Ep 575: The Angle Audit: How to Break Out of the $5M “Vibes Plateau”| AKNF x Ad-Venturous

0:00Avery Valerio:It's all killer, no filler. And for this week's D2C podcast, AKNF episode, we're bringing you an absolute banger from our sister show, Adventurous, hosted by the ever sharp Aves Valerio. It's called Adventurous Angles. And if you're running any creative at any level, brand or performance, you'll want to lock this one in. Every breaks down how most DTC brands stall at the same point, coasting on vibes and aesthetic without ever doing the deep work on angles. The strategic hooks that connect your product to actual humans. She shares how to build winning angles from scratch, what makes them tick and how to scale them across your funnel.

0:35Avery Valerio:So let's get into it on with the show. If you want to start really scaling and really growing, you're going to need to address the sort of elephant of not having substantial angles. Better do that work sooner than later so you can create everything with your top angles and top personas in mind. Angles are the point of connection for a brand or a product and their audience. In today's media landscape, angles need to be agile and they need to be sort of broader than ever before in their conception. I have a secret weapon for angle ideation and no, it is not a custom GPT.

1:22Avery Valerio:This episode is brought to you by Contentful. Marketers, you know that feeling when your creative clicks, when that social post sends engagement through the roof, when your outside-of-the-box campaign hits ROI positive, when a personalized homepage turns prospects into customers? It's utter marketing bliss. Contentful helps you create tailored omni-channel experiences without working overtime. No stress, no limits, only possibilities. Get the feels at contentful.com. Hi, welcome back to Adventurous, the podcast produced by DTC and hosted by me, Aves. Today we're going to be talking about angles, not the math kind, although I do like math, but we are going to be talking about the marketing kind.

2:09I feel like there's such a high demand for content velocity right now that it's really easy to lose sight of real angles and sort of replace them with vibes and lifestyle content and really brand focused content. And that stuff does work and it can help you scale up your organic channels. And sometimes even when we bring that sort of like aesthetic B-roll over to paid, it works well. but I've audited like a ton of brands who come through having done that exactly so you have a again I don't want to overuse the word vibe I feel like as a society we've sort of overused the word vibe but if you have a product in a brand that just like is very aesthetically pleasing you may have been able to take yourself to like three five mil in rev a year without genuinely thinking about what the angles are that work for your product or your brand.

3:08So number one, congrats. Lucky you. That's always really fun. And it is really exciting when I do see brands in that position, because what that means to me is it's like you do really have something there. You have a core issue that you're solving. You have an attractive brand. The product just fits really well in the marketplace. But if you want to start really scaling and really growing, you're going to need to address the sort of elephant of not having substantial angles. So better to do that work sooner than later so you can kind of create everything with your top angles and top personas in mind.

3:43So yeah, if you're in that spot now or if you're just starting off or if you just want to get better at creating winning ads, this episode is definitely for you. I guess who doesn't want to get better at creating winning ads? That was kind of like a silly one to put in. Anyway, But typically when I see brands like I just talked about really heavy on vibes, really heavy on aesthetic and lifestyle B-roll, they've gained a lot of organic momentum. We have to at that point start talking and thinking about strategy. We need to really think about what we're producing. We need to think about who we're trying to attract with that content.

4:18And again, we need to just really ground it in some angles that are proven out to work. One of my closest collaborators and I, we always joke about coming into performance marketing. We both come from backgrounds in brand and segmentation communication. So we've really seen in real time digital marketing advertisers really have to come around to some of our ways of thinking when it comes to capturing attention and demand in a strategic way. And it is very exciting. I think both her and I are very cheeky and we like being right. So we like being early and right about things. And one of those things is definitely strategy.

5:00So that stuff being like segmentation and personas, why buys, angle development, product development, all of that. For a while, like I said, digital marketers wouldn't really have to consider these things because the thrill of seeing something cool on your phone and then being able to buy it instantaneously was enough of a net new cool shopping experience that it really ballooned out what DTC startups could do with little to no strategy. I'm not saying that was a bad thing. It's like a fun golden era where so many cool brands were born out of that time. But now, oh boy, we all have to return to the roots of marketing and advertising and communication.

5:42We have to get a little Freudian with it. We have to think about the psychology of these angles. Personally, like I said, as someone who came from that background and also as someone who is kind of a nerd, I love that. That's really fun for me. That's a good time. So back to angles themselves, which are a really small part of this overarching strategy that we're talking about. I want to talk to you guys today about how I go about developing angles that actually work across an entire suite of personas that work from sort of the very top of the funnel. we're talking meta, we're talking Snapchat ads, doing pretty well, we're talking things like Apploving, all those really top of funnel platforms, all the way down to how to consistently bring those angles out in any kind of bottom of funnel marketing you're doing, whether that's retention efforts, website, all of that stuff.

6:31We're going to talk about how to take your best angles, first how to make them, and then how to spread those angles out all over your e-com strategy. Let's just get into it. I feel like these tactical episodes, I really don't need to be like yapping so much. I'm just going to give you guys the goods, give you some tips and tricks. But before we do, quick little shout out. I am going to be talking about a tool that I made again on this episode. So if you're interested in seeing the tool visually, you can head over to LinkedIn where I'm just Aves Valerio, V-A-L-E-R-I-O. I'll also be posting it on TikTok if you who like to rot your brain like I do.

7:11And the username there is ad underscore venturous underscore Abe. So you can check out the tool on either of those platforms. After you listen to the episode, I'll be posting some like short form video content and links to the tool there. So what is an angle? Let's just start there foundationally. To put it very simple, an angle in this context is the positioning you use to attract a customer to your product. An angle in sort of older school marketing would be the very core of a large campaign. Across digital execution nowadays in this media landscape, an angle is usually what drives the creation of an ad.

7:53Hopefully that makes sense. As a breakdown, it's basically, like I said, it's just how you position your product out there in the world. An angle can basically be driven by one of two things, in my opinion, a product feature or a product benefit. So it's like the steak or the sizzle, if that makes sense. An example of this could be the mug itself keeps things warm for very long. That is a product feature focused angle. But one of the product benefit angles could be my make-believe mug brand. Let's pretend everyone loves it and it gives you a sense of belonging because it's like bigger than Stanley.

8:33And if you don't have one of these mugs, you're out. So the like product benefit would be social status and belonging. So that's just like a very quick, weird example of how I think about those two things. But especially in today's media landscape, I think an angle has to be tied to one of those two things because you need to create a real value moment in all of your touch points with users. Angles, most of the time when we develop them these days, are for top of funnel channels and audiences. We're looking to attract new customers. We're looking to get more eyeballs on the brands. For me, when I think about bottom of funnel or returning customers, I think about why buys more than I think about angles.

9:15Because a lot of the times, especially depending on sort of your SKU matrix and mix, they're already really familiar with the angles. So blasting them with campaigns about like the mug keeps things warm for very long isn't going to necessarily work because they already understand that angle. So why buys being product news, sort of like discounting info if it's relevant, urgency, scarcity. That's where that stuff kind of lives rather than angles. So hopefully that breakdown makes sense as well. But let's really sort of take things back to our roots here today, guys. The subject of the very first episode of Adventurous was my own favorite ad of all time, which was the Aaron Burr Gut Milk ad.

9:59I feel like maybe you can hear it in my voice. I am smiling because I love that ad so much. It's so funny. Anytime I think about it, I'll probably watch it after this. But in case you missed that episode, go listen now. Or maybe don't because it was like 24 episodes ago and it was my first time ever recording like a full episode of something. So who knows if it stands the test of time. But if you missed it, here's a quick recap of the actual spot. So basically, there's this guy. He's got a bunch of Aaron Burr merch all around his home. They've dressed the set really well for the ad. You can tell this guy is like weirdly obsessed with Aaron Burr and Hamilton.

10:39And so he's listening to the radio. Maybe it's the morning. Who knows? And he's making himself a peanut butter sandwich. And he takes the world's biggest bite of this sandwich, which looks like a really bad sandwich. It's just white bread and like a ton of peanut butter. It looks really nasty. But as he takes a bite of the sandwich, they announce on the radio that the big question of the day, that if you answer, you win a ton of money. The question is, who shot Alexander Hamilton? And obviously, a guy obsessed with Aaron Burr knows the answer to that. So this guy is super panicked. He starts like calling.

11:10He gets on the station. They pick up his phone. And he's ready to answer. He has the answer. and he can't do it because he doesn't have any milk. He tries pouring some from the carton. He's out of milk. The peanut butter is like sealing his mouth shut. So he can't answer. He loses. He doesn't make the money. And so it's a big bummer, right? It's like no milk. Oh no. What are we all going to do? What is the angle there? It's very interesting to think about. What is the angle there? I'll pause here. I'll let you think.

11:41Avery Valerio:Come up with your answer based on that description. Okay. This is the angle. The angle is, to not mince my words, I guess, it's like a massive pain in the ass when you run out of milk. That is the angle. The genius of that angle is that the angle is not the product. It's actually barely even a benefit of the product because milk itself, I talked about this in that first episode, it's like a horrendously and hideously boring thing to market. Everybody knows about milk, especially at that point in time. I think this context is really interesting when we think about gut milk as a spot. At that time, like the sort of main angle to get people to buy milk was milk does a body good.

12:26And every single person at that time knew that about milk, that it supposedly, this is also coming from someone who does not drink milk. So take this with a grain of salt when I say supposedly. But anyway, supposedly milk was like good for your bones and had a lot of calcium in it. That's neither here nor there. the main angle for milk at that time was like it's good for you you have to drink it but milk sales were going down right so there it wasn't working it wasn't resonating anymore and they needed to think outside the box and so really with milk the main thing is when you don't have it it's annoying because you're not gonna go out in the middle of making your coffee to grab milk it's just genius if you want to know more listen to that first episode but i wanted to re-dig into that ad because I think it's a really good example of how angles are the point of connection for a brand or a product and their audience.

13:17How you express those angles, we'll get into that in a little bit, is where you can really start to deploy some brand fundamentals. But the angle itself is really, like I said, that point of connection between you as a brand or a product and your audience. So for the Gut Milk campaign, Goodbean Silverstein, love them. That point of connection was so interesting because they found it through research and just figuring out like, how do people buy milk period? When do we notice milk? What is interesting about milk? And that's how they came to that angle of you don't want to run out of it. So yeah, really try when you think about angles to frame it through that piece of connection point of view, because I think that really helps you understand your audience and what they want to hear and what's going to make a successful angle.

14:04So that is some sort of ground laying around what is an angle, how do we think about angles over here at Pilot House, but I want to chat a little bit about how to develop angles as well because that's obviously a really big part of everyone's day-to-day job. I do have a secret weapon. I don't know why I didn't use it at the beginning of the episode as like a hook so that you listen longer. I do work in marketing so I should know better, but I have a secret weapon for angle ideation and no, it is not a custom GPT. Do not be silly. It is a hand-drawn graph of an upside-down triangle. And to be super fair to me, I have since recreated that upside-down triangle as a document that can be used.

14:50And I will, like I mentioned, be posting it on LinkedIn and TikTok. So check it out there. It's no longer just one scrap of paper that I use. It's like fully available. So back to the secret weapon, I created this little angle ideation triangle because I found that within the context of DTC and startups and digital marketing as it stands today, I needed to consistently come up with angles that worked across the funnel and across my suite of personas. I needed to come up with ways to reuse the same angle for different platforms and for different stages of awareness, which is massively different when you compare, you know, the work that I do today to the work that Goodby and Silverstein were doing with Got Milk because they were making a single spot they knew where people were going to see it they'd be watching tv they knew all of this other stuff that we just don't know so very different and the requirement of angles is sort of just as high as the requirement of content as well so that is why i created this again just out of like pure necessity and it works really well angles used to be these like big sweeping things like i mentioned the best angles previously would create culture that sort of made them more relevant But nowadays, I think the strongest angles are more of a reflection of culture and they do less actual culture building.

16:10In today's media landscape, angles need to be agile and they need to be sort of broader than ever before in their conception, which I'll get into in a moment. When I'm onboarding an account and I'm starting with sort of next to nothing in terms of creative strategy, this is my exact process. I feel like this is hopefully going to be helpful for you guys to figure out sort of where any gaps are. but number one I create a really highly curated playlist based on the vibe of the brand and I'm pretty sure that's just a me thing and it's actually not that helpful but I find it very helpful because then I listen to that playlist as I get into my research mode I did want to share a fun personal anecdote once that hyper curated playlist for a brand was life is a highway only and I listened to that song on repeat for days and then I'm not kidding you I did some of the best like brand development work I've ever done immediately after.

17:03It's like something broke in my brain listening to that song so many times, but I really got it in the end. So maybe try that, maybe don't, up to you. But on to more serious applicable tools when you are onboarding or starting with a brand or kicking off your own brand, or if you just want to validate if you're doing it right. Number one, the real number one, not the playlist number one, is I dig into all the market research the brand has done previous to me and also any sort of market research for relevant brands. So I like to again start with what has been brought to me. I look over you know whether it's a post-purchase survey, whether it's actual consumer insights research.

17:45I take in everything the brand already has and then I start combing through things like reviews. I look at Reddit depending on the brand try to figure out how people are thinking and talking about this product and I try to find a couple of key points in this research period first of all I try to really understand if the brand is a little bit delusional or not and I'm being really serious when I say that because sometimes brands come in or brands are founded with this idea of who their target persona is and sometimes they are completely off base and other times they might be missing a huge sort of central audience where there's a lot of potential for growth.

18:26So I try to just almost gut check and make sure that we have accounted for everyone who is a potential customer and we kind of understand a full scope layout of what our segmentation should look like instead of just a broad idea or too specific of a like 25 to 30 year old woman making x amount of money per year like usually it's not going to be that niche so really making sure that i understand and the brand understands who the highest yield audiences are what the size of the prize is and then sort of going from there i'm not going to dwell on this whole process of figuring out your personas too much today because this episode is not about segmentation it is about angles but i do really like talking about personas and segmentation.

19:11So we can do a deep dive app if you guys would find that helpful. Let me know in the comments. Also, if segmentations and persona sort of categorization and product matrix aligning to your personas, if that's something that you're curious about, we do have a whole team of strategists over here at Pilot House who every day wake up and work on this type of stuff specifically with our partners. And I think, you know, something I've seen now with a lot of years of experience talking to brand owners, auditing brands with Pilot House is that when this core sort of foundational strategic work in terms of segmentation and personas, when it isn't done or it's incomplete or it hasn't really been validated, your chances at reaching that next level of scale are slim to none.

19:57It needs to be done before you need it so that once you do need it to reach that next level of scale, you're cooking. So yeah, if you want to see an episode on this, let me know in the comments on sort of segmentation and personas. But also another cool fun option is to head over to the Pilothouse website and fill out a lead form. Tell them you've come from Adventurous and we can chat really directly. We can set up a call right away and chat about your business and what's going on with your segmentation and your personas. and just figure out if we can help at all. It's also really fun for me to chat to brands.

20:30I love it. I don't know if you can tell. It's very fun to like problem solve in that way. So yeah, if you're curious at all about how we go about it and want a more detailed approach, go over to the Pilot House website, fill out that lead form, tell them you came from Adventurous and we can chat directly. But back to this process and my secret weapon. So once I've gone through and validated that brand strat component and really looked at the growth strategy behind a brand that I'm going to start working with, I then break my thoughts into a bit of a persona and angle matrix. I start looking at angles that are already relevant for the brand, and I want to find what people actually like about the products.

21:09And I try to be very objective as I do that. I try to find really big angles for the brand and for top performing product specifically and then I start sort of scratching down how I think these angles are relevant to the personas that I have and this is when I grab my secret weapon that I call the triangle and that is such a funny name and like most of the best jokes that you've ever heard I'm now going to explain to you why it is so funny it's like try because I split it into three parts the top, the middle, and the bottom, and angle because it houses your angles. And also, it looks like a triangle.

21:52It's super funny. It works on like every level. It's peak comedy. I'm sure Joe Rogan is shaking in his boots. I'm the premier comedian with a podcast. Anyway, the triangle. It's upside down, which is very important. I use this triangle to workshop each individual angle. as I am saying that, that sounds like a lot, that is what I do. I workshop each individual angle and how it relates to a specific persona in the mix. I do this because I want every angle that I am running for a brand, I want it to work and be relevant at each stage of the funnel. I want to challenge myself to make sure that it is relevant and represented across every single platform.

22:34And I also want to make sure that I am representing it in a way that is communicated clearly to the persona I am targeting. So like I said, it's kind of a lot, but acting like a psycho and doing a lot of planning does create better content. I hate to tell you, if you're looking to hack your way into making relevant, hype, cool content for a brand, it's not going to happen. You just have to do this amount of work. So get that out of the way. The first layer of the triangle I'm very excited to announce is where I store variations of the angle that I think every single person should just be able to relate to.

23:09So it's like top, top, top, top of the funnel. Anyone on any platform should be able to relate to the notes that I have in there. So I'm going to use my like typical fake coffee cup brand to give you guys a more practical example of how I actually fill out the three sections of the triangle. So let's say I am filling out this triangle exercise under these parameters. The angle I'm looking at is that the travel mug keeps coffee warmer for longer and the persona I have is trend-focused Gen Z women. So in that first layer, I'm going to fill it up with reasons and ideas and pieces of copy around why every Gen Z woman needs a travel mug that keeps her coffee warmer for longer.

23:57I usually do build my triangles in platforms like Milanote or Figma so that I can also add an actual ad examples of how I'm going to execute this. I do that in each layer, but I start, like I said, very top of the iceberg. And obviously I know this, you know this, not all Gen Z women are the same, but there are going to be a lot of overlapping similarities from person to person. So I will make sweeping sort of assumptions. It's like, maybe I don't think this is true as someone who is inside this persona myself but maybe it's like gen z women are very busy the demand is to wear a lot of hats in a lot of jobs so they're all very busy and they don't get to drinking their coffee at the office very quickly that is something that most people can just relate to not being able to get to your coffee and that nice relaxation point very quickly so running with things like that that are just someone who is completely cold to your brand is going to understand like being disappointed when they go to take a sip of coffee and it's cold.

24:58Every single person can kind of relate to that experience. So the very top of the triangle, that's where I put all that stuff. The middle layer is very interesting because it houses two central ideas. The first group is that people inside the fold will understand this problem or this benefit. And the other part of this in the middle is people outside of the fold will be genuinely curious about what we're saying. So I want every idea that I put into this middle layer of the triangle to tick both of those boxes essentially. I want people who are already sort of aware of coffee mugs to know exactly what I'm talking about and I want people who don't think much about what they use as a travel mug to be genuinely curious about what I'm presenting around this angle.

25:45So that middle piece really is like true middle of funnel marketing but you should really like I said break down your angle into how would you actually describe it under those two parameters, which is people inside the fold will understand this and people outside the fold will be curious about this. Something that I find really interesting when I'm working with brands is that a lot of the times when we assume that we're speaking to someone who already knows the brand or is already very educated on the product, we start to use a lot of sort of like insider baseball lingo and we start to lean on crutches.

26:19And I think that a big mistake is, you know, we all spend a lot of time thinking about the brands that we work with or thinking about digital marketing in general. And so it's really a good note to think about the second part, which is people outside of the fold will be curious about this. Are you actually sparking substantial curiosity? Are you getting people to click through? If we're using those parameters of the angle is the travel mug keeps your coffee warmer for longer and the main persona is Gen Z women, some variation of that angle within this middle part would be really centered around problem agitation, I guess.

26:59And we'd be really thinking about how do we visually demonstrate cold coffee? so that is the middle layer of the triangle i do find this one the most challenging personally to kind of fill out as much as the other two parts of the triangle but it is where the most value is because most products unless you are really engineering something different most products will kind of live in this middle territory where people understand them fundamentally but you need to make them see how different your product is so this middle part is probably the most beneficial the last part of the tri angle is people inside the fold will be curious about this so this type of content i will say i don't like running as paid ads i like putting it on organic channels and i like you know using this as a jumping off point for email but i don't think that the content that you develop at the very bottom of the triangle which is basically just an iceberg but the very bottom of the iceberg triangle whatever you want to call it this idea that people inside the fold will be curious about it.

28:05It is better suited for organic and it is better suited for building community rather than performance marketing. So there's a caveat there. I think it's important to understand the full triangle because like I said, you really want to know how you're activating angles across the entire business. So it's helpful to do it all at one time so you can really start to see how things connect together and what that customer journey could ideally look like. So people inside the fold will be curious about this. It's a really interesting way to frame this, at least for me. I like to think about it as sort of what I mentioned before, really focused on building community through your content that you're developing in this section.

28:47So thinking again in the parameters that I set up, which are the travel mug keeps coffee warmer for longer and we're focused on gen z women we might look at creating content on the organic side that is aimed at specifically gen z women so using a lot of sort of visual signals to them that we're talking to them maybe thrown in like a road lip balm next to the coffee mug but it's really about signaling to that group of people that you are talking to them and then softly introducing the product. This type of content is really good to brainstorm around when we're thinking about trying to get new people into the fold or say you are an established brand and you have a new product launch that's going to reach out beyond your typical persona.