S17 S2: The Creative Supply Chain Every Brand Needs (And Most Don't Have)

0:00Nik:Welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. I'm your host, Nik Sharma. And today, today we're actually going to do something fun. So recently, well, not recently, last week, I went to join a very large consumer brand, one of the biggest in the world, probably, about on their CMO offsite. So essentially, you know, they're a global consumer brand, they bring CMOs from all over the world of their businesses, they've got like a few sub brands, they bring them all to New York. and their global CMO basically hosts them here. And they have different people come in. I was one of them. There was a couple other big agency CEOs I heard of.

0:39Nik:And essentially they just kind of talk through like what is it that is the, what are the problems? What are the challenges? How are different markets working through them? What are some efficiencies they're finding in one another? And so going into this, I was a bit not nervous or anxious, but I was just like, I don't know if I have any of the chops to talk about what is going to be relevant for them because they have a billion dollar spend budget per year. I've never managed a billion dollar spend budget myself. I think maybe the largest spend I've managed in a year might be close to 100, maybe 200 million of total spend, but a billion dollars across one holdco is pretty amazing.

1:24Nik:So, and I used to remember when I would meet with Moyes or Hang With Moise, he used to talk about how P &G's ad budgets were crazy. Like they would have multi-billion dollar ad budgets. And for them, it was less about like where are they finding efficiencies, more so just like how do we even spend a billion dollars? I have no idea how you would even spend that. But what was interesting was that, you know, this company is absolutely massive, right? So the interesting thing is like, even though they spend over a billion dollars on advertising, you hear something like that and you just assume that their marketing problems must be completely different than the marketing problems you'd experience inside a$10 million or a$50 million a year brand.

2:10Nik:They have more data, they have more agencies, they have more people, they have more distribution, they're global, they've got more brand awareness, they've got more money to test with, They've got more money to outcompete you in placements or for celebrities or at events. But the truth is, like when we started talking, all the questions were pretty much the same. It was, how do we produce enough creative? Why does it take so long for us to build a landing page? How do we use creators more effectively? You know, how do we personalize lifecycle marketing and make that more truly one-to-one? How do we measure brand work that doesn't fit cleanly into an attribution dashboard that we're using, right?

2:47Nik:and they're using the same attribution tools that we do in addition to maybe a couple of things they build on their own. But for the most part, like when you're thinking MTA or MMM solutions, it's the same players that we talk about and see everywhere. You know, how do you use AI without adding another layer of chaos? And the interesting thing was that like the bottlenecks were pretty much all the same, even though the budgets could be wildly different, right? So I think fundamentally, everybody is still just competing for attention with how AI has now sort of made its way into the world of consumer brands.

3:20Nik:It's also now that the hard part of things, which we'll talk about later in this episode, but the hard things are now actually the easier things. And really one of the only variables that really matters is like how good are you at acquiring and holding attention so that whatever you're trying to do or say or sell is able to get across the board. So being in this room, you know, definitely walking into it, I expected the conversations to be sophisticated to a level where I would feel out of place. Like, I thought we were going to talk about the evolution of, for example, how catalog feeds would feed into multi markets and how they leverage that across different channels, whatever it may be.

4:04Nik:I don't know why that was kind of like where my brain went. But then I met with some of the team and realized beforehand that partnerships were something that they wanted to talk through or how to balance brand or where to lay off the pedal with performance and accelerate with brand and vice versa or how to show up at events and how to show up and be culturally relevant. And then when I actually got to sit down with everybody, then it was like, I was like, wow, these, you guys have the same exact problems that everybody else has, which is essentially like, you know, this creative supply chain, the ability to produce and test assets, whether that's pages or advertorials or angles or stories, the ability to have reliable content coming in.

4:46So again, creative supply chain, but I'm also thinking like outside of just, you know, designers or video editors or agencies, I'm also thinking like content creators and influencers and partnerships and, you know, showing up at a like a big event that caters to the same community or same audience. So anyways, I just thought it was interesting, right? Like the room was obviously the some of the smartest marketers in the world. Now, the problems were still the same. So I want to talk about scale.

5:15Nik:So scale, you know, scale is like something everybody loves to mention and talk about. And everything is like, we got to test it and then we got to scale it, right? Or we want to do this so we can get to scale. But I feel like, honestly, ever since Jolie launched, I've had this perception that scale is actually, can sometimes be inefficient in the sense of like, you know, Jolie operates with like two or three or four people, right? and there's tons of brands that we've heard of, you know, Instant Hydration with Jordan, another amazing example. Very, very lean team. Willys, the THC beverage by the Junshan guys, extremely lean.

5:56Nik:And, you know, it's kind of given me this new appreciation for not just like staying small and nimble, but the fact that scale doesn't need to mean you need to scale operations. Now, in this case, scale is actually kind of required because they're a multi-billion dollar a year revenue company. However, the scale does, and they're the first ones to say it, like it does add complexity, right? So if you're a small brand, your problem is the opposite, basically. You don't have enough resources or you have too few. You don't have the budget. You may not even have the time to do it if you've got the budget, right?

6:31Nik:But at a giant company, your team may have too many resources or enough resources, but too many dependencies. So, you know, when you want to launch a single test, you have to touch the strategy person, the brand person, the creative person, the copy person, the legal team, the product team, you know, web development, the analytics, the media team, maybe regional teams, maybe potential agencies, you know, and then final approvals down the road. And each of these might not just be like their GM or like the person who's leading it, but it also might be parts of their team. Now, when somebody gets something or a team gets something, that also means they need like 24 hours, 48 hours sometimes to get back.

7:10So you can see how scale in this sense, right? You've got all these amazing teams built out and doing great work. But then when it comes to the idea of like, all right, let's run a test. You know, you have too many handoffs and it's not that anybody is incompetent or is not able to actually do what the, what, what, you know, contribute in a positive way to what the end goal is. It's actually just that the handoffs is what adds time and information loss. And if you've ever played that game of telephone as a kid, you know that the more people you go through, right, the more the message gets distorted along the way.

7:45That is completely true here in the case of, you know, going through approvals or going through different teams, right? The idea that you initially start with is likely to not be what the final end product is. And I've actually, I've seen this work a little bit.

8:03Nik:Well, I've definitely seen it work where this has happened, right? You have so many teams, so many people. I remember at Sharma Brands, we'd work with companies that would have, you know, they'd have like a person, fully dedicated full-time person, just to SEO of product pages, because that's how, you know, big their team was. And the problem was whenever we would try to get something done, whether it's a new product page test or a homepage, or like, you know, we used to build a bunch of these like holiday landing pages, which were essentially like, think collections pages made as landing pages for the purpose of holiday merchandising.

8:37The problem is that when you have so many people involved, you know, the message or like the intention, the goal of the page gets distorted by four or 5 % for every person it goes

8:49Nik:through. So by the time you go through like 20 people, you're pretty much at a completely different thing than what you may have initially started with. And that's because you have layers and layers of opinions. And, you know, they're all objective opinions, too. So anyways, you know, you compare and contrast that to there's a brand I work with now, which is doing, I think,$4 billion in revenue. But they're a global brand, their US team, marketing team is literally four people. You know, with them, it's kind of the opposite, like, oh, we have an idea for now, granted, they're not doing they're mainly retail.

9:20So digital is actually not a huge concern for them. They're just starting to get into digital. But the reason I bring this up to contrast it is because their entire digital team is four people versus like maybe 40 or 400. And as a result, you know, when we want to build a landing page to try, you know, doing something

9:37Nik:with paid social traffic, or even leveraging like field marketing or retail based QR code scan traffic, we can go from the idea to a wireframe to assets and copy is completed by the brand, to developed by the development team the brand uses within a week. That's phenomenal because we have fewer handoffs. So we have, we just have more ability to move quicker. So yeah, you know, this, this reminds me that like, it's not that these companies have idea problems because also this brand specifically that I met with last week, I've enjoyed my conversation with every single person I've met from this company over the last like probably five or six or seven years.

10:19Not only do they have a good culture, but like they just have incredibly smart people. It's not that they have like an idea problem. It's more that they just need a faster path

10:28Nik:for these good ideas to reach the market safely. So this brings me to the first operating metric that I think we need to be tracking better as marketing team leads or people within a marketing team, which is how long does it take us to learn something? And I'm not talking about learning a skill like Claude, but I'm talking more like, okay, we want to test something. we want to test if this angle works. How long does it take us to actually run that test from start to finish? From idea being created to the test going live to then actually collecting a meaningful result, right? There's so many things that can go into this when you think about it.

11:05You know, let's just come up with an idea here. So like, let's say I'm selling gummies that help you, you know, it's like lactate gummies, right? So gummies you eat before you have something with dairy and it allows you to digest that dairy better. I don't take this, so I'm not sure about the science, but you get the point here. So now let's say you wanted to test this with an angle for either like a food that is commonly seen, maybe like pizza or vodka sauce, pasta, and you wanna hit a certain demographic, right? So like from coming up with the strategy behind what is the creative we're gonna use, which by the way, if you haven't checked out this little repository that I use to save all my ads, which is ads.nick.co, ads.nik.co.

11:56I usually just use that and find great inspo there because I just save all the ads I like. But you should do the same. Highly recommend it. It's so natural for us marketers to do just screenshot or save ads we like. Anyways, going back to this, right? Like you've got the angle, you've got the product. Now it's like, okay, how long is it going to take us to actually test and understand if this worked or not. Well, you have to come up with the idea. So I guess angle and product we have, right? Now it's like the strategy of how are we gonna test this? Are we gonna use static ads? Are we gonna go film at UGC?

12:28Static is probably the easiest, right? So if we're thinking speed. So create a static ad, start running it, get it live, understand the metrics that are showing signs of promise, whether it's click through, whether it's actually showing immediate signals of purchase. And then, okay, if that's working well, let's validate it even further, right? Let's make a landing page entirely behind pizza, pasta, and butter chicken, for example. Again, I'm just making this up. Now, how long does it take to do that, right? Because now you got to build a landing page. You have to think through offers and price points and bundles, headlines, audiences, use cases, objections, the formats, the product positioning, you know, any like campaign specific messaging.

13:09So this previously, this whole thing would take forever. the way I've been seeing brands use it now and the way that I've actually been starting to build pages myself, which is crazy to say because just two years ago, you know, we had Hooks, which was a landing page agency with like 40, 50 people trying to pump out pages at the speed of two weeks per page, right? I think our actual speed was something like four weeks per page, which is why that model just couldn't work. But now the question is, well, can we spend two hours and develop the landing page? Like, does this angle deserve the two hours?

13:47Not, does it require, you know, three weeks? So now you take that, right? The ability to get to this two hours point and you couple it with the idea of a scaled company. You can see where even still that the opportunity is there to develop a page in two hours, why it still might take three weeks. and that was essentially something we talked about a lot, which is just like, how do you get faster and better and more efficient?

14:14Nik:And some of the things we talked about there were just better sharing of learnings, better updates to internal systems around the company, which they already do a pretty good job. They've got their own kind of systems around updating skills and markdown files and all of those things. Very similar to what HQ does, if you've seen HQ or I think it's getindigo.ai is their site. But HQ basically allows, it's kind of like how Dropbox syncs across your whole company. Think Dropbox sync, but for all the skills, markdown files, memory that AI can leverage within your company for all your team members, which is pretty sick.

14:56Anyways, back to this, you know, the idea that you can now do this in two hours using Framer, right? If you've seen some of the biggest performance brands right now, they essentially use Framer to build their websites. And the way that they do this is you got to just basically have a design system built out and ready to go for your agent that's building this to reference. Me personally, I use either CloudCode or I use Hermes. Lately, I've been using Hermes where I just created like a AI character that is my editorial director or blogger rather. And like this Framer site that I've built so far is basically her website.

15:34And so I will essentially use her to build out and design the site. We built out a brand book, a style guide. We basically go through and find what it is about other publisher sites that do so well, from how they read, to the style, to the margins on the side, to the fonts, to the font size, to where our buttons laid out, what are the colors we're using, what's truly accessible, what drives the most engagement. We're basically creating the dream, you know, CMS, not CMS, but the dream kind of like theme that we're going to end up publishing a bunch of content on. You know, I don't actually know why I've gotten on such a tangent here.

16:17But I guess all that to say, Framer and whatever AI agent you're using,

16:22Nik:if you're not using it, you should 100 % be using it, right? Okay, so now another thing I want to talk about that came up a lot is basically that growth is almost now just a game of angles, right? It's not necessarily just about being able to spend online because now there's so much content online. You still, if you're not using angles or headlines or, I mean, obviously everybody's using headlines, but you know what I mean with angles, like really provocative things that kind of break through just the slop of content that's in the feed and kind of like get you to be noticed, right angles are essentially what is winning so if you look at the fastest growing brands online whether it was five years ago 10 years ago or today it's always the same ones it's the ones that are using crazy angles to explain the product and basically take one product and sell it to a hundred different customers for a hundred different reasons at the same time and you know we see that happen in a few different channels.

17:27One, it happens on paid social, which is the obvious one, the ads to the landing pages. The other place that happens a lot, which is where a lot of brands

17:38Nik:are actually understanding what to even test or that they should be pursuing this angle on paid social is organic social. And that's happening in two ways. One is it's happening in the creator world. So either there's the creator world, there's the creators that are paid as influencers, influencers there's the creators that are paid as affiliates and there's the creators who are just getting products seeded to them in order to post and talk about what they're you know like what they just unboxed and and etc etc now if these creators are not given strict briefs on what to say and the product is universally able to be understood and they can kind of figure out like how they use the product in their life the creator world is an amazing place for you to find angles because these guys are all gonna shoot you with real angles, real stories.

18:25And whichever one basically does well from an engagement standpoint, that's now a new angle that you run because you figured out it finds a micro audience that's new. The other way to test it is your own organic social.

18:38Nik:So whether you're running TikTok or YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels, right? Those are all places to put up many pieces of content and just test what works. And based on engagement, you'll know which angles have a better chance of hitting than others. Obviously this piece, right? Being able to actually throw up content also requires that if you're gonna be able to test that your angles are legit, you have to also be good at putting out content because if you have good angles, but horrible content, it's gonna give you a bad read on what you're trying to see. And then the other place that I think this happens a lot is in the world of lifecycle marketing.

19:17Nik:And this is something that's coming, it's on its way. It's not fully there yet. You know, we've definitely talked about companies that exist where you can basically, you know, do insanely personalized email one-to-one based on website behavior, website triggers, what, you know, a third-party company might have in their database about you. We've also talked about things like Outer Signal, where you can literally see who is actually coming to your site. And maybe even based on that, you figure out more angles or more more reasons of why you would sell the product. There was even just another company this morning, I think it was Hexclad.

19:53They're creating either a new product or bundle or launching something, or maybe it was even just launching a test, but it's based on outer signal data, just understanding the personas and the cohorts that are coming in, which I think is sweet. And, you know, more people

20:09Nik:are going to do that. But anyways, organic social, creators, paid social, obviously, advertorials, if you're not already doing that, advertorials and listicles are now as easy to set up and test with angles as static ads because of things like Framer or Manus, right? And then Lifecycle. The last thing about Lifecycle I'm going to say is I truly feel like Lifecycle marketing is kind of taking a backseat this year, if I'm being honest. I think everybody's trying to understand and figure out like what is the acquisition? What is the crack around acquisition, which generally is always the thing that is prioritized.

20:44Nik:But people are obsessed with acquisition this year and not as much with retention or lifecycle marketing or building out LTV or reducing churn or increasing subscription. And my hunch is that based on what is happening with AI and where things are headed and what is going to be possible with API keys and MCPs and players like PostScript trying to get into the world of email now. Retention is gonna take, retention is gonna be, especially like personalized retention and personalized lifecycle marketing and personalized email campaigns are all gonna be a legit thing because you're gonna be able to create, you know, almost like writers, agentic writers for different personas or for different reasons and write a ton of emails at once and send them out.

21:37Nik:And you can have the Black Friday campaign go out to, you know, 400 ,000 people on your list, but maybe there's actually like 5 ,000 different variants of that Black Friday email that go out based on what you know people will click and their shopping patterns and who they are and the persona data that you have from outer signal. So, you know, all that to say that's just, again, I keep going on these tangents, but all that to say that this idea of angles is not going anywhere, okay? I've been talking about angles for years now and it's still the number one or two or three thing that everybody needs to talk about or think about or focus on because the angles is how you get to the point where your stuff starts to grow.

22:20Nik:And that too specifically where, I mean, like if you just look at Iomate or Groons or any of these other ones, Instant Hydration, you know, Absorption Company, any of these companies that are ripping online, it's all just because they're testing, 50 to 250 angles per month. And out of that, maybe 10 to 15 of them end up with landing pages. And out of that, maybe five or six are ones that really become, they move over to their evergreen campaigns as, all right, this is working, we're going to keep this running, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. Now, if you feel like you can't name what angles you're testing, you've got a problem that you probably need to solve or just rethink what you're doing.