Oren John - The Most Valuable Marketing Conversation You’ll Watch in 2025

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21:02as far as buckets and formats. Yeah. How do you look at like your holistic content strategy? Yeah, so I've worked a lot on this over time. So I basically, I want to have a toolkit. Like one of the original things, reasons I started content is I wanted to be good at it as a CMO. I wanted to be like, I know how to task it. I know how our team can create it. And so I wanted to create a lot of different styles. And then now same thing, I want to have everything in my toolkit. So I've done interview content. I've done like the trade show and had figured out how to get that to pop off. I've done carousels.

21:28I've done vlogs. I've done the one-shot content. I've done skits. So my whole thing is I'm experimenting at least once a week. Like I did a skit last week with another creator. It's like an experiment. But I look at it as like you have all these tools with which to share your message. And that's really important because people consume content in different ways. For instance, like I don't watch any talking videos, green screen videos. It's hard for me. I've got like severe ADD. So if I'm gonna sit there and watch something for 60 seconds, it's gonna take a lot. I consume a ton of nine second content, the caption over the thing, like all day.

21:56That's my feed or carousels. And so I feel like that's something worth noting as a creator, especially for me as a green screen, primarily creator is like, okay, not everyone consumes like that. So I need to match that with vlogs where they can just follow along or carousels where they can just read it. They don't have to listen. And then my available market of the message I'm trying to share spreads. So that's my literal, my exact format is I'm doing basically four to five green screen or talking value videos a week, maybe one or two of those slots will go to a carousel. I don't love carousels as a format because I think it's really easy to be saturated, but I'll still use them.

22:29It's a good bottom of funnel content. And then I will do two travel or like vlog pieces where it's just me talking and I'm in the videos, but I'm talking over footage. And that's like a great, that travel content has been huge for me. And like, even just going to places, like I'll do like, oh, the three things I saw at Airwam this week, or like I'm going to this new, Maddie Matheson opened a burger joint. Here's why I like the design, whatever. So that content's really crucial. And then I kind of do one big, like I try to make one like viral top of funnel video every week, whatever format that is.

22:57so looking at from a content formats perspective and content buckets or topics perspective you went through the content formats what about how do you look at like topics in general so i have a four pillar strategy where basically like there's four topics i'm focused on at any given time and i will rotate them in and out as they like fail or perform so for instance i used to do packaging content a lot like cool packaging that no longer kind of resonates i think like that era of that being exciting is done and so that kind of phased out but like right now my my buckets that I'm talking about are like marketing ideas.

23:26I don't want to do any like this brand did this or this playbook because there's so many other creators doing it. So I'm like, here's an idea about marketing. And then I'm doing art direction content. I'm one of the only creators who like is and can kind of do that. So that's like a big one for me. And then the travel content is like the third pillar. And then just like basically what I call shopping content, which is just like talking about brands and why we buy. And those are like my four current pillars. One of those at some point, it'd be like the travel content's kind of flopping. I should to sub that out for something different or, you know, or this or that.

23:54But I think if I have more topics than that, it's too much. It's like my content's too wide, but that four is kind of the perfect number. And I can stack multiple videos on each of those in any given week, but those are like my North stars. And I evaluate that basically every month. You said two really interesting things there. One, so many people are doing it and you're off it. And then two, to start, you talked about just the maniacal testing. Ironically, on the drive here with Jake, we were talking about like how we're doing these teasers and actually ironically starting to pick up steam from a views perspective.

24:23But we're already thinking about how do we iterate off that and what's the next thing? For people listening out there, you need to think about the next thing before the current thing runs out. And I think people, like, you want to drain it and you want to get all the juice that you can get out of it. But if you're not thinking about the next thing, you're done. Yeah, well, look, and I obsess about this for like, at the end of the day, like what I do now, essentially I'm like, I'm a creative strategist. And so I'm obsessing about my content, brands content, content for people that are in Cut30.

24:47I'm like really thinking about how do you stay ahead around that? And you just have to like build the hard part is people will obsess about that, but won't have like a toolkit. That's why I think like the scheduled time we talked about is so crucial where I'm like, I am adding to this toolkit. I am solving the worry in the back of my head by building this list of what comes next. So I know I always have something like in the hopper. Yeah. I can't like, for me, just like doing some research on you and talking to you more, I'm going to go so deep and just organizing my ideas and thoughts. I think it is one of the most under, like people don't do that, quite frankly which is and it's but it's crazy like i look at like i organized my vacation in italy because i take photos and i was like organizing my here's every illustration here's the colors i liked here's the just logos and stuff and like cool i might not use that tomorrow it took me 40 minutes on a flight to put it all like on a millenote board and but like i'm going to come back to that at some point where i have some sort of heritage project to be like oh yeah i actually have 50 references no one else has it's like it's just crazy like why and they also look back at in 20 years you go and look back at your life like here's all the things i found interesting here's all the, you talk about teaching or value for the next generation.

25:45Like I'm going to just release that toolkit at some point and be like, here you go. And it will be like, not as valuable as like, you know, Virgil Abloh's free thing, but like, Hey, let's get as close to it as we can. Right. An interesting thing that I want to bring up. I think it's not many people do it. It's kind of my thesis. I'd love to know your thoughts on it is I love how you have the topics. They're changing based on probably your passion as well. What's working, what's not for everybody listening to on the format side, I feel like you can stay with the format a bit longer, aka like you with the green screen, like you should ride that out for help.

26:16You have to add other ones in. Yeah. Adding in other ones. I think another big thing, it's how I look at a lot of my life decisions as well, is I look at it under a rubric where it's low, medium or high lift from a resources perspective and then low, medium to high impact. Completely. And for us on my brand side, on Iconic side, we did this whole entire exercise and we kind of labeled all the different buckets based on that rubric. And then we know on a 20 post allocation, we know 10 of the 20 posts is going to be this bucket. And then we know how to kind of manage those resources. And then we have a small resource allocation to do what we're talking about.

26:51It's just to take new swings, try new shit. I think that's exactly a form of, especially for brands you should look at is you only have so many hours, right? So it's really just that breakdown of like the high, medium, low lift. I found at least with my content, even the short and quick stuff, all my lift is like kind of the same. It's basically takes me like kind of the same amount of energy or juice to do all the good content styles. But I think this is where I'm at as a creator because I haven't been able to on short form, at least outsource a bunch. My YouTube as a whole, as a whole process, but then short form, like I'm still doing the majority of it.

27:19For people that are just starting out with minimal resources, definitely do that rubric. Cause I think that's, you look for low, medium, lift, high impact. Yeah. And also then don't feel the need to like, you don't have to post every day. You don't have to like, there's so many things that people are preaching at where it's like, Like these things help, but like consistency of what you can achieve over time is like, it's just a matrix of like, all right, if I can post every day versus if I can post twice a week, it's just like, all right, I might get to my goal in six months versus a year. But like, as long as you're headed towards a goal is all that's matter.

27:47Yeah, I think a big thing with that as well too, we always have the conversation. Let me ask you that first, I guess. What do you think? Is it quality or quantity? I think it's quality. And I think on TikTok, again, it's that barometer of like, there is a multiplier, but if you have to pick one, you pick quality, right? Like if you make one really impactful video, I'm like, you have Caleb on here. Caleb makes one YouTube video a month, basically. And they're super high quality and he's, we'll get the results of that of if he made four shitty ones, right? And I think then you'd rather stand by the quality one you make.

28:14And so I think that like, if you have to choose one, it's that, but like in the real answer in today's age is like, I make a pretty good video every single day. And that is not, and I've done that when I had an executive job and I'm doing that now and I have a million things going on and it's not actually that hard. And I think that a lot of people, you don't have to limit yourself going one way or the other, but if you did have to, I'd pick quality. Good to know. Yeah, I think a big thing in relation to that, a lot of people say, it was the same thing in Caleb's episode, was quantity, which then informs quality, and then obviously quality, then you want quantity and quality.

28:45I think a big thing for people out there listening, especially, you know, we're really focused on creators, creatives, and then obviously entrepreneurs and operators. For the entrepreneurs and operators out there that are starting to do more content, I think a huge thing, and I've had this problem is just not burning out and just making sure you're not overdoing it. Like these long form right now, like, dude, I have a lot of shit going on right now where I'm like, these launch once every two weeks and I think they're high quality and like we're not upping that cadence until other thing comes off the plate.

29:13So don't get burnt out. I think consistency is what it all comes down to. Especially if you're a founder. So one of the brands I'd love to call out around this is Percival. I'm like a UK menswear brand where the founders in the content is like one of every 10 videos. And like, that's a great cadence. Like get someone involved, build that. There's the other concept too around, oh, the founder has to be the person from the brand in the videos. That's like just not true at all. I don't really think it matters who it is as long as they're interesting and somewhat charismatic where it's like, all right, it could be your chief science officer.

29:36It could be literally the social media person, but they're like equipped. You could hire a creator, whatever it is. It's just having a voice to represent your brand and does not have to be the founder. And in many cases, like knowing some of these founders, it really shouldn't be, whether it's their personality or just the time value. Do you think a brand can win on social without some sort of face tied to the brand? Yeah, I think you can win on social in a thousand different ways. But I do think it is a extremely, for most brands have done other stuff and are wondering why they're plateauing.

30:02That's the easiest way to take it to the next level. So let's take that back. Forget brands that are scaling and potentially plateauing. Let's start from the start. What's your view? Is it one channel at a time or kind of be everywhere at once? Yeah, so it's like test wide. But I think with a brand, with any new brands, like find one thing that allows your business to function. And you may have to test your way into that. But for instance, like you may find like, hey, my business is like started to grow to start on Facebook ads and organic didn't matter as much because I nailed meta or vice versa.

30:30But you need to be on the hunt for one channel. And then you begin to build other channels. Now, I don't think that doesn't mean you don't test wherever you go. Like when I'm talking to people about posting content, it's like if you made a short form video, you're doing yourself a disservice by not posting on literally every network you possibly can because you spent all the time making the asset. You should at least, and you look at the compounding effects when people go, oh, I didn't post on YouTube shorts. You're like, yeah, well, maybe you would have gotten 600 views over your 100 videos in.

30:53So now that's 60 ,000 views or whatever that looks like. Like that compounding effect in terms of your brand halo, like is an actual thing. So I encourage people to go really wide in their distribution, but really you're just on that hunt for like, what is the one thing that will scale my brand? And then if that one starts to work, you begin working on adding the next one in. I'm going to tell you something. I have not said it. I guess I'm just going to put the juice on the camera right now. This is a mind blowing and I'm going to actually give the numbers and do a YouTube video on it. We were posting with iconic one time a day on three channels, Monday to Friday.

31:25And we did these 45 day tranches and we upped it from like once a day to twice a day. We upped it from two channels to four channels. And then we added one on the weekend. Then we added two. And if anybody goes to Iconic right now, they'll see all the posts. Bro, in every 45 day window when we were incrementally doing it, especially when we went on wider channels, bro. We went on Google Analytics, GA4. We'd see the traffic coming from social. We'd then see the conversion rate. We'd then see the AOV. everybody listening, hundreds of thousands of dollars, just coming in from just posting more on more channels.

31:57Literally, bro. Well, then there's the scale concepts. This is something I talk about. I work a lot with bigger brands. I'm trying to get them to wrap their head around it. It's like the scale concept is even bigger. There's the, I need to get started. If you talk about scale, people get overwhelmed. But then there's the, hey, if you actually have a budget, like if you're spending tens of millions of dollars on marketing every year and you're like, you know what you can do with that from a volume scale? If you're like, hey, we have good ad concepts. Now we're multiplying this by language. We're multiplying it by the way people look.

32:21We're multiplying it by region. You're getting 10, 15, 20 creators on your roster on TikTok. You're reposting that content. All that's going into your performance funnel. You're in the scenario you're in where you're like, hey, this is going to smash. And people get overwhelmed. They're like, that sounds crazy. And you're like, no, it's just a math equation. This is just process. And it is the 100 % for any brand of a decent size is the way to stay ahead of everybody right now. Yeah, man, I hope for someone out there that has tens of millions of dollars You should just give it to orin and you can get way better dollar value These brands are ridiculous like what you can do It's crazy.

32:54You look at shoot costs and stuff like that So a lot of like my life ends up in shoots like i'll be hey, okay You're doing creative strategy for this shoot, you know, you're doing like we're how do we get the best assets out of this or that? And you look at the budgets on some of this versus what's possible They're just like stuck in the past right in terms of like what's available with cameras and whatnot And there's just alpha i'm always looking for like what is that area of alpha? especially if you're someone who feels like you're ahead, you're like, I'm always see things ahead of time. You're like, okay, I see this thing and I'm ahead of it.

33:17How do I then make money off it? Or how do I inform people like how to do that? And right now that is like 100 % in shoots where you're still paying crews and gear and scenarios that like, like you could be doing this setup that we have in here. You could spend$50 ,000 on it if you want to, you know, look exactly the same. That's what a lot of brands will do if they want to execute it. And if you are one of the people that can do that at the lower level, it's like, all right, how do I maximize the in between of those dollars? Like where does that give me a ton of leverage as a brand? Does it give me a ton of leverage as an agency?

33:43And then where do you build it? Yeah. People are blown away. For everybody listening, this started the first six or seven episodes was two of us. Yeah. Now it's three of us. And when I give the names, when I come on the set, people are like, wait, it's two of you. And it's, you guys are bringing all of your own equipment. You could do so much for so little now. That's why I can never do like some of these agencies with big budgets. I'm like, you guys are just literally lighting money on fire. It's absolutely unbelievable. And even you look at people, I've made all this content about like social shows, this idea that you can create basically a couple mini TV show on social media.

34:14It's a really good brand strategy for brands trying to establish themselves. And the comments are always like, oh, if you have a budget, if you have a blank, I'm like, I've been on these shoots. Like it's not even FX threes. I used to say it's FX threes, FX thirties. It's like, it's a$2 ,000 camera, like in a lens. And literally it's like, if it's a two person, they're taking the camera on the tripod and then they're just moving it to the other corner and there'll be like maybe a soft box or two. And so one or two person shoot I'm like, these are not, that is attainable for basically anybody who's not just starting from zero.

34:40Yeah. You are a big consumption guy. You got these blocks. I'd love to know those two TV shows for brands spin off a bunch. What are a bunch that are doing really well for people out there to listen? Yeah. So basically there's a brand called Alexis Batar who they're a jewelry brand and they basically built this series around like socialite characters who like are in New York and basically it's like a drama and they just happen to be often wearing the gear of Alexis Batar, but they have like celebrity guests. Like it got so popular with their audience that their audience was like, great, I can consume this 90 minute drama, the 90 second drama multiple times a week.

35:08So that's one. Bape has another good one. Bape has an in-store show. Anyone in stores should be doing something like this where it's like, hey, people pick out of a fishbowl, like a color, and they have 90 seconds to make a fit. There's a countdown timer, like on top of it. And then they're running around and it's influencers and somewhat well-known people. And they run around the store grabbing stuff and then they show the fit at the end and they have like a ranking scale and they have little effects that come up. They'll pop the item up when it does it. So there's some production involved, but again, it's got a timer.

35:32It's got an objective, you know, and that's where I talk about with brands is like, hey, how can you do in 90 seconds? How can you do Hot Ones or MTV Next or Cribs? Cribs is like the default format. I want to see your apartment, right? That is a known thing. I would just go back and look at all that vintage TV and be like, how do we do our brand version? Yeah. I got to give a shout out to this young buck, the school of hard knocks. Bro, that kid is killing it for all. And he's just, I mean, it's super simple. It's again, it's repeating an existing format that works. And then look at how do you use that for your brand or for you as a creator?

36:00That's why I encourage a lot of new creators who are coming at this now too, to be like, all right, like, If you do feel like your thing is saturated, maybe or may not be like, what is your concept for it? Like, how do you launch a show instead of launching just a social media presence? And a show doesn't mean you have a huge production, but a show can mean you're sitting at the same set every day that sets in your house and you are doing things in a repeatable format that make people feel like they're tuning into HGTV or whatever. I do think a very key thing you said there to draw out is repeatable format, making sure whether it be the time, the aesthetic, the branding, making sure when people see it, they know that it's you.

36:33That's another thing that we're working on right now. We're working on like the color scheme of everything. You've done a good job with it. Because even when I look at it, even with the thumbnails, all these things that come together to like add up to that. And I think that's a huge thing for creators because you look at all the biggest creators, they have a format where they're doing a thing, like the biggest TikTokers, like Nara Smith cooks something from scratch. Thor, that guy, he chops wood. And then they're doing it to talk about something else or engage a goal or like have somebody, you see them, you're like, oh, they're in the kitchen or they're in the forest or they're in wherever they are.

36:56They're doing the action and they're making content in and around that. And they have their outfits, It's like they'll always be kind of relatively looking the same. And like, there's a reason for that. It's because it works. Question for you. And then for everybody in the comments, do you think we should have one branded, I call it the octagon, one place where we shoot all the time? Or do you like the diversity in some of our locations? I do think, I think have it there. Well, on YouTube, it's one of those where like, YouTube is like seasonal, I feel like. You have a set, run it until it's kind of getting dull and then run the next one.

37:22But I'd say, yeah, for like three out of four of them, like don't be afraid to break that mold if you're in somewhere cool. But I think that helps make it. I think, I don't know if I shared with you when we were sitting down before, but that fashion neurosis YouTube channel where she's literally on like a therapy couch and that's the entire vehicle. It's a normal podcast. It's the same as this, but because one person is on a couch and one person's in the chair, it has this completely different feel and dynamic. And I think that will lose its allure after like a year. It will play its course, just like any YouTuber wants to update their set.

37:46But like, then you can think about how do we do the next version or the next version? I think that's a very good way to think about YouTube and short form. You got a fashion creative director over here by season. We're planning our seasons. But that's also how YouTubers think, right? Every YouTuber is like, oh, I need to upgrade my set or I need to move my apartment. That's why you see these guys move and shit so much, right? Is you get all the content from moving and then you have a new thing because again, I think it's just people want that. They want some level of familiarity and then it meets its peak.

38:09That's why I have to give a shout out right now to Lighthouse. I'm a proud member of Lighthouse. It's in Venice. It's an amazing space for creators to work. I had seen yourself before on the internet, obviously, but I saw you speak there and then we spoke and we started going back and forth. You know why I love that place, bro? I do content there. There's 60 places to shoot content there. It's endless, bro. The environments is the first thing I thought when I walked in. Literally, I'm like, oh, there's like 30 places you can shoot video. And that's crucial. That's how I built my house now. Like, thankfully, my wife is like equally as unhinged.

38:36But like, I have so many environments like in the home and we converted our whole garage. And there's this office space. Like we're putting a drop down full green screen, like in the foyer. Like it's like, it's so good. And but then once you like embrace that, you're like, all right, cool. This actually makes my life genuinely easier. I think the tie a bow on this part, a huge thing for everybody to take out of this. Thinking about top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel. these TV shows, guys, are great top of the funnel brand awareness and you're selling, but you're not selling.

39:01Exactly. That's the whole entire thing. And awareness, man, the top of funnel concept is so important. I was ranting about this on Twitter the other day because I'm dealing with it with like multiple projects right now. But like top of funnel is like, it doesn't matter. All that matters is the views. And because the way the algorithms work, if you see someone's content on Instagram and you like it, they show you more of it. So give them the ability to like something from you, whether you sell it, whether the brand's integrated, whatever it is. But then to achieve top of funnel content, most brands where we're like, well, we just need to make our existing content about our products better.

39:26You're like, guess what? Look at the top of funnel content that works. It's literally concepts. You're like, oh, we're recreating Mean Girls or whatever. Or it is skits. Like, hey, we're doing something that is really funny. Or it's a show, like a format like that. Or it's just amazing visual execution. The 3D, you know, or just some amazingly shot campaign that's everything hooked. There's not really any other ways. Ironically, that stuff at the end, actually, I think actually performs the least. But if you're trying to position yourself as - And what's the hardest part, that's the easiest one to get brands to buy in on.

39:54Because basically, if you're like, oh, we're gonna launch a TV show, they're like, Jesus. Or if you're like, hey, we need to do conceptual. A lot of brands don't think that conceptual content works for them. I guarantee the conceptual content works for everybody. Like if you're trying to like, hey, we're gonna make a campaign that's gonna be themed around a thing and we're gonna go all in on it. And you'll see a L 'Oreal group is doing that like with like everything. They're basically building these themes and these like campaigns and then they're really running it. They're like pushing it through all their influencers, through like, they're bringing it to the retailers.

40:18They're like, how do we get this as wide as we can? I think because they saw so much success with CeraVe doing stuff like that. And then if you then you tell them to be like, hey, we're going to do skits. They're like, well, humor isn't it, or this isn't a lifestyle brand. So you hear these arguments. And it's funny, every brand likes to think that they're unique. I'm like, no, this is the same exact arguments that every single brand has around this. So you end up with, okay, the beautiful content is what we can do. And to your point, it works the least, but at least you can get people to sign off.

40:43Yeah, I mean, a great example of that, for people that have not watched the episode with Ryan Bartlett from True Classic, their whole identity is all about slapstick comedy. and that's their top of the funnel. That should be. And that's also like, what do, that is a brand aimed at bros. Yeah. What are bros going to share in the group chat? That's like, should be the number one goal of what a company like that looks like. And guess what? You probably have the best chance with Slap State Comedy. Yeah. I should take my own advice with Iconic, probably six, seven years ago when Trevor Wallace wasn't Trevor Wallace.

41:08We branded a character called Dennis Gallagher and he was like a loser and he revived his life through our motivational art. Got hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and it smashed. It's amazing. Yeah. I should probably take my own advice on this one here, guys. I want to wrap up a bit on the content side. What do you think is the biggest myth you still hear about content? Not that it's saturated. Yeah, I just think you're still here. You're going to hear everything is saturated for years and years and years. Or the other biggest myth, probably the biggest one, is like, oh, it's the algorithm or Instagram isn't giving me reach or whatever.

41:36You hear this complaint like all the time, like, oh, I have this following. And it really is, it comes down to like better content. I've looked at this, I go through peaks and waves like anyone else. I'll look at my week and be like, oh, I only got 30, 50 ,000 views in these videos, they normally get 100, 200. And I look at it, I'm like, genuinely, this is because the content's not good. And every single time I come out of that and try something new, every single time, and I've probably gone through that peak and valley at least a dozen times now, I came out the other side. I made better stuff and I came out the other side.

42:01And so I think people get so dejected when you're just like, guess what? Everyone on the internet is improving at what they create every day. I'm such a better creator than I was six months ago or even a year ago. So if you're expecting the same thing to work, it's not. You have to be leveling up at the same time. Then people get stressed by that. And it's like, well, what else? Strive for fucking greatness. I think a big thing in relation to that too is understanding who your ICP is, ideal persona. And sometimes it's not about views. For us, when we're doing very granular, value-driven business stuff, it sometimes doesn't hit.

42:36But I do know that as a part of my ICP, people that really care about more elevated business people, they're watching that and they're getting a ton of value. So don't be blinded by the views. I think about that all the time because I have a rule that if I don't have a flop every week, I'm not experimenting enough. But also the thing is my flops, quote unquote, like my videos with the least views are often designed for that, but they are idea-based videos, this marketing idea thing. Like I had one about how like HR needs to deal with creators was what I did the other week. And I had one a while back that was about like how trade shows could not suck in like conferences.

43:04And even another one about quiz brands, brands like Ill Makiage and stuff that are all like AI quiz. And so those are videos that didn't do well. And those are the three videos I can identify that have brought me like serious inquiries from like absolutely major people. Like, because that's the ones who those resonate with. Like that quiz brand video has the least amount of views. It was a sponsored video and it's still got like CEOs of multiple beauty companies being like, wow, like I need to think about this. Like, is this really the tool they used to build this? Like in the DMs and you're just like, that was an action point for them while not having the views.

43:32And I'm just like, this, all that really matters is the results. Are you getting where you want? If views were the only focus, I would just be making consumer content. Guess what? Consumer content does not get me brand deals. And so marketing content does. And I think it's really worth thinking about that because you'll get in your head around views. It's so crazy. It's the same thing from a product perspective. Like the more elevated and from a taste perspective, the better art I think in my mind actually does not sell well. Because people don't have necessarily have taste nor do they want it.

43:57And also a lot of purchases are like comfort purchases versus tasteful purchases, right? And I think that's a huge thing in psychology that we don't talk enough about. If you had a bet on one platform in 2025 to build a content moat, what's the best choice? I still think it's YouTube just because YouTube is hard. And so if you want to actually do something and you're willing to learn thumbnails and packaging, you've come out the gate and crushed it. That's rare. You know, we suck the first four videos. Guys, the first four videos, just ignore the first five or six minutes, but give it a chance.

44:24I'm telling you, give it a chance. Oh no, the first four videos. Like, yo, most people suck for like a hundred. That's still coming out the gate and killing it. So I just feel like that's the number one platform. And I don't want to give everybody a false sense here. I don't even know if you know this. I had someone following me around for 24 hours a day for 18 months. We had a web series. We got kicked off YouTube. that was in 16 or 17. And then we had a podcast with 15, 20 episodes. You've been through the rigor. I've been through it. I did suck when I restarted doing this again. But yeah, for everybody out there listening, like we didn't give a fair shake to let's say Oliver from Mad Rabbit, Manny from Slate.

44:55They're good episodes. But now you know what you do. But you get better all the time. But I do think that is the biggest moat because it's hard. You can't publish as much. And so you kind of only have one shot, maybe two shots a week to start. And people get, they're like, oh, I get these instant dopamine on short form video. And you don't get that. on YouTube, but it's still the mode. I look at it like I'm really the only marketing creator. Like there's like, what's his name? The future is personal brand. Kane is like social media. Caleb's doing some stuff in that kind of brand world. But like when I look at it on a wide basis to showing up in search that makes a lot of videos, I'm kind of it in marketing, which is just such a crazy concept to look at.

45:29When you look at the size of these niches and then how little content there is created on it and then how much kids are willing to consume. Like my audience on here is like 20 to 27. And that's just such a miracle audience that is not not going to watch my own videos on TikTok, you know? So you have a different audience, a younger audience, younger audience on YouTube than I do on TikTok and Instagram. And also they're watching on TV. That's the other thing I've seen. People will DM me like me on their TV, like whenever I do Sunday episodes. And so I can get much of those DMS and I'm like, oh man, I'm really on like the thing in your, like you're eating lunch.

45:57This is a common, like you're eating lunch, you're doing whatever, and you're watching TV and I'm on the TV. That's a very different consumption experience. From a positioning perspective, I do think one of remotes is production value. And I am seeing more and more like we don't get a crazy amount of audio listens. I think that our viewer appreciates the aesthetic that we put on. Yeah. And all the tags are all. Well, I think that's what they want. People want the way I look at this now is I really like about consumption habits. Target consumption habits is the most underrated marketing concept that people don't think about.

46:24But the watching a YouTube video at lunch or watching a YouTube video at night or having YouTube as an app on the TV is the most underrated consumption look. Because what do people want for that? Even when I look at my top YouTube videos, there are direction videos. I can talk about our direction in a nuanced way. That's hard for like a newer creator. So I have a moat there, but also really it's just a visual showcase of the brand. I'm giving you 20 minutes of like Stussy's greatest hits of the content they've made. And so you get to watch this visual thing. You have a guy who's entertaining and like valuable talking to you.

46:52You feel like you're learning something, but you're consuming that like an episode. And when I look at like why content, like some of the content that does really well, like the represent guys or Marcus from Minted, that is lunchtime guy consumption content. I'm just going to watch these cool guys who I aspire to be like, live their lives for 20 minutes. And I think that is just a wonderful consumption thing that people should understand how girls consume versus guys consume and older versus younger. But the younger guys are doing that on YouTube. Do you think that day in the life kind of behind the scenes content is still doing well?

47:19No, I don't. I think it's a well, especially from the start now, I think building in public for anything, especially if you're like a fashion brand or some shit is like actually a negative signal. Like only people that are doing it are whack. If you're established and you've been doing it for a minute, great. But like, if you're new, you're doing that, like it's not a look. If you're doing a traditional business, I still think it's great. The people that are popping off now is like, I started a coffee shop. I'm opening a burger joint. And so it's kind of like almost like an HGTV plus business.

47:42Like that's working really well, but it's traditional businesses. I think if you're doing that with any like CPG or fashion, like you're kind of behind the curve. And then for the people that are doing it, like it's like episodic, like who already have big established brands, that's good. But you'll notice they're kind of doing other things. Like really, if the represent content is really like fitness motivational content, right? And that's a massive niche. And to a lot of extent, that's the same thing with the minted content. And that's an amazing thing, but it's not really a day in the life.

48:08Really, it's like getting into the soul of what their customer wants to see. Makes a lot of sense. And I want to further validate, like, you literally have little to no competitors, especially in that first bucket that you talked about from an art direction perspective. Like nobody is doing that. For people out there, I I mean, just the common theme in life, the harder it is, the less people do it, the less competition. And anybody that does YouTube, they just get, so they don't see the views to start. Well, the art direction one's interesting is the reason they don't is like, anyone who's a good art director is inherently tasteful.

48:37And so for them to make that content, that's to have it perform, it has to be somewhat cringe. And I don't care about getting art direction work. I've been an entrepreneur, I have other stuff going on, but it's a passion, so I love to talk about it. So I don't care about if it's like cringe in the eyes of that community, but the people in that community will never execute it. And so it's a moat. And then anyone that's trying to and doesn't know what they're doing is going to kind of flail. And there is that example probably in every type of business or every type of thing. Well, most good people mix.

49:00They just don't package it right. It's not interesting. It's not visual. You have all this ultra value content. People are always like, oh, this video of someone driving a truck got 700 ,000 views, but this entrepreneur sharing his deepest secrets got like 600. And it's like, yeah, because it's not presented in a compelling fashion. People don't feel like they want to sit down and have that conversation. Like value alone on YouTube pales in comparison to value and entertainment. it. As far as that goes too, we can talk for probably 10 hours and I'm probably going to bring on someone to go super deep on the YouTube side.

49:27But for people that are new on YouTube, you should be spending 50 % plus of your time on prepackaging. And by prepackaging, guys, idea, title, thumbnail, beginning of the video. If you don't know design, get a designer to break down why thumbnails are good or bad. Because I'll see people that will copy it, but then faces aren't brightened or they don't understand type. I'm like, you have to have someone with a design background. The less elements, the better on thumbnail. We'll leave it at that. Well, it's true, unless you're a female audience, because you'll notice the female thumbnail that crushes is the ones with all the different stuff in the background.

49:54It's all busy with the things calling them out. You look at Grace Beverly's thumbnails or some of the pop culture. So again, it's just like, what does your audience consume? Make those thumbnails. I stand corrected because I had no idea that would work. I don't know. But yours is exactly the simple thumbnail. If you're doing male business-driven content, 1 ,000 % the fucking way to go. Yeah. Even for us, I was looking after the fact. One of our thumbnails has very big, bold lettering on the hat. and it's just one more thing that draws attention away from what the actual thumbnail is. I wish we would take that one off, which we probably will.

50:24Are you A-B testing thumbnails at all? Crazy. Crazy A-B testing. I want to talk, wrap up a little bit on the positioning side because a lot of the content has to go with the positioning. What would you say is the most brilliantly positioned brand in the marketplace? I think Grunz is a really brilliantly positioned brand because they basically, I love position against. So there's different types of positioning. Position against is basically where you're like, there's an existing big incumbent and we are an alternative. And our entire identity is wrapped up in being an alternative to this big, massive thing.

50:54And Grunz is an excellent example of this. We're like, AG1 is a big honking business that has marketed its way to success. And they're like, hey, guess what? The user experience still sucks. We're just gonna be like, we have this huge TAM. We just have a superior user experience that these guys will probably never copy. Or if they do, it'll be too late. And we're just gonna hammer that. And so I've loved the way that they positioned that. And then they were like, you know what? We're also gonna widen the TAM. We're like, you know what? They suck at positioning. kids will never consume AG1. So we are going to say we are going to be a, we're going to be able to get the kids and we can get that as a, like a, an entry point.

51:23So even if you're an adult and you are, don't use AG1 or you do, you were going to get your kid and then we're going to upgrade to you. Why shouldn't you ingest your greens that way? So I feel like they've done just a absolutely incredible job with that. David is another one. David's another one where like their value prop was unassailable. They were like, we are going to on metrics. Like you look at their trucks, they run trucks in New York city. It's just the calories, grams of protein. They're like, you will never beat our metrics. That's unassailable. And then we are going to present ourselves as a work of art, the whole David theme to be around that.

51:50Those are two brands that are both new that are just the most excellent positioning I've seen. For context, guys, it's David Protein. They actually just launched COD. Yeah, as an initiative, but yeah. The same exact thing though. It's just all about how many calories this has. Well, you notice they hired a creative director. This woman's super talented. She did like the locker scene with the COD unveil. And you look at like that brand going from launch with a value proposition, hammer TikTok shop. TikTok shop is a huge part of their adoption strategy. than like widespread distribution. And then, okay, now we actually hired a creative director and we're doing like fun campaigns to go along with like launching product as marketing, which is what they did like with the COD.

52:21They are, that is a, the level of sophistication and simplicity inside that operation is legendary. Yeah, from kind of like a counterculture, us against them mentality. Another good example is probably Poppy that went against Pepsi and Coke. That whole category. All I pop and poppy is just against, again, position against with a product of that nature. And those are just huge. CPG, if you, to succeed, you have to be taking a massive swing like that. If you're not taking a massive swing in CPG, the volume isn't there to ever make you any real money. And then in other companies, another good position that I actually love to talk about, I have never talked about in a pod, is Satoshi Nakamoto in fashion, where it's like they just took a popular pop culture term that people are obsessed with and then turned it into an ultra-expensive fashion brand.

52:59And the only reason that brand succeeds is because of the brand name. And if it had a different name, it would just not be where it is. And it's just a genius bit of like, I recognize this thing going on in society. It's a Japanese brand. So we're going to use this inherent credibility that associates with it. And we're going to execute at the highest, most luxury level. And it was a kind of a masterclass in what a name can do for a company. I think from a positioning perspective, something that a lot of people do is they play the price game. And I think if you're a new company, if you don't have economies of scale, it's a very dangerous game.

53:28And I feel like a lot of people, especially in the health and wellness space, they're getting to the super saturated space. You need to really differentiate yourself through some sort of unique positioning, like stuff that you talked about. Yeah, well, I think I talk about this. Actually, I haven't released it yet, but I'm doing a video about where it's like we had little tree culture. People used to spend their extra money and be like, I'm going to get an Air One smoothie. I'm going to get this fancy snack. People would basically be buying dopamine. It was a generational thing. So that's why we saw all these cool new snack and beverage brands.

53:52And then there's now it's like little luxury culture where it's like, yeah, I'm going to buy a Jolie showerhead and it's$400 versus$100. And now you see that across everything. I got a toolkit for my son the other week from this brand called Tinker. And it's like, they just made like a very aesthetic, also very user-friendly toolkit, all the handles and stuff are kind of like OXO grips. So my son can like grab a hammer or grab a nail. Same thing with an old person. And I want it just because it looks good. It's not like a big DeWalt set or whatever. I can slide it in somewhere and I have like an aesthetic house.

54:18And you're like, cool. They basically just upcharge the ability to take an existing thing, add kind of relatively minor innovation, but like that is a market. And so I do think that there's, if you are going to like go premium positioning with a premium look at a slightly higher price is such a better move than trying to just undercut someone by 10 % in the market. Like That just isn't a winning strategy. Yeah, you can always go down on price. It's tough to go up. Amen. Always can go downstream. We could literally go probably 20 hours on content. We're going to dive into influencer marketing. Pop this jacket off real quick.

54:47Yeah, pop that jacket. All right, cool. So let's hop into influencer marketing. When you hear influencer marketing in 2025, what comes to mind? Always on creators and then creators on staff at companies. By always on, I mean like, hey, you have creators on staff that are just making content for you in these longer term relationships. But yeah, I mean, this is like the era of influencer marketing. I know that you have been working with Jail Blaster in the past, and then obviously you work with all of these beauty brands. I want you to give context for the listeners, and I'll be able to layer on top with Iconic.

55:17How much free stuff are these big brands sending out? So much, right? As much as you can, literally as much as you can find addresses for people that are relevant, right? Because like, look, here's this, there's these metrics called, a metric called EMV, which is like earned media value, which is basically value you get from like people just posting your content without spending your money or pay behind it. And you look at in some of these niches, like how much content is just being made casually. And you're like, all right, cool. I can get this 100 ,000 view video, but the compounding effects of all these smaller videos and all these things like really move a brand forward, especially when you're at retail.

55:49Like that was the biggest thing about working at Gel Blaster. It's like we were in Costco, we were in Walmart, we were in Target, we were in all the hardware stores. So you need to push just volume awareness. The only goal is volume awareness. You can't track or attribute anything at that scale because there's so many locations where you can buy it. So it's just a, has to be a cultural like awareness level. And so the idea is like get these in as many people's hands as possible so that they see them. And if you see people having fun with it, whether that's on the internet or that's in person for the cost of what that takes and someone's buying into the ecosystem that had like a huge value.

56:16But yeah, I think this is, it's scaling it up as high as it can go. And then also, how do you want to find the people that you pay? Would you rather have it be people that support your brand organically or you started in some relationship and then you pay them because the content was successful or you just want to hunt for random people on the internet that you want to pay max dollar for? You said something in an interview that really resonated with me and it was a strategy that I formerly did at scale and I stopped doing it because I listened to the numbers guys. We have probably sent out, it's probably at about 8 ,000 canvases and keep in mind, canvases are significantly more money than a pair of socks or beauty, no attribution.

56:50All I did was just look at the true cost of goods and I would just bake that in to align them on my marketing budget. And people have to look at it as A, they're getting content. B, they're getting distribution. C, they're getting social proofing. D, per what you said, there's no better way to see if they're a good creator to work with on a bigger scale than just give them free stuff and just see what happens. Yeah, the other one, multiple brands I've worked with prior to this beauty era we're doing was like Bisk was the was the buy it store. They'd be like, hey, we're going to recruit you know, 100, 200 creators that, yeah, like for every campaign or every month or whatever, we're going to gift card them to wherever we want to boost sales, target, sprouts, whatever.

57:26So then you get the purchase sort of volume and you get the posts that come from it. And then some of the content would be like at the location. That's another strategy. That's like, sadly, again, you're baking it in the marketing budget. You're like, this is how everyone's like, how do you support retail? How do you attribute it? Hey, it's like, attribution is a extremely hard thing to quantify, but it becomes like significantly easier when you're looking at like overall lift and you're doing these like campaigns that are like at a high level, but a lot of it's common sense too. Like how do you get multiple assets for that, for a lower cost, you know?

57:52And then how do you compare that to traditional media? And how do you know what doesn't work? Like we've run this magazine ad, if we cut it off for three weeks, does anything change? There's just so much of these budgets. I feel like you can move to some of this where the numbers are amazing. The numbers of giving stuff away of like DMing relationships, giving stuff away and then graduating that, or the numbers of like in-store purchase gift card stuff is like so as actually the economics are kind of amazing compared to any non like meta TikTok spark ad stuff like any other type of advertising and I think it's just it's just getting the conversation between executives is just complicated because a lot of people in charge of these budgets don't understand modern media there's so many different ways that you can use it as a weapon as well too I've talked about it in the past is if you're a brand and you have a big following you could use that as leverage against the influencers that you're ceding product to, i.e.

58:40repost it on story, repost it on feed, do a co-branded post and really sell them on a distribution that you're going to give them. Another thing that I think people sorely underestimate is the fact that you just need to be looking at just your true cost of goods and just say, hey, this cost me$10 and I'm going to spend X amount per month. But also the, if you wanted to get super quantifiable, then just start with TikTok shop. Start with TikTok shop affiliate. Be like, we are going to get and send to as many people that create videos on affiliate and we're going to be on shop and we are going to track it.

59:08And then you actually get a very numbers driven version of this. And a lot of brands have a lot of opportunity to scale. So like, that's number one, like start their attributable and then build it to other networks. And then B, the thing that I've gotten brought into work on almost the most when I was doing a lot of packaging content was packaging for influencer boxes. Cause I'm like, Hey, how do you want to guarantee post rate? People will send out a thousand packages, look at 45 posts and get discouraged. And you're like, well, what did you send them? And Oh, we just put this in a random box with whatever.

59:31And it's like, okay, cool. Say that there was a$2 cost package on that. That was looked viral. Like I always looked at K beauty for this, like Korean beauty, because they have all these crazy PR packs because of how big their influencer culture is. Like there was one, I think it was like a Maybelline one that was like sticks of dynamite and you like pull the things out of like, they're so intricate. One of them was like a computer with a floppy disk, but like you look at the cost to actually get those made in China. You do it a thousand, 2000, it's dollars, not tens of dollars. But even if you're doing tens of dollars and you're sending a hundred kits and you want to have max open rate, it's like, all right, I sent a hundred mailers.

59:59I want to get 60 posts. The quality of the way that mailer looks and the concept behind that, and does that tie into your other campaign? Then can you do a giveaway based on that. That's banging content. Like it becomes a campaign strategy in itself. You can engineer into success. Guys, that's why we do this podcast. I think that's just so valuable and people don't even think about that. I've seen a significantly different, I love it how you're looking at like it's a D to C, an open rate. From a post rate perspective, if you do a handwritten note and customize it to that person, there is, they feel a, they have to post it.

1:00:29I get this little time where someone's like, thank you so much. This content's meant blank it went. I'm like, ah, you know, and it makes you smile. You think differently, but all of it's about that. Yeah. That relationship is like, did it make you smile? Did it make your kid smile? If my kid loves the thing that comes in the mail, it's a wrap, you know? Yeah. It's coming on content. You mentioned a TikTok shop. I am not on TikTok shop just for whatever reason. I just, it has not worked for us as a brand. Attribution is very hard on the influencer side. Tell us more just about your experience with TikTok shop.

1:00:55TikTok shop is a combination of like, it's like a gift and a curse, right? So for instance, when we were working on it on gel blaster, We would get kicked off constantly because it was a blaster product, right? So we just had this on and off thing. But then I have so many people in my life that live and breathe TikTok shop. What people don't understand about that, back to that scale conversation, is that when you look at a good brand on there, you look at brands that are really crushing it on there, Tart, a few of these others, they are getting so many organic posts from TikTok shop as an added benefit.

1:01:20So even take away the economics. A brand like that is getting 3 ,000 to 5 ,000 posts a month. Actually, they have more than that. They're doing 3 ,000 to 5 ,000 active affiliates. That means active people on TikTok that post their product every month. You can look at places like Kalo Data and like hunt this down. The data will be okay. I want you to go very granular and give people as much context as possible. This is everything done through the platform or they paid through the platform. Yeah, so let me break this down. So if you are a brand, you want to hunt down what's called affiliates. Affiliates are creators that post links on TikTok shop to products.

1:01:46So they'll make a video about LaCroix. They will link LaCroix inside the video. Then they get a commission on that. There's different structures for it. And a lot of creators make a lot of money doing this. Now, what you want to do as a brand is you want to hunt down those creators and get them to join your program and promote your product. There's two kind of ways to do this within TikTok's backend. So the first way you have is basically you can create a, I can always open program. So basically you can recruit affiliates and they can just join or anyone who finds it can join. They can get sent product and if they meet certain parameters and they can make it for your brand.

1:02:14The other one - Embedded in TikTok shop? Better than TikTok shop is just open. If they are in a affiliate, they can go see that. And if you want to be an affiliate now, I think you need 5 ,000 followers. It used to be lower. And then you can go join that program. And there's places like Creators Corner that train people to do that, that are amazing. And then you have the level above that, which is if you want to get actual good creators, they're not just going to go join your open program or necessarily even respond to a DM. You have to go hunt them down and be like, hey, I know you make good content with these other people.

1:02:38I want you to make content for us. And you're probably going to pay them. You might pay them a retainer. You might give them some super high percentage. And TikTok allows you to create basically programs where you add people manually at higher percentage rates. And so you kind of have these two things. You want to recruit people into that. But then once you're in there and it's working and people see volume and they see you can make money and sell on it, you begin to do more and more of it. And so there's a bunch of different like agencies and services, or you can do it yourself. I forget some other software.

1:03:01All the software names are really weird. So it's like hard to remember the top of your head. There's another good, like tracking, hunting down auto DM software that works for this. But you just basically want to scale that as high as you can, as long as you're getting the economics, but you know, you have the economics because if you're doing, if you're making sales and your commission is 20, 25%, TikTok takes a very small amount. It's not like a big distributor and you have built in your margin and like all your fulfillment costs. If you're selling anything with a decent AOV, 30 bucks, 50 bucks plus, you probably have some margin there, then your goal is just as much scale as you can.

1:03:28But at the same time, you're getting all of these posts, these thousands of posts, which are generating likely millions of views. And so you have all that EMV as well, which trickles over into Amazon purchases, retail purchases, your website, it's just brand awareness and value. So not only do you have this trackable, scalable marketing by seeding influencers, you have this huge lift effect that comes from it. And I think it's one of the most underrated tools possible for scaling any brand that sells a product where the economics of shipping and logistics allow you to actually do it. and you can control within this platform if you want it from an attribution perspective, like they could get just on that purchase.

1:04:01Oh, it's just on that. That's all it is. So literally, if they purchased it, they clicked the link from that video and bought it. That's when you get your attribution. So the affiliates don't get LTV if they come back and buy more. Doesn't matter. But it doesn't matter because affiliates make a lot of money because these videos that do well. Look, it's all shots on goal. You go to these affiliate pages, they'll be posting five, 10 videos in a day. One every four days pops off. But if it drives 100K in sales or a 20K commission, like one I like to look at, there is also a Maybelline, sorry for my bros, I'm deep in beauty.

1:04:24There was a Maybelline video by Jeffree Star. Don't Google Jeffree Star. And where he went ultra viral, it's like a reaction video for him for a product. And he drove, it was something, it was like five or 600K worth of sales because of how ultra viral that video went. You look at the chart of their top affiliates. There's a lot of affiliates that drove 20K, 50K in sales. They're getting that 20 % commission and they're making 10K in a month. It's amazing. And then you have Jeffree Star who just like probably made six figures like off a single post. And you see like, oh, this is the ability you have.

1:04:50It's all about shots on goal, right? You didn't know he was gonna go viral versus anyone else who's going to go viral or that video type or this video type. You can't necessarily pick it. You have less control. It's why brands don't like it. But then you have this massive potential of what can happen to your product. And I think it's just, it's untapped. And the way that Amazon was untapped maybe a few years ago before they started whippling fees and everyone was on it. Now, like we have that same alpha on TikTok shop. Guys, if you have not watched the episode with Kent, 2024, biggest TikTok shop in the world.

1:05:18NeuroGump, great episode. Yeah, and I'm just obsessed with it. I work on it. I make creative for it. I do briefs for it. I'm not like running some big brand on it, but I have many friends that are. And so I just loves it because I just want as many people as possible to take care, like take advantage of that like scenario. It's just an amazing like thing to exist. And I look at it every day and wonder why, like every project I'm on, how can I convince them to do more? What's so crazy is I would imagine there is definitely somebody that's watching this video right now that has influence, may or may not be on TikTok, if they are on TikTok even more.

1:05:48And they're not even selling stuff on TikTok shop and they're integrated into their videos. It's free money. You should be doing it. Yeah, exactly. If you're making it about it, that's the other thing I thought was like, if you're running influencers or seeding and then they've been posting free stuff and they're not on a TikTok shop, there's a whole like cottage industry of management there dedicated to onboarding those people on the TikTok shop and then having them link the product and being like, hey, guess what? You're already posting this to get 600 ,000 views. Like don't you like make money at the same time?

1:06:09And that's where it makes it useful to be like, hey, we're doing retainers or we're doing whatever. But like that is a whole thing. If you're seeding and you're not on shop, you're like, this is free money for them and for you just connect the dots. but there's always worries about like, you know, again, control. What does this mean for our retail environment? People will always find a reason to not do the hot new thing at the time when they're supposed to. And they'll talk themselves out of money. So you have 10K to spend on an influencer budget. What do you do? I think you try to find, I would try to be like doing five people that are a 1K and then doing two posts each with them and like kind of Hunger Games-ing it, at least internally to be like, which of these people can I develop a long-term thing with a little bit cheaper?

1:06:46But I think the biggest alpha and influencer right now is going into like the emerging where it's like, hey, cool, you're now broken. They just broke 100K or whatever it looks like. They haven't gotten a bunch of brand deals yet, but they've done one or two. And they kind of make content that gets the same views or is just as good as these big influencers. Like now that's the biggest alpha, but it's the hardest to find because people really don't want to hunt for them. These agencies necessarily don't want to hunt for them. So they're not like cutting down the edge. It's not as nimble. But I think you have the biggest upside.

1:07:11So I would look for that. But again, the multiple posting I think is crucial. You do one post with an influencer, you really don't know what's going to come out the other end. My biggest recommendation on that is always like, can you redo their biggest piece of content like with them, with your brand integrated? So a good example is Reformation, the dress company. They took all these big creators and they said, Hey, go remake your best video ever, but you're wearing Reformation. And that was the campaign. And that's a genius thing for them to get placement. They have a little bit of different goals.

1:07:34But it's the same thing I did when I did like a, I did like a red flag wallets video and I had a wallet video. I'd be like, Hey, can you just do this again? And then just like put us like in like a prominent thing and like market is sponsored. Like there's stuff like that makes a lot of sense for the brand. So that's how I would look at it is like spread your shots out, do multiple posts with each of them, remake some of their best content versus go, let me get the biggest influencer I can for 10. Because if you do one shot like that, you just don't know where it's going to go. You need time to figure out like where it hits.

1:07:58Makes a lot of sense. Looking from like a macro perspective and obviously there's different outliers, AKA you, someone with a bigger following. What's that sweet spot where you think you get the most value on a per follower perspective? Is it at 10 ,000? Is it at 50 ,000, 200 ,000? Well, it's interesting. What I've noticed in my niche is like The budgets don't go up as you continue to grow. Basically, you get to the top. If you are on a couple hundred K, let's say three, 400 K combined between Instagram and TikTok in the marketing niche, I'm not getting any more money at a million followers than I was at that 400.

1:08:28This is capped out. The brands aren't going to spend more. And also, you're not getting necessarily that many more views up there. It's the way that virality works. And so I think it's really finding people that are getting to that spot. So in marketing, I think it's really like you just got over 100 K or who's kind of hot right now. Like for instance, like I'm on a streak these last like two months. This is a great time to get me. The previous two months before that, I was like still, I was obviously like my content was like figuring it out. But even then it's hard to predict it with timing and stuff like that.

1:08:54It's kind of, I know it's a hard answer. It really, really varies by niche, but it comes down to really consuming. Like what is your audience consume? Like having that algorithm, are these people showing up a lot and just being online? I would say for me, it's a fast race to get a 10 ,000 followers. I think that you have way more legitimacy just having 10 ,000 plus. and then for me what I've found and my girl who's done agency big clients and spread it across 50 girls at once she's getting more value dollar for dollar smaller smaller yeah I think that's the again I look at it like there's a certain amount of it's different when you're in consumer good for like b2b stuff it's like if you don't have really 100k I feel like the credibility isn't there where it's like okay this person and promoting that I feel like there's like more risk necessarily unless they have a really tuned in audience and you'll see it too like the videos just aren't as good now if you want to nurture that relationship to then have a bigger thing that's really where it's at.

1:09:41Like I remember like Particle is one of my first sponsors. I still do a video with them like almost every month. My rate is like not significantly higher than it was because they've just stuck with it for that long. And so there's a big, they've gotten a huge upside by being early. And I think there's a lot, there's a lot to be said for that if you're looking at a longer term influencer plan. So let's just say for B2B guys, you probably have to be 100 ,000 plus for credibility and then B2C, I would say. Yeah, 10. Yeah. Maybe even lower, but I think 10. And it really just depends on the quality of the content.

1:10:07Like I look at, There's people making good videos that have less of that. And it's just where you want to catch them in their arc. And also, are you willing, are you going to spread this across a few and try to get some hits and understand that's how it works? Or are you looking for sure things and you're always going to feel like a sure thing is the bigger creator, whether that's right or not. A huge thing that I think is going to make its way back, and I can make some analogies back to LA, Fairfax, 2016, 2017 with companies like Pink Dolphin. Going back to, I call them COIs back in my finance, finance, the center of influence.

1:10:37these people that have, let's just call them seating lists, basically, that have these owned seating lists where they have access to a narrow persona and at any point in time they can hit 10 people, 20 people, 50 people, 100 people. Those people are going to have a lot of value for anybody that is going after TikTok shops. I used to coach this for people that were on teams and stuff. And I was like, hey, I know you're about to do a bunch of manual research, a bunch of manual outreach and it's going to absolutely suck. And it's going to turn you into the most valuable person whenever you go to your next job.

1:11:03And I'm not going to want to lose you, but that's going to be true because you're going to walk in there with that Rolodex. That's the same conversation I had about the stuff. I have all the same thing. Every influencer's ever posted any brand I've worked with like is in a list, you know? And I know what that list is. It's parsable by category. It's part of that thing that you organize. And guess what? Whenever I go anywhere, I know where the, here's the hitters. And then the bigger you get that, the more valuable you are. So I could not agree more. And that's why it's like, everyone doesn't want to work these manual jobs or do whatever anymore.

1:11:27But like, yo, you work in influencer outreach for a year or two and you actually track who had results or not. And then you go walk into like a leveraged conversation to have one of those jobs. Like you're basically working your way from a 90K a year job to a 200K a year job off a list. And it creates insane amount of added value and leverage on collaboration. I can give you two examples. One with Iconic, with Legends, the athletic apparel. Like, do you know how easy that was for me? Just like guys that work out in LA. People don't even know this, David Protein. Yeah. I sent out to 40 people right out the gate because that was right in my wheelhouse.

1:11:56And it was a win-win for me too. It was Peter Hall, RX Bar. I like the product, win-win for all. But same thing. I have that organized by three or four big pockets and being able to, at any moment, deploy that by vertical and or another big one too, is by geography. Yeah. Like saying like - Especially with retail. Yeah. Saying like, hey, I already know right now that if I wanted to blow up a brand in Boston, Miami, New York, Scottsdale, Austin - Yeah, blow up the pop-up, the launch event, the way, man. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. I want to tie a bow on the influencer side. What's the biggest waste of money you've seen in influencer marketing?

1:12:31Man, there's some of these agencies, I'm not going to call some of them out specifically, but man, I walked into a scenario where brands are spending millions on influencers paying top dollar for all these people for bad posts with like weird briefs without the right CTAs. People will, their big agencies will go blow a bag. They will go be like, hey, this is 75 ,000, this is 12 ,000. And then you'll see the difference to them in small agencies. An agency I always like to call out that I loved working with is agency Cavell, K-V-E-L-L, where I worked with them. I was as a creator and I've worked with them.

1:12:56I've hired them after that because I was like, man, the briefs have so much attention to detail. The feedback was actually so good. Everything was organized in a way that it was just relentless. And I was like, that difference between like, oh, just pay 75 ,000 bucks to the biggest person you can, which is like what some of these big agencies do. Actually, it was like offensive to me seeing what some of those are. So it's really just like, are they tactically in the weeds, like helping make great videos? And one of the call outs that, one of the things I appreciated most about the Cavell stuff is I did some stuff at Gel Blaster with them.

1:13:21We did these videos that went viral on YouTube shorts with the creator, smaller creator to the point of your upside. And they were video game recreation videos with Gel Blasters. They're recreating a kill shots, basically. And the guy would do like dramatic falls or whatever, like tricks. And in their feedback, I remember in the brief, they were like, hey, can you put the video game sound effects? And then can you put the little targets like on the video? And here's the PNGs for the overlays. And then when they added that, it was one of those things like I'd never thought of and just looked amazing and just added so much to the production of this.

1:13:46And like, I think helped ensure that video go from a couple hundred K to like a couple million. And it's just like when you need people that are in that in the weeds and it really comes down to your rep and the experience they have and how they treat influencer. A little co-creative direction by an agency. That's pretty rare. I'll take it. They were in all these briefs doing that level of stuff. And we were doing, it was like a 70 influencer campaign. But that's the ones, you can just tell they're obsessed with success. You called it out. And it's just so embedded in my world. And my business partner, Jeff Cole on Instagram for Iconic, he's one of the most talented digital designers in the world.

1:14:18I've become accustomed to it. This guy is a master at creative briefs. What are the most important elements of a creative brief? References. So it's like, what are you actually showing people to create? and then thinking through how that creator is making it their own. So you can make an amazing brief, but if you don't then, if you then go to a creator and here's this brief and it's not like the stuff that they do or doesn't incorporate their best qualities, I feel like there's a personalization level to a lot of briefs. And then the ability to just say, if you want to say no to the brief, okay, just send us something back that you're stoked on.

1:14:44I think it's another good one, but I'm the same way. I'm obsessive about the briefs and the ideas. And I think the other good thing about a brief is like having it be wide. Like here's a concept, here's a campaign. It ties into what we're doing as a brand, but like do your own interpretation of it. Cause I feel like creators don't like to be pigeonholed. And if you are pigeonholed, you make bad content. I agree. Keep it super macro, tons and tons of ideas and just say, pick any and all of these ideas and sprinkle just your personal sauce on it. And on UGC, so I actually spend more time now on UGC briefs and influencer briefs just at least this last few months.

1:15:12The other crucial one on that is like elevation where it's like, if you have a good UGC creative, say it's like a male creator and you want to spread it. Okay, I'm gonna do a female creator. I'm gonna do a older guy, younger guy, black guy, white guy, Asian guy, whatever it is, you're gonna spread out. I'm gonna get more demographics. It's an easy win for a performing ad asset. But then if you're like, okay, how else do you update this? Or how could you make this work on organic? It's always about elevation where I'm like, hey, okay, instead of doing this, you know, get ready with me routine in your house, like you always do, can you do it in public or in a car or on a subway?

1:15:38Can we give you a little extra budget to go like light it like that or have that extra element like, or to go get a luxury hotel? It's like, how does$400 elevate that asset like significantly? I think is one thing I'm always looking at when you're taking an existing brief and like adding it on that people don't think about. Same thing with props. It's always like a previous project I worked on, they built like a prop box and we were working on that constantly. Like, what can we send creators in this box? It's going to cost us some$100. We'll make the video pop, you know, and it's like reflective jacket or like this mirror.

1:16:04One of them had like a mirror, like vanity that looked crazy. And like, you just start to add that was into your briefs and now you're fucking cooking. Stealing this idea. I'm adding an extra five to 10 % of overall seating budget to give people and just say, Hey, you could spend X amount of money how to make this video better. That's a great idea. Do people do that? Are you that guy who does this? people definitely do this and like i'm not the only person doing this yeah but like yeah it's well also a lot of the good us the strategists are really making there's like the twitter people and then there's like the people that are and there's some people that are valuable in there and there's like the people that are really making stuff pop like we're all like on group chats and shit like everyone's trying to share a success especially if you're also a creator there's like a lot of that but yeah like even you'll look at but we have one where like i know one brand that bought like 10 or 20 of their best creators osmos when they came out we're just like here you go it's 400 for us and your production value is going to be like amazing right and then the creator's fucking stoked.

1:16:52It's like little stuff like that goes so, such a long way. I mean, I even think about that. Like I'm a constant, like you'll be on my Christmas list. Like I'm a constant gift giver. Right. And like every holiday I'm just sending stuff. Like I said, everybody at like blank studio stuff, my friend Brandon's brand, like nice stuff. An entire Christmas, I bought like 70 of his things. Like even this, I know that I have my own brand, I send out a ton of that. It's like that stuff goes so far, whether you're as a brand or as a person, just on building up that little rapport that like leads to more relationships.

1:17:17I love that. I do the gifting too. I think the one huge thing though is in conjunction, with them creating the content. I think that's genius. I've never heard or seen that. Got alpha on here, brother. Yeah. I want to wrap up on the influencer marketing side. What are kind of the key KPIs that you're looking for a good influencer outside of following account? Yeah, I think it's really just like consistent views. Like I would basically, I always look at the bottom. I encourage people to do this with me too, where like you're getting me as an influencer. It's like, all right, look at their outliers.

1:17:42Are you going to make a video that's like their outliers, their viral videos? And your answer is, maybe you are, but you're probably not. And then you're looking at, okay, so what is their, like what's their ceiling? What's their basement? Like what's that? What's the bottom look like that? And for me, like that's, you're going to get 30 to 50 ,000 views. That's like the bottom view range of what I put out. And it's like, okay, are you stoked with that for the price range? And if you're stoked with that, then like that is perfect for you. I'm always looking at that being like, you got to look at the bottom because a lot of sponsored content is going to end up on the bottom.

1:18:06And if you're stoked on the bottom, then run it. When you really look at a lot of creators, especially in that marketing space, their bottom's bad. If it's a bad video, it's thousands of views, 10 ,000 views. And so I think for anyone to be like basically obsessed with, how do I get people where I know the minimum, the worst result is a result that I'm happy with. And anything else about that is value. And then as a creator being like, how do I not, how do I kind of minimize those losses on branded content to see people have that standard? And I'm looking at their other sponsored posts. People always look at organic, being like, look at these organic posts they do.

1:18:31It's like, nah, what were their branded posts that crushed? And who put a bunch of spend behind it? You know, I send out, I did an Anthropic Claude video and they put a bunch of spend behind it. And I showed out a lot being like, hey, this is a good video. It did pretty well organic. And they put a bunch of spend behind it because it works. And like, here's why it works. This is why we should do a similar brief. So I think there's a lot of it's like, you know, looking at that. I want to touch a little bit on that. You basically talked about whitelisting there where people are just boosting your posts.

1:18:53Whitelist everything. If you're running already ads, like whitelist everything. Yeah. We should dive a little into it. I'm going to go super, super deep on another episode. But whitelisting for people out there listening is, you could do it, chop it up a bunch of different ways. But for creators out there, if a brand whitelists you and puts spend behind it, it just allows their end consumer to see it from a different POV. So you could see, you know, ads from Iconic. You could see ads from Oren. You could see ads from Oren and Iconic. And it's just a different way. It can be in stories. It can be in Explorer.

1:19:18This is pushing it to more places, but it helps them. I always like, I literally just did this with a brand where like they want to add whitelisting to them or budget. And I was just like, cool, just add it in there. Cause I, I want them to get max value. And I guess what you have as a creator, your best ability is to get brands to come back to do another video with you again, or for other brands to be excited to do a video with you because of the sponsor post you did. And if you're not achieving that, then you're like not getting max value out of your brand deals. And so I'm always like, Hey, put the spend behind it.

1:19:42I want you to like, that's another shot on goal. If it got to your results organic, awesome. But if it got to your results organic and it got there unpaid, or if it didn't get there organic, but it got there unpaid, that means I'm gonna get another shot. And the value, like the time to dollar value of brand deals is like ridiculous. And so you want to get that other shot. And guys keep in mind as well too, when you do that, you're obviously getting more impressions and views to your profile and building your audience. And from a leverage perspective, you get one of those clients, to those clients.

1:20:08Yeah. The brands are not going to probably want to be the first person to do white-list. And once you get a couple underneath your belt, you can just point to that. I can't push it. I can't recommend that comment more because it's so funny. People are, how do you get more brand deals? I'm like, I actually got a lot of my first brand deals because my friends, I go get my haircut at this place called Jack Henry. And I like them. They're really nice guys. They're local in my neighborhood. And I made a video about them unprompted, no money, no anything. And they're like, hey, can we whitelist this?

1:20:29And I was like, even though I was like, sure, for free. Cool. I've never done it. Let's try it. they ran the shit out of that video. They ran that video to the ground. Free haircuts. Yeah. And then, but like the brand, the other brands were then like, oh, this guy does that. And all of a sudden I got all these brand deals. So I'm actually thankful for the free thing. And I encourage that a lot with creators. I'm like, hey, if you haven't added whitelisting on, or you're trying to budget it$5 ,000 when you have, you know, 25 ,000 followers, I'm like, just get the deals and get the deals and let them run with them.

1:20:53And it will be get way more deals. I get more deals than anyone in my space because I do more deals than anyone in the space. It's like that simple. And if you're a creator too, you can chop that up a million different ways. you can throw it on the front end and get more money up front. With probably smaller, more medium brands, you can get a percent of the spend, a percent of the sales. And then looking at the rights. So it could be for three months, six months, a year. What's really crazy, we talked about this off camera last time, is it's like, you could get like a percent of sales and like an ad could crack and like they could keep it up for a long time or you could just print money every single month.

1:21:23And that's where people start to realize how much influencers really make. You're like, oh, there's some little things. Then you have some of these like unexpected, like there's like unexpected five figure in your lap, like stuff that happens kind of all the time, which is, you know, again, unpredictable, all these things, but is like a truly amazing byproduct of just taking the time to negotiate some things like you mentioned. Guys, the last segment of this video is going to be how Oren makes money. And it's probably more than you think. So stay tuned, guys. We'll get to that. My next question, actually, you pseudo answered it, but let's just see if we have any other things that you think are huge is what should a creator deliver beyond just the posts itself to be truly valuable to a brand?

1:21:56Yeah. And so I think it's like doing whatever it takes to achieve the brand's goals. And so I look at it. Like if I make a post and it is amazing and it's going to crush and it works for them great. And it's what we scoped. Awesome. If it's not going as well, it's like, okay, can I put it on other networks? Like maybe they didn't pay me to cross post, but I'm on Snapchat. I'm on YouTube shorts. I'm on Tik TOK. I'm on sub stack. I'm on LinkedIn. If, is it going to help them achieve their goal? And if I can continue to post it more, then I'm going to go above and beyond and do that. Same thing with, I have the email newsletter is one of the most valuable things.

1:22:21Most creators don't do. My email list is 40 ,000 people now. I email them every week. I have someone that works on that. It's a business in itself, but I will 100 % hammer a brand deal. if I think it's going to help get that another time and I'll just do it organically or throw it in. Now, also if they want to, then I also sell all those things basically a la carte where it's like, you can also add this on and you'll get a whole more, like much more dedicated portion of it. But it's like, do whatever it takes to help them achieve their goals. Like as long as you're stoked on it. Now, if I went back and forth with the brand 40 times, we made a whack video because of their insistence, I'm not gonna do any of that shit, right?

1:22:49But like, if we're all incentivized to win together, like go do it. This goes back to posting on all channels. So you just have more leverage points. I'm doing Substack right now. It's my new one. 30 days of posting on Substack videos. See if it works. I mean, there's people doing it and they're pushing video and I was like, I already have the video and it takes me another two minutes. I'm seeing some crazy, I saw some with Substack, I also saw it with Patreon. I'm seeing some crazy numbers. You see that Joe Buttons Patreon thing? Yeah. Doing 20 mil, that was wild. I don't necessarily believe that, but either way, it's like even if you're in double digit millions, you're fucking killing it, yeah.

1:23:20All right, let's move on. Let's go to partnerships, collaborations and licensing. I'd love to know, what is your philosophy on what makes a brand partnership actually work? if your customers get excited about it and you can make good content around it. I think people overcomplicate it or this is too much or that's too much. And also brands do a little bit too much, but really just comes down to those things. That's why I think I like the, Represent does a ton of licensing, right? With all the metal bands and all that. And maybe some are true collabs now too, but like their customer base loves it.

1:23:46Their customer man is stoked on it. That's the number one metric is like, they go, that shit looks sick. And if you can create that, then that is like exactly what you want to do. I think from a licensing perspective, I've been in licensing for like 10 years. You have to be very careful. for anybody out there that's looking to kind of sprinkle and go into licensing. It gets to a point where sometimes you cross the chasm and you're looked at more of a licensing company versus a brand company. It's so hard to kind of stay on that line. Kith has done it very well. I think represent is that kind of like the max cadence.

1:24:13I would kind of slow down. I think they added it though. Like they had a good brand. How do we take it to the next level? And they added it with licensing. I agree. They're like pushing it to the limit, but like they push everything to the limit. Yeah. I think another good idea, another good brand that's doing on licensing very well is Truff. Those are my buddies and they do one or two times a year. It's based on the marketing calendar, based on the schedule. That just seems very authentic. It's a tool to work in like a campaign. I like to look at it when you're planning your product roadmap, it's like, cool, you have genuine new releases.

1:24:35How much can you do that once a year, twice a year? And you have expansions to your existing lineup. Like I can add more SKUs or variations or flavors or colors or whatever it is. And then it's like, this is just another tool to have in that toolkit to fill up that calendar. Right. And so to your point, I think the Truff thing is genius where it's like, all right, they're only doing so many releases, but they can add to the release calendar, a non-core product twice a year. That's a wonderful way to increase the amount of SKUs they have. What do you think is the most underrated value you get from a great partnership?

1:24:59It's just access to that other audience, right? I don't think that's, it's underrated. I think that's like the biggest rated one, but you know, when we were like a fandom, like a friend of mine works really extensively on like video game licensing. So he does all the licensing and stuff for Pudgy Penguins who are like on licensing fire. And it's just like, hey, you get, if McDonald's people know who Pudgy Penguins is, that's a huge win for that community. Like an overstated win. And it's like, and then you got to think about how wide is your TAM and total available market and like how do you get the new parts of it excited in a new way?

1:25:26And I think partnerships is one of the best ways to get into that. Really, really interesting. On the last episode with Brian Garofalo, I always thought that you wanted to go after someone that basically had the same persona as you, but he had a very different answer. It was more about net new. Yeah, I agree. Well, and also new you can't access in another way. Like that's why video game licensing, I think is so popular because you get this gamer culture that just isn't aware of any other culture outside of it. And so the only way to tap into it is if you tap into that culture. I think that's an interesting one.

1:25:53So in the past, when you've done different partnerships, how do you usually structure them? And so typically partnerships like brand to brand, or what do you mean? Yeah, brand to brand. Usually you're paying a licensing fee, or if it's together, it's really like, okay, are we jointly paying for it? Or is one person paying for it? And then kind of from that, there's economics that trickle down. So if like one person's funding the whole thing, then usually it's like a payment back or something like that. Or if you're sharing costs, then it could be a split. But there's a bunch of different models for that.

1:26:17One of my favorite models, I just want to bring up something I've never heard anybody do. And every time I bring it up, they like it. I do a window one and a window two. I'm in a single unit dropship business, but what I do on window one is we split it 50, 50 under the notion that we're both going to hit our organic. There's going to be no paid against it. So if they're going to hit their email, their socials, et cetera, they should eat the same. And then I flip it to a licensing where it's like 10 % because I'm going to go paid. That's super smart. Yeah. So now you got another person being like, that's good.

1:26:44Yeah. It's a good one. That's a good one. Take that one. It's a good play. I think that for me, you know, I've been dabbling on the creator side. I've been an operator for the last 10 years and I'm going obviously all in. Everybody here sees on the creative side. And you're someone that I think has a really interesting skillset on both the business and the creative side. And you've made a great life for yourself. So many people know you from the big social media presence. Let's just get to how do you make your money? Perfect. So a couple of ways. So creator money and creator money is now is the most.

1:27:17So brand deals, creator related stuff is like the number one income source now. It used to be a little more split up and now like that's the big one. And then on addition to that, we have info products. We have Cut30, which is also pretty big, but I have partners and it's a business. We have employees, we have, it's a whole thing. So there's the info product piece on top of that. And then I still work for brands. Like I am the creative director at a private equity company that they understand it's not a full-time thing. And I do these other things and they understand the value that comes with that as well.

1:27:40So I still have like working, but that's also anytime you work at a brand and you are a serious creative professional, That's more of an equity play than like a salary play, right? Before that, I was doing a bunch of creative consulting. So basically, I was doing guest creative strategy, creative direction, like workshops. I wanted to go to this position because I was able to consolidate. I have to manage all those things into I'm focused on one portfolio. And that's like a useful thing for me to be able to be focused while still having that. So those are really the three buckets. But the brand, the creator side is like expansive because we have a newsletter, the hyper newsletter.

1:28:09It's our, I have a partner in it. We work on it together. He writes a lot of it. He is a creator in his own right. But we basically have that business. It's a separate entity. We monetize it separately. We will probably sell it separately at some point. And this is specifically a newsletter? Just a newsletter. And there's brand deals inside the newsletter. And we do these big branded reports. And we've done like some other kind of creative stuff. We did a big YouTube series with this brand Air. We're about to do a second season of, so we're like making some content. But that's a business unit that then has payroll and all that stuff that we're on there.

1:28:34YouTube makes like, is a smaller amount of it, but there's ads on every YouTube video. There's the IG and TikTok ads, which is the lion's share. Short form is the lion's share because that's like really good money. And then the info side. I want to break that down so everybody in the creator space could really understand this in a deep way I had an amazing conversation after we spoke with kane for like two hours and just understanding your business model and his business model while We're developing ours was Absolutely fucking amazing. I love you for this and now he's sharing it with you guys Okay, so let's just first start off with at the top of this fly reel for everybody here listening The number one most important thing is content distribution hundred percent None of this works unless you have what we talked about in the beginning of this a content machine and you slowly build your distribution and capture like this a lot of this wouldn't work with the email list is kind of like a hinge of a lot of this that i think people don't quite understand because we sell info off the email list we sell sponsorships on the email list i have retention on that i can push to basically like anything and then i if a platform goes up or down people still live on it yeah so i think looking at we're gonna look at it in three different buckets the first one is quote unquote sponsorships which could be on social media or newsletter the second one is your continuity play with cut 30 and the third one is your creative director in that first bucket the sponsorships.

1:29:40I think for everybody here listening, again, going back to what we talked about in the beginning, the fact that you have all of this distribution and you have the newsletter, when you're going and talking to brands, you have so many different things that you can sell into him and different levers that you can pull. If this doesn't work, you can hit it here and here. Yeah, completely. I'm not looking. It's literally, I just did a, I'm doing a couple of videos with Framer, which I really like as like a platform. I try to do the brand deals with people I use and like, but it's like, Hey, short form wasn't the right.

1:30:04I was like, I don't even know how I can tell this story kind of correctly. And then you've seen a lot of other short form that did it really well, but like on YouTube, actually my audience is perfect. So let's do this YouTube deal. And it's an easier investment for them. It's a format I feel comfortable with. Like I love having that toolkit to your point. Yeah. And what's crazy about that too is, I mean, it's obviously your time to create the content and the ad read, but it's free. You own it all. So you could just cross sell everywhere. Exactly. And that's how we structure the deals, right? So we send, I have like a base rate.

1:30:29Everyone wants an Instagram reel. Instagram reel is my most popular thing. It's also the most expensive thing. It's the most impactful. And so basically it's a core thing of an Instagram reel. You can also buy a TikTok, but I only really want people to get a TikTok. if they're going to whitelist. And so we'll include like, hey, TikTok and whitelisting is like one thing. So you get one of those cores and you build a package off that, which is like, okay, now it's extra money for, do you want LinkedIn? Do you want email? Do you want like YouTube shorts? And then YouTube's kind of its own separate beast.

1:30:50But a lot of people will combine a short form and a YouTube. But I think that's in the brand's best interest is like if you're going to get somebody, reaches far into their following and their bag and create as much continuity as possible. And like most of my deals are multiple networks, like YouTube and short form across multiple posts. Because then it's like, look, I want to take shots on goal. If one doesn't work, I'm going to go extra hard, making sure the next one works. And we want, and then people take a couple of times to resonate. And then I will have told multiple stories about your stuff over time.

1:31:14And you can add any of those or run any of those. And I feel like that really creates a world with the brand where they can like really act on it. What is, what would you say is the single most kind of uniform element across all the companies that you've worked with where there's success? What is the reason why it succeeds? We make video, we make value video. So basically I'm always like, especially on Instagram, it's like, we're going to make a video that is savable. And so basically I want to make a guide. This is a, like I did one with Paperless Pro that was like an event marketing guide where it's like, hey, here's a common types of events brands should consider.

1:31:40And I break them all down. And here's how you would use Paperless Pro if you were to enable those events. And they have like a tool platform for event management. And that is a saved video. Like I look at saves as the metric number one for me where it's like, I'm trying to get high hundreds through thousands of saves on these because that's a, especially for SaaS or the kinds of things I sell, more complicated things, the purchase point isn't right there. The purchase point is in a month when they were like, oh, we need a CRM. And it was like, Or, hey, remember that thing that they shared in Slack two weeks ago?

1:32:06Like, that is where my value lives. It's like someone is trying to solve that problem right now, and we just gave them a solution. Or when they go to solve that problem, we are one of the references. And so I basically build that framework with brands around that. We're like, I will get hundreds of brands. I guarantee hundreds of brands will save or have shared this. Like, pay me nothing if we don't get 500 combined of those two things. And those people will all have intent. From a creator, and you're kind of, I would say you're mostly geared towards B2B. Obviously, you do. B2C is a funnel play.

1:32:33Yeah. for creators out there looking to get into B2B, which platform do you think holds the most amount of value? Instagram. Yeah. Because Instagram is like, I think what people don't understand is that most executives of major companies, VP and C-level executives, are on Instagram casually browsing and they are DMing to a group chat or to a Slack channel, their teams being like, why aren't we doing this for business creation in their niche? This is a common user action that happens all the time and that doesn't happen on other platforms. They're probably not on TikTok, on LinkedIn. They're not consuming content in that same way.

1:33:03And so I think there's just a huge proportion of what's happening there. Plus all of the people that are like active decision makers in companies are in the age where Instagram is their best focus. How long have you been doing a newsletter for? Oh man, I've had it combined with Clayton for probably 16 months, I think. And we've been doing a total probably two years. Wow. Actually, you know what? Sorry, I started, I had the newsletter before I started doing short form. So it's longer than that. But I combined it with Clayton about halfway through that process. So what would you say is the single best piece of advice for a creator looking to get their first social media sponsorship deal?

1:33:31I think you need to do content that you do any deal, do something with somebody, do a free thing, do a thing with a friend, do a thing with whatever, make sponsored content so people can see that you do sponsored content. Because if they don't do that, then they will never know. The other biggest thing, which for some reason, no one seems to understand is put your email in your bio, put your contact for that in your bio. I get that question all the time. How do you get so many brand deals? I'll go to the bio and be like, Hey, you don't have a contact. A step number one is if anyone did want to reach you, they wouldn't be able to.

1:33:58Yeah. I double tap it now. Now it's like written in the bio and it's on the bit.ly list. Yeah. It's so funny you say that because I formerly know funnels, obviously from my direct to consumer business, but I'm just learning now about kind of DM automations and really optimizing the funnel. Like right now I have a Hoobie link on my Instagram and I was told that I'm an idiot. I mean, there's certain types of links that it, you don't know. You can trigger and all the other. Yeah. All this type of stuff that I never actually know and I'm learning about it now. It's absolutely mind blowing. Let's go into bucket two.

1:34:27So this Cut30 is a continuity play. Why don't I give you the floor on that? What is that? Perfect. So Cut30 is a program where we teach brands and creators to either make content for the first time or make better content. It's a 30 day community. I feel like any course in the modern era, it kind of needs to be community based or you can just learn the value for free, basically. So we will in 30 days, people come in, they pay a thousand dollars and we, they create, it's about 15 pieces of content with us. And we cover the whole gambit. You create talking videos, you create vlogs, you create one-shot videos, you create carousels.

1:34:55And then by the end, you begin to form a strategy. And so we've run a lot of people through this, like thousands of people now. And I do it with two other creators, Alex Garcia from Sweat Equity and Colin Landforce. We have a team of people that work with us underneath it. And we feedback every post, every piece of content that people put in there gets feedbacked by somebody. And so you will basically make all this content and we're going to work there to help you improve it. And we just have a wild, like so many creators have kind of come out the other end or brands have come out the other end, like just making better and more successful content.

1:35:22And so, and we run that in 30 day sessions. I think it's like nine times a year, roughly eight or nine times a year. What's really interesting this is what we spoke about when we were at lighthouse for his bucket two and three cut 30 the continuity play and then his quote-unquote Job as being creative director and this pe firm going back to what we said earlier as well This is informing you on what is working for bucket one the sponsor deal to grow your audience And this is the hardest part about this is now when I sit down with anybody and they try to argue about an idea I have I just know innately like I've like I have before my career was like, okay, I could be wrong or right now I'm right.

1:35:55I'm just right. I see we have a hundred creators, roughly 70, a hundred creators every month in cut 30. And I know, and they're brands and careers of all sizes. So I have a complete list of like, what is okay. We're changing this regularly. Okay. Carousels are working. This is happening on Instagram and TikTok. I know probably more than anyone on the globe between the brand work and that, like what is working and not. And so it's really hard for me to like take any push back from anybody on anything. Cause I'm just like, you just, you would have no way you could have the scope of knowledge of what I have on these really specific things.

1:36:20For everybody here listen to this podcast, I am never going to have a guest on here that is not deep in the game. This is why I love these conversations. And I think by any means possible, you have to stay in the game or else, again, like we said, four, six months, you'll have no idea what's going on. Well, and if you're enabling people to win, you learn even more. Like the other part of that is I have a group chats with like people that come out of that or different, like a bunch of those more successful creators and we're all sharing. And I'm the person who encourages that typically. There's a few other people.

1:36:43Bima from CloudLab is also really good at getting people together. But like, if you're the person who's in the conduit, oh, let's get all eight of us on a chat. and you ever have a question, like bring it up or you want to, what rate should I do with this brand deal? Like if you're the person putting all those things together and then you're getting the value of the information seen and you're the connector, it just gives you so much more benefit in life. Completely agree. We give them value here. So for the creators listening, a really good action steps on how to make money. I would say first and foremost, by any means possible, get a deal.

1:37:09So you can use that as leverage and point to that. Focus on content and distribution and then create some sort of flywheel where you're learning fast because that's going to ultimately feed into the other stuff. Other creators your size, get group chats with other creators your size who are like one level above you and just like start to get to know them. So you guys are sharing info. We would not be anywhere near where we're at if I didn't. I convinced most of my friends to become creators and most of them are like 100K plus now. And then also I have a bunch of friends who are big creators and we are talking about it constantly.

1:37:35And that was like extremely helpful. Even people are always like, how do you stay so up to date on marketing? It's like Jordan Ashman and I have a chat where we're constantly sharing the links we come across that you might find interesting about marketing campaigns. So I can think about that. So I now have a multiplication because we're completely different. Jordan's all sports. Ashland's kind of way more like CPG. I'm way more like aesthetic. And so all of a sudden, we just have all of these perspectives in one place. Good friend group. Good chat there. I would say a big thing too, looking at this from like a macro perspective, like I said, just analyzing what you're doing, what Kane's doing, what other people are doing too, is you guys have a really, really healthy balance from a predictability perspective where you have continuity.

1:38:10Continuity for people listening is just money coming in every single month through these courses. And then you have kind of the one shots on goal through the sponsorships. Some of them might be more long-term, so they're more continuity. And then you have an opening to take a home run swing too. Yeah, exactly. Like right now in bucket three, that's feeding the flywheel and you're learning and learning more. But at any point in time, you have all of this income as a base. That's the best part about the creator income. We didn't change our lifestyle. That was the other big thing. It's like the lifestyle, I make way more money than when I was an executive.

1:38:38And we used to live in the same house. We drive the same cars. We already were pretty decent off, but that could really have changed. Like maybe we go on some slightly nicer trips, but what I've done with that is we hire people. We got employees to cut 30. I have people to help. We have editors. I have management. We have like, I'm willing to invest in the creative career. And I also know that if everything else went sideways, like I have not, all of a sudden I have this, like the Miami penthouse or whatever it is, you know, like I think people get really caught up in that. And if you have goals and you look at the size of the prize, like it's absolutely huge, but look, that's the best part.

1:39:06I could work probably an hour or two a day, just making content and have a wonderful life and not have to do anything else. And knowing that if I ever got sick or anything or that, or God forbid, like a health issue, I could do that. It's like a, you get that weight off your shoulders, even though I may not have 10 million in the bank. You know, it's like, you could know that you have this sustainable thing as long as content keeps going. He will have 10 million in the bank. We're getting there. All right. We're going to go to the last part before quick fire. Let's go to your team. I'd love to know just the whole entire team behind this for anybody trying to create a content machine.

1:39:34What does the team look like? Yeah. So a lot of part-time and then bringing on one more, more full-time. So I have management. So this company DMG that manages me. So they help negotiate all the deals. I don't negotiate any of those invoicing, the details of that. They also do some strategy with me. And so there's help there. There's an editor for YouTube. There's a shooter for YouTube. So my boy, Eddie comes to my house every week or sometimes every two weeks and we'll shoot YouTube in short form. So I have like additional support on that. He'll shoot stuff for a brand. He'll travel with me sometimes.

1:40:00So basically we have, yeah, the support from the management. I have accounting support and like fiscal support who helped like do my PNLs and all that every month. Editors. I do have like a VA assistant stuff, putting stuff into docs, adding everything, like doing kind of manual items behind me. And then a graphic designer. Again, this works across. Also, I didn't mention inside these buckets, but like I have brands I'm like part partial ownership in, but don't spend a ton of time on. But like a lot of these things are serviced on that. And I'm now hiring, I'm not giving those enough attention.

1:40:28So I'm hiring one person dedicated to just brand support. And then the next hire. So that's the seven, I believe that we have core. And then the next hire is a CRM person. I think we talked about separately where I want, after I saw Gary V's team about basically helping manage his relationships and sending DMs and like helping get on with other creators. I was like, oh, I'm actually leaving a lot of money and reach on the table by not doing that. Shout out uncle Tyler. Yeah, Gary is the man. Gary's going to have a massive team that's just going to be firing away at anybody. I saw Tyler and I was like, how do I get like 19 year old that like immediately?

1:40:59You know, yeah. That goes back to what we talked about before is just people that have the lists and the relationships in the economy that we're moving towards from an offline relationship economy. It becomes absolutely fucking huge. Quick question to tie up on the team side. So what does your day look like from an allocation perspective, time allocation? Yeah, so I basically, I only try to make content at night or besides I have Eddie come once a week, like on a big block on Wednesdays. That's actually later today. So I basically only try to make content like kind of after hours. I try to spend as little time like recording that as possible.

1:41:27So basically I will have like a standup every day where either I'm meeting with people or I'm assigning stuff to my team. So that's like mandatory in the morning. Then I have usually a couple hours of meetings related to like the PE stuff where we're just working through things. And then I'm doing like big blocks on, basically it's briefing and strategy. And then one or two days a week I'm in LA, either on shoots or in meetings or doing whatever. But really it's that core of like the standup. I'm building lists throughout the day. It's a lot of how my content gets done. Like at the end of every week on Friday, I have a list of like even topics we talked about here.

1:41:54I'll make a list after. that's all goes in the big video topics list. So Fridays, I'll just go through that and be like, I'm picking what I'm going to do next. And that's goes for YouTube too. I'll just like build these big lists. But really it's, yeah, it's standups, couple meetings during the day, big blocks for briefing, scrolling strategy, and then a day or two in LA. What's the one non-negotiable action step you need to take every week? I have to put the references in the fucking, in the list. Like if, because again, if you're behind, you're just behind, right? It's forever. And it's, and then the ultra high value, it's so much easier for me to make a brief if I'm just, if I'm just on top of it or like to do any of these campaigns.

1:42:24And then now like one of the next offers I'm working on is I'm gonna try and scale that. And I'm like, cool, now that my toolkit will enable a hundred other people, it makes it 10X is valuable, you know? All right, last section, we're gonna hit the quick fire. What is the most in-demand position in marketing today? Creative strategist, creative director, 100%. Basically the person that is going to say, I am briefing the ads, I am briefing the influencer, I am briefing organic, and then actually can pull it together with the relationships. It's like I get hit up every single week. People wanna call the creative director, but I think they're actually more junior than that or younger, a little more savvier.

1:42:54It could go either way. But people are hitting me up for that job every single week. What is the most important skill to have as a creator? I think organization. I think you have to be able to, if you can't turn your creative ideas or the type of video you create into something that is like a process or actionable, then you're going to burn out. That is a legendary answer that I was not going to expect. How many times should you test a content concept before giving up? I say six. I actually talk about this all the time. Yeah, it's like four to six. But if you do not give a concept six tries, then you have no idea if it's going to work or not.

1:43:25What's one thing brands should ignore doing on social media? Reposting stories of people that tag them is definitely one. I think there's any other good ones off the top of my head, but posting every day because you feel like you have to. What's an emerging trend in content types for 2025? So you're seeing it on TikTok, especially it's just the people raw talking to camera, posting like a lot a day, five times, 10 times a day, just doing like quick little yaps or skits with no production, no captions, know nothing is like very happening right now. Is information or ideas more valuable for content in 2025?

1:43:55In 2025, it's ideas. It was information in 2024, but I think we're basically reaching the peak of ideas this year as well. Like there's so much like the key format of this year, a format a lot of people popped off with. If I was doing X, this is how I do it. If I was running social media for blank, if I was starting this brand, it's an amazing way I actually think to go from here's how this person did it to now showing your own ideas and becoming employable. But that content has like reached peak saturation. So I think we're looking at what comes next and I don't know what that is yet. What's the biggest mistake brands make when they try and act like a media company?

1:44:23Trying to act like traditional media, as opposed to acting like modern media, like act like a creator in their team. Don't try to act like, God forbid, like Puck or like any of these, like, or the New York Times or any of these traditional media rooms or hiring people from traditional media. The worst hire you can make in business today is anyone that has worked at a major publication. The most underrated element of a brand photo shoot? The behind the scenes. basically. Yeah. Because like, look, a lot of the content that goes really good like is the, okay, here's how they set it up to like, here's what the result is or how they capture that or the carousel you're telling the story of who was on the shoot is like oftentimes does just as well as the campaign.

1:45:00And being intentional about it for sure. Of course. You recently said Instagram and TikTok are the highest leveraged platforms in 2025. Why? Because again, you can get views. You will show up, make your first video and you will get probably 100 views on Instagram and 400 views on TikTok out the gate with nothing. So that is a validator. They're basically giving you a free audience that you would basically have to pay for any generation before this. You would have to go on TV or buy an ad. There was no way you would get a hundred or 400 eyeballs. And even better, if it is any good, that will become a thousand eyeballs.

1:45:28If it's amazing from video one, it can become a million eyeballs. We've had multiple creators in Cut30 who've gotten 40 ,000 to a million views on their first video because it was really good. And so the ability to go from nothing to that amount of audience is like, I would like scream from the rooftops at how big of a generational opportunity that is that like the window is not going to last forever on that people just ignore. I completely agree with you. You can just post on either one of those and you're going to get 200, 300. You're going to get it three, four times. And then the fifth video is going to be a thousand.

1:45:55It's going to give you some sort of little outlier every fifth video. And then it's about incrementally growing it. And then you just hit a home run. And if you're great, we were testing this the other day with some brand stuff where I was like, cool, let's just start a new account. We're trying to determine if a brand was cooked or not, like its account. And created a new account, hit a banger video and it was like 40K right away. And he was on ig and I was like, oh like you truly can from nothing if you know what you're doing like hit something Is seo still worth the long game in 2025? Man, I think I it depends how I don't think so I depend how ai seo is going to function And I think it's too early to really lean into it yet But like getting all in on that and then the other side seo I don't know what's going to happen to it And it was already questionably worth the value unless you're really a killer at it Or you really had something that had a special like search impactful category If not is changing so fast.

1:46:37I think you kind of got to wait this one out Guys, Oren's bag is so deep that I had to cut a section on SEO. I watched it. You know what you're talking about in SEO. Man, I was so deep in SEO for so long. You have a deep bag, bro. Yeah, I mean, because I had multiple brands where SEO was everything. And I haven't worked out a client brand. My friend, Matt, I used to work for him, this guy who runs a brand called Chlorophyll Water, where I convinced him, like, don't launch this brand until you own number one for Chlorophyll because he was going to do this whole big TikTok seeding campaign. And it took like three months.

1:47:03We got number one for Chlorophyll. And then guess what? He gets to go to retailers with like, I have this big viral campaign. I have all this traffic and I have nowhere to send them. And you can tell that story with Google Analytics and TikTok Analytics. It was beautiful. For people listening for SEO, I think two things. One, it is a super, super long game. It's going to take you nine months minimum to see anything big. What this does though, is because there's a brand actually in my space that's been in the space for 20 plus years. They have all these backlinks from third-party artists that come on the marketplace.

1:47:28What that does is that just lowers your cost to acquire a customer. You're getting in organic sales. I completely agree with you. There's some AI SEO companies that are raising like a shit ton of money. Yeah, I don't think we see how that's going to play out. We see the consumer habit changing like in mass. And so I think it's just like making a long-term investment in that right now is like, look at me, might eat my words on this. Will he be willing to be wrong? I think it's like, I would just wait it out for like a year. I'm with you. All right, last three questions that I ask everybody. Favorite book or podcast and why?

1:47:57I am a huge fan of, there's a Steven Pressfield book called The Afghan Campaign. Steven Pressfield is, he wrote this book called The War of Art, which is like really impactful. It's like a self-help book for creatives. But he also wrote a bunch of like nonfiction about, he wrote Gates of Fire, which the movie 300 is based on. But I liked the Afghan campaign because the Afghan campaign is a book about Alexander the Great trying to conquer the world and how he keeps failing in Afghanistan. Much like how the US failed in Afghanistan, there's a lot of parallels to it. But you kind of get this portrait of this guy who's like accomplished all these things and brought these things together who like still can't solve this problem.

1:48:25That's a book that was really impactful to me. Entrepreneur or brand that you want to give flowers to and why? I really feel the House of Errors brand like opened up a new era in streetwear and like streetwear content. and like elevating stuff from the beginning of a brand, I think that they've done like an incredible job. So what would want to give them their flowers? I'm trying to think if there's any others that, that one in particular, I always just think back to, to like, they just, from so early, just did things so well. Favorite content creator that you want to give flowers to and why? Oh man, that's a really good one.

1:48:52I really like Bima Williams. I've talked about, he has this collab lab series. And what I love about what he did is that he created the brand with the basics, like the core basics of branding. He used color, he used his outfit, he used the way he like accentuates, like the core element like of his brand like the topics he's a generated conversation and like I see purple I think of him and the way he's like brought that throughout it I think he's done an excellent job guys you can't make this up on the last episode with Brian Garofalo CEO of Skullcandy we all we talk about the whole entire time that's a great yeah super interesting creator good guy bro you are a gangster I had so much fun I don't even know how long we went for it probably was a very very long time where can they find you at ormeetsworld on all social media it's that simple or yeah let's go what's up guys if you guys got this far in the episode, I would assume that you enjoyed it.

1:49:36If you got any value, it would mean the world if you hit the subscribe button, give it a like, post a comment, tell a friend. We could keep going bigger, bigger guests, bigger locations, more value. See you in the next episode.