand from zero and make it just the best brand ever. But you got to get the proper tools to make your method work. So that's totally understandable. And Brett, I'm noticing that we're almost at time. But before I do finish and close up the episode, I did want to give you the chance to let anybody who's listening or maybe a brand who does match the requirements that you just mentioned. How would they go about contacting you, seeing if OMG Commerce is a fit for what they need or anything like that?

30:20Brett Curry:Yeah, it's a great call out. I would love to chat kind of regardless if you think you're, hey, maybe I'm a good fit. Maybe I'm right on the borderline. We'd love to still chat. So best way to reach out is OMGCommerce.com. Click on the Let's Talk button. You can kind of fill out a short form there. That leads into a strategic conversation with someone on our team. It's really a senior person on our team. And so that's the best way to kind of get the ball rolling. We also have a podcast called e-commerce evolution. So check that out. We also were one of the very few agencies. We do events at Google and YouTube offices fairly regularly.

30:55Brett Curry:So this year we're doing an event in Los Angeles on February 20th. We're doing an event in July in New York City. It'll be big brands kind of sharing the stage with us. So in L.A. it's going to be one of our buddies from Groons, which I think was one of the fastest DTC brands to get to a$500 million valuation. We've got Connor from The Ridge, friend of mine, awesome brand. He's speaking. I'm speaking. My buddy Jacques Spitzer from Raindrop is speaking. One of our favorite creative partners. And so we'll be teaching people how to scale with YouTube ads. So that's an invite only or you got to be approved to attend.

31:29Brett Curry:It is free. It's at the Google LA offices. We got one coming up in New York in July. You can also reach out, like ping me about that. Say, hey, how can I get details on those events as well? But depending if you're listening this way in the future, we probably got an event coming up as well. And so that's always happening. But, yeah, omgcommerce.com. You can follow me on LinkedIn and on X. I'm a little more active on LinkedIn. But, yeah, those are the best ways.

31:53Andres Figueira:Okay, amazing. So anybody who is interested or if you're not sure if it's a proper fit, you heard it here first, omgcommerce.com. And just follow the prompts on the website that will make sure to get you in contact with somebody from Brett's team. but with that said Brett thank you so much man for hopping on the show for sharing your insight it really has been super interesting and I really do hope that OMG Commerce keeps on growing and you keep on amassing a huge client base so that you can just keep on shredding it love it man

32:22Brett Curry:love it keep up the good work awesome podcast awesome interview really appreciate it appreciate it man

32:28Andres Figueira:and to anybody who's here still with us thank you so much for staying on for listening to the shows that we put out and for learning with us about the different industries that we're talking to and all the guests that we are having on. So with that said, thank you very much and have a good one.