Bonus: How Hungryroot Scaled Meta Spend by 10x with Partnership Ads + Meta and adMixt on Cyber5 Success Strategies

16:23Kevin Simonson:To your point, we do have a long way to go in just continuing to make that more seamless for all parties involved. And some of the things that we are building here, I'm very excited about and are showing even more improved performance. And one there, Eric and Adam, is partnership ads plus catalog ads. That's one we're very, very excited about. So for any of the e-commerce companies that run catalog ads and the ability to combine that with a partnerships ad, we've seen to be particularly potent and to drive a 20 % improvement in performance.

17:00Jake Bailey:And does that just essentially make the creator look like they have a store in a way where it's like their content and then the catalog has come right underneath them. So it kind of almost looks like it's their store. But think about how compelling that is.

17:11Adam Weber:So like I get a creator to talk a video about the amazing gluten-free snacks that they got on our platform or the gluten-free dinner recipes that they bought and they're making live in their kitchen. And then the catalogs just pop up for those individual items, allowing us a very seamless inroad to get somebody to onboard into the platform. So like, I think that's going to be really exciting, Jake, when that starts to build out.

17:33Kevin Simonson:And at the end of the day, and Kevin might be able to speak to some examples he's seen on his side, but this is all about making the buy easy. And not only making it easy for the brand, but also just making it easy for the consumer to say, oh, I love what they're saying. Now I go immediately to the products that they have in front of me.

17:50Jake Bailey:I mean, that's what I would say is like, you're just removing friction. And hopefully the confusion around, wait, what are they using? Oh, where do I find it on the website? I mean, we've been doing this for a long time. And we know that if you shorten the path to conversion, typically conversion rate improves. Right. So why not start at the ad in this case? So, yeah, I think when I saw the announcements of new kind of products that were coming out, that was one that I immediately flagged to our team. It was like, oh, we got to run these. I can see these working really well. I'll back up. I wanted to add a couple of things that might be interesting.

18:18Jake Bailey:So if you run a partnership ad, it becomes its own new creative concept. So like just a classic example of this is, let's say you had a creator say something, and then you had a different creator say the exact same thing. Me as a normal person would be like, oh, that's the same concept, but to meta it's not. If it's ran through partnership from their pages. So I think that's really powerful because, for instance, we had a brand this Black Friday, Cyber Monday. They had a piece of creative takeoff around a very specific product so well that it sold out or it's about to sell out if it hasn't already.

18:51and we're like, great problem to have.

18:54Jake Bailey:The reward for good work is more work. But then I was like, hey, we can do that same ad with a different product and a different handle and it will be a new concept that we can put in the machine, right? So that's like a, oh, this is what happens and what we're gonna do about it. But I do think that's important because I don't think a lot of people know that or they add that value to say, going through the hoops to set up partnership ads, which are definitely easier than they've ever been. But it's not the same as just making a static, right? What do the deal structures look like on the creator side of things?

19:21Jake Bailey:Like if you're going to get a piece of creative and you're going to pump, you know, Black Friday levels of budget through it, you're going to, you know, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on it. Do you make deals that are one and done? Kind of like, I'm going to pay you a fee for this partnership ad? Or are there sort of rev shares or like, Adam, from your side, how did some of those deals get structured?

19:39Adam Weber:There's definitely, I think, a lot of growing diversity on this front as well in terms of how the deals get structured. And so you're starting to see it evolve from being, you know, much more of a flat fee approach to much more of a shared revenue or shared upside type of model. I think for us, what we've found success on is one structure for somebody that we're trying for the first time, and then we evolve it into a multi-touch relationship with the creator and influencer. Once we know that they're a good fit for Hungaroo, they like their product and they like the service, they deliver the message in a compelling way.

20:10Adam Weber:So we'll often arrange it that way. A lot of our deals are still like a flat fee for the organic post. Sometimes there's a slight add-on that the influencer will add to the mix for the rights to be able to do a partner ad. But I think the key thing for us is kind of the trial and aerodynamic and allowing us to go wide, try to find lots of influencers. We stick with the ones that work. We don't do one and dones because we find that actually repetition matters quite a bit here. I don't know where I saw this stop, but it was like the average message has to be delivered three or four times from a creator influencer for it to really actually drive the level of incremental purchase intent.

20:48Adam Weber:And so we prescribed to that. And a lot of our deals are structured on that multi-touch, multiple year or month type arrangement where we then actually get a financial benefit out of it as well. The creator likes it because they have stuff in the bag for the rest of the year.

21:01Jake Bailey:Do you echo those structures, Kevin, or do any that you lean towards more than others? What he described is typically what you see when it goes well. Like the first is kind of a smaller, shorter trial. It's probably cheaper. But if it does well, typically the influencer knows or the creator knows, excuse me, the brand obviously knows. So they're like, hey, we're both incentivized to make this work together longer term. And then it varies wildly by terms of numbers of followers and the space and things of that nature. It's a real win-win-win because you're also paying to grow that creator's audience.

21:33Jake Bailey:That's what I tell our brands to bring up all the time. Like, hey, a lot more people are going to be seeing you when we're putting a million dollars behind this content. That's good for them. They're trying to grow their creator brand, right? So I don't think, I think that used to get lost a lot in the outreach kind of negotiation period. But now I think more creators are matured in the space and they understand it. You should remind them that that's a big deal. This year, I came across in a couple of my recent podcasts with Pilot House, just how important it was to be nimble, to go in with a plan and go in with multiple horses in the race when it comes to all your different creatives and all your different angles, but be very willing to kind of pivot, be nimble as much as you can.

22:14Jake Bailey:Is that something you guys found during the heady holiday season? Yeah, we were on computers all day going back and forth in Slack with our brands that we work with making adjustments. I think it's kind of an interesting callback to like, like, hey, the creep of Black Friday, separate money starting earlier, I think puts you in a position to then, depending on where the company's at, whether that's revenue, contribution margin, or both, to say, oh, we now understand where we're trying to get to and we can pull these levers in terms of, say, changing the discount or whatever it is during that period.

22:45Jake Bailey:And I think that's like, okay, when you should do it, right? Because the window's running out. So yeah, I would say that's 100 % true. The other thing we saw, I don't know if you've ever saw, we have another podcast on our network called Adventurous with one of the people at Pilot House named Aves. And she's one of the creative leads at Pilot House. And she is a peak millennial. She's like, and the thing that I was realizing this year is millennials are 35 this year. Like millennials are, you know, in the, in that peak buying thing age. And she was able to make all these ads for a bunch of clients that just tickled those millennials and made them laugh, actually made like really generated some humor in, in the craziness of, of this time.

23:22Jake Bailey:And they really broke through. The ones that I just always feel like if you can make someone laugh, you can make someone chuckle from an ad. It's like a built-in brand affinity, right? Yeah. I mean, the other thing, well, to this topic in general, our focus up to the sale period, whether that's early November, Black Friday, September, Mondays, is incremental new reach. We're trying to reach new people and how you reach new people generally, top of funnel, middle of the funnel, are concepts that go after personas. Partnership ads can be a part of that. UGC is certainly a component of that. And especially because most of those content pieces are video.

23:57Jake Bailey:They're hitting the top and the mid and building that momentum. They can still close and be the bottom. But we see, because we get to pull the incremental reach report from the API, we consistently see the video, especially those types of contents, reach more new people at the top that then close off during the sale period. So that's the whole strategy right there in terms of, hey, to get new customers, you need to reach new people. How do you reach new people? all the stuff you guys are saying, right?

24:22Adam Weber:It's funny, Eric, whether it's humor and everything what Kevin just said, whether it's humor, just delivering something that's different and unique and catches people's attention. One of my favorite stories, this isn't about necessarily making somebody laugh, but one of our best performing performance heads this year was a creator who lived on a house boat in a lake. So we're talking like literally on a platform in the middle of a lake. And she obviously, it's a pain in the butt for her to get healthy groceries in particular. and she delivered this amazing piece of creative talk you know she used a drone to fly above her house and then talked about you know a video of her on like literally like a little motorboat like carrying her hunger box out out to her houseboat and i it probably made me chuckle uh but i think the point is just totally different it was an ad that just broke through um it was cord value prop it hit it great convenience of getting healthy groceries delivered to her door even if that's a houseboat clearly our market isn't getting people to live on houses in lakes No, that's a tiny market.

25:21Adam Weber:But it worked because it broke through and delivered the message.

25:25Jake Bailey:I will say you guys have probably seen the street interview ads made popular by 203 Media. So we have a few clients and we brought them in because I saw them and knew they did well from friends that had used them. And then we use them and they're funny. Like they're almost always funny, right? They hired comedians to do the street interviews. And they honestly did well. They've done well, especially, like I said, middle of funnel and top of funnel. So there's something to it for sure.

25:49Kevin Simonson:One last thing that I would add that was important for, I think, the brands that were successful this holiday season, they've kind of both hinted towards it. It's just this notion of scenario planning. A lot of folks will kind of go in with like one plan. And we all know it doesn't always go the way that you expect. So having this notion of good, better, best, like three different scenario plans going in so that you know which actions to take when something happens is really important. And even better if you have buy-in from your financial partners at your company, your CFO or VP of finance. So then you know exactly what you can do depending upon which scenario you're tracking towards.

26:27Jake Bailey:Very cool. Does that resonate with you guys? Did you have multiple scenarios for your clients, Kevin? Yeah, a lot of it was based on inventory. I think we have a – well, first, you got to reach out to Meta and say, hey, what's our credit limit at? And make sure that if you are in this situation where you need to spend more, you can, right? Like that's getting way ahead of it. But I don't think we did, just being frank, like a lot of downside, if this, then that planning. And we're fortunate enough, it didn't have to use it. But a lot of it's like, hey, if this goes really well, what can we do?

26:57Jake Bailey:And if we run out of inventory, what should we do? That comes up pretty consistently. And then, Adam, you mentioned that as the kind of company you guys are, that Q5 is probably a little bit bigger than the Black Friday, Cyber Monday stuff. I guess, were you kind of planting the seed? What does your Q5 look like for everyone in January wants to eat better for all these ways? So that's your Super Bowl. Talk to me about that.

27:20Adam Weber:You know, it's wild. It's very different than Black Friday, Saturday, Monday fives. In some ways, it's very similar to others. The way it's similar is that the volume ramps tremendously fast. Like you'd be surprised. Like we're talking 8 a.m. Eastern on 1226. It's like Q5 starts. It's not about like a gradual increase. You can see the dynamic in the consumers' minds. You can see the dynamic in the media landscape change all at once. And it scales incredibly rapid. It does last longer than Black Friday, Saturday, Monday, five days. It lasts well into January, February, at least for our business.

27:53Adam Weber:And I think the big thing is, to me, it's all about habit change. And I think that so unlike the pressure to get a promo or a deal right, which is kind of how C5 works, this is really about kind of going back to your fundamentals when people are most open to changing their habits and reevaluating how they eat and looking to try to change things up. How do you deliver, you know, all of our best foot forward in this timeframe when the market's the hottest and the media landscape is the most favorable. And so like, it's nicer in a way that because it goes back to just delivering the fundamentals better, but just doing it at a bigger scale and not having the pressure of it having to be a deal the whole time.

28:29Jake Bailey:Do you do a deal? Or is that another benefit of being this kind of business where you don't have to do deep discounts. It's more of the time of year.

28:35Adam Weber:We do have regular ongoing promotions for new customers. That is kind of a regular dynamic in our category. But there's nothing like amplified about this time period. So we don't have to give away more in order to attract customers. They're just naturally in the market to try to find and change their eating habits. And our solution fits great for that. But what I still love about it, you kind of still get the same adrenaline rush as the C5, as a marketer. We're sitting around, it's war room. I wake up at the crack of dawn the day after Christmas and I'm ready to go and our whole team's ready to go.

29:09Adam Weber:It's scenario planned out, like Jake said. Last year, we learned our lesson. Whatever best scenario we could have come up with, we beat by a whole lot. It's really important you think ahead to get all the inventory, the supply chain, a great customer experience all lined up in all the different scenarios. You still get the adrenaline rush of that like really high, high impact, high scale moment in the business. And it's so it's a lot of fun.

29:32Jake Bailey:You're really exemplifying this idea of avatar based marketing really well. Talk to me about what you what you sort of arm yourself with in January. Do you want multiple creators along each one of those sort of problem axes that you're going to be testing? Is that kind of how you think about it?

29:47Adam Weber:Yeah, and we do the same thing across our regular video based ads that we create ourselves. We look at all the different kind of set customer segments we have and all the different value props we have. And it kind of creates a puzzle, right? Because you can go inside of each of those different personas, each of those niches, niche customer audiences, and talk about the individualized reasons why we're special. A lot of times that comes through when we're creating the ads themselves, that the unique spins come in the hook. And the common denominator kind of may stay the same within a customer segment.

30:15Adam Weber:On partners, obviously, you kind of get one more crack, you only get one crack at it per post. That's a lot more about finding what's most compelling for that creator to talk about and letting them talk about it. But yeah, we assemble, this is probably similar to the C5 dynamic, massive amounts of ads throughout the months of November, December that we don't launch at all. And we just sit on and then we launch them all at the exact same time on December 26th. And they all go out and they're just finding all that incremental reach all at the same time.

30:43Kevin Simonson:One other thing I would add to that too, Eric, is that the consumer is still in that buying mindset. And whether that's buying for their family in Adam's case or whether that's buying for themselves, they're thinking about renewal and starting fresh and starting healthy. So that's a big piece of it. But in addition to that, we also see a lot of services-based brands and advertisers advertising at this same time because of that same reason. People, consumers are thinking about projects for the new year. And so anybody who's in this services-based business, someone similar to Adam's, they're also thinking about leads and lead gen and what that means for feeding the funnel as they broach into the next year.

31:24Jake Bailey:Well, just to get nerdy on campaign structure real briefly, I heard, I'm starting to hear for the first time advertisers sort of like foregoing testing campaigns. That's one thing I've heard, they're just building everything into their scaling campaigns and they feel the algorithm is good enough to test. And if you're diverse enough in your creative, you don't need to force budget into different creatives, the algorithm or do that. Kevin, from your side, what are you guys thinking about campaign structure and testing? If you want to do a separate podcast, I'll just rant about this for... I will.

31:56Jake Bailey:So the reason this topic makes me rant is because everybody's different. Everybody's different. And I feel like our community, while hopefully it's fun spirited, comparing a brand, like a retail brand, maybe they have their own stores, maybe a third-party retail, maybe they have 500 SKUs to a supplement brand with three different flavors and saying, hey, you should run it this way is crazy to me. I've just worked with too many brands, too many different business models over 15 years to where I say it's a one size fits all or this works best. I think there's so many caveats that it just drives me nuts.

32:31Jake Bailey:So like, I mean, matter of fact, I went and asked this to my directors about two months ago, every single one of them had a different answer. There are themes, there are themes with respect to like ASC and things like that, but everyone had a very different answer based on that business. And those answers were because they work. Right. So I don't know. I mean, I, uh, I appreciate the conversation and I think it's interesting to see what other people do, but I think that when you get really, really good at this stuff, it's just nuanced and rant and rant or very equivocal hot take. Adam, what's your hot take?

33:06Adam Weber:I don't have a hot one on this one. I'm in agreement. I think it's different for everybody. And I think it's really hard to say this is right or this is wrong. I think for us, we lean more into allowing our creative diversity and our broad audience reach to breathe. And so we set up our account to allow that to happen. But that doesn't mean it's right or wrong. It just means what works for us.

33:27Jake Bailey:Okay, Jake, tell us what's right. Yeah, you have all the data.

33:31Kevin Simonson:It really is different by brand that we work with. And we work with some of the most advanced performance advertisers in the world. And some of them will take a small percentage of their budget to dedicate to testing. And some of them, to your point, Eric, will just full on lean into it because the AI has gotten so much better than any one person's ability to arbitrage or pull the levers themselves. And so that's why we push so hard for people to adopt account simplification and adopt automation, because at the end of the day, those are the things that are going to take the most signal and ruthlessly drive the best outcomes for the brands.

34:10Jake Bailey:Does anyone have any hot takes? Does anyone have any? We love hot takes on the DTC podcast. Kevin, you must have some hot takes. Give me a hot take. I mean, this is a phone. Interest targeting still works. Very good. Love to hear it. We do it because it works. So we run it how we're supposed to with the incrementality testing and lift studies. And it helps us grow mid and top of funnel when done correctly. So we don't have to get into that unless you want to. Scorching. But that would probably be the one thing that I bring up on a regular basis. People are like, what year is it? You know? So yeah, it's a thing we do.

34:43Jake Bailey:I like it. Got to test. Got to test everything. Adam, any hot takes from your side? Or do you want to get in an argument?

34:50Adam Weber:No arguments. And this is a little bit of like, you know, I don't know if it's a hot take, but at least, you know, where we're investing for 2026 and where we think things are heading. We've been really spending a lot of time this year and investing quite a bit, building on a team to focus on organic content and identifying pretty quickly that there's a lot of crossover between what we're talking about here from a paid standpoint and also what works organically. Food as a pillar is like one of the, you know, top most engaged with verticals from a, you know, social content standpoint. So it makes a ton of sense for our business.

35:21Adam Weber:We think it's a great way to build brand, build customer relationships with our existing customers. And it's been feeding a lot of the creativity for our paid as well. So there's a lot of time we're spending on organic. Again, I don't know if that's a hot topic, but I think it's something that's emerging.

35:37Jake Bailey:When you're talking with meta and you're talking about organic content, it's pretty hot, pretty spicy.

35:40Kevin Simonson:Listen, I will say this, and this might be a hot take for Adam, but he's being very modest. His team is exceptional at operationalizing all things creators and partnership ads. And it's really special when you get to see a brand like this take off at the level that they are right now and just seeing how well they've executed here. So Adam is being very modest, but I think a lot of brands could learn a lot from him and the company.

36:06Jake Bailey:Don't run to the ad library of Hungry Root and go check it out. On the 26th. See what you can pick up. On the 26th. You're there today, but you're not going to find anything interesting. Just wait. At the end of the year, we like to do something called the double down where we're like, what are the things that really worked this year that you're going to double down on next year? It sounds like partnership ads are going to be a big part of that. Anything else to add there, Kevin? Well, I think that I was talking to Jake about this the other day. I think that the pendulum swings back and forth in terms of what's hot on marketing, like organic coming back, right?

36:38Jake Bailey:Love it. And I do think it makes sense in the food vertical, beauty vertical, totally. And health and wellness, right? Like there's some that just lend itself to that. But I think the pendulum swung years ago to, hey, just throw a lot of creative at the wall and go broad and it'll figure it out. And we got away from, I think, certain levels of measurement. And I think you've seen the rise in a bunch of different companies, right? North Beam, Triplewell, House, right, measured. Because measurement's coming back and a pendulum's swinging. because it's not just throwing about a bunch of creative, but at scale, I mean, really at scale, when you're trying to reach new people, you need to measure mid and top.

37:17Jake Bailey:And I'm glad the conversation is moving that way because it's more technical as opposed to just like, yeah, broad and lots of stuff on the wall, which frankly is kind of lazy, even if it's a lot of work. I just think it's bad work. So my 2026 is that that's going to continue. So that could be my double down. And I think it's even going to go further. And it's a return to traditional marketing to not just having one platform where you can just throw a bunch of creative in and it'll sort it out. Like that's the, I did a podcast recently with Nick Sharman. He's like the number one thing that's changed this year that from three years ago is every brand has a strategist.

37:50Jake Bailey:Every brand has a creative strategist. We've reoriented Pilot House to be, you know, to have this layer of, of strategists on top because you, you just can't throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. You have to be thoughtful about it.

38:01Adam Weber:I can say this as an, as an old school brand guy, but it's, it's cool to be a brand marketer again. And so, you know, I think for years, everybody, you know, that was a word that people shunned and it was all about performance and performance importance. Now you got to be good at both. And it's the people who understand strategy, segmentation, messaging, compelling storytelling, they're needed on a team now in a way that they've never been.

38:24Jake Bailey:Jake, any predictions for what you're seeing being a massive factor in 2026?

38:28Kevin Simonson:I think it wouldn't be 2025 if we didn't talk about AI and where things are headed. We are all running at this a million miles per hour, us being no exception to that. And it is going to make both the brand and performance marketers' lives a lot easier. In some ways, probably a little bit more complex in the short term, but it's all going to be about getting the right content in front of the right consumer at the right time and driving outcomes that are incremental. And to Kevin's point, leaning back into measurement is now more important than ever. And so for any CMO or CEO that I'm talking to, I'm stressing incrementality and making sure that they're leaning into that to make sure they're getting the most bang for their buck.

39:12Jake Bailey:Kevin, how are you thinking about, you mentioned middle and top of funnel. Are there any new ways that maybe you weren't a couple of years ago thinking about that? Like, are you talking about streaming? Are you talking about, is it partnership ads specifically? Yeah. I'm actually specifically, when I'm talking about, for the sake of this conversation, just meta. So I know from a marketing strategy standpoint, certainly multi-channel, linear, connected, everything, right? Yes, that is top and mid traditionally and actually more so than just meta. But I'm talking about actually bottom, mid, and top within meta.

39:45Jake Bailey:Because we do have some brands that are, frankly, two channels deep, maybe three, right? And spending a significant amount of money compared to their peers where we have to have that middle and top of funnel strategy just within the channel. The equivalent on Google is probably YouTube to search, right? But meta, it's all siloed. So it could be both, but I'm referring to specifically meta. And are you letting the content determine the content and maybe the targeting as opposed to running awareness campaigns, for instance? Or are you actually using those campaign types? It's a good question. So it's targeting, structure, and creative, if I was going to simplify it into three things.

40:22Jake Bailey:And it's going to vary by brand. But like I said, we do interest and lookalike targeting still to this day in conjunction with the majority being broad, frankly, but then creative tailored to that interest targeting when applicable. We get that targeting information of our ideas of who we should target based off of Meta's data, based off of Google's data. Because I think something that's talked about a lot for whatever reason in startups, when it comes to performance marketing that's not talked about on the brand side as much, is product channel fit. So identifying, say, a persona using some other channel and being like, hey, why isn't this working for us, say, in meta?

41:00Jake Bailey:Well, we got to figure it out. So I think there's very creative ways to go out there and find maybe who might be in your TAM that you're not necessarily hitting with your creative and then structuring and targeting an account to go get those people or put yourself in the best position to succeed and making sure you're adding the incrementality studies on top of that to prove that there's new people. but you know the vast majority of our brand's goals are is ncac right lowest new customer cost per acquisition and new customer growth in general so to do that you have to shore up exclusions you have to have a structure that's airtight and then you have to do these things on top of it i could talk to you guys all day about this stuff this is a great great round thanks for coming on the ddc podcast yeah this is fantastic if you're looking to improve your diet you should go to hungry root please do check out ad mixed as well.

41:48Jake Bailey:And you might've heard of meta. Uh, they're going to be a big, big factor, I think in this, in 2026 and beyond, uh, Jake, thanks for putting this together. This is fantastic.

41:56Kevin Simonson:Love spending time with you guys. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks y 'all.

42:06Jake Bailey:Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not a subscriber to our newsletter, you can do that right now at direct-to-consumer, all one word, dot co. I'm Eric Dick, and this has been the D2C Podcast. We'll see you next time.