Ep 593: 3 Rules for Culturally Relevant DTC Ads That Still Convert on Meta

0:00Aves:How to build culturally relevant and cultural elements into your ads in a way that makes sense.

0:06Daniel Sendecki:A lot of brands started co-opting culture and it wasn't getting them anywhere in terms of actual performance. And it was also coming off as super cringe, which is a double negative.

0:15Aves:Culture isn't disappearing as part of like the ecosystem, but like it's just changing rules. Instead of driving distribution these days, it's now providing that like context for relevance. the crossover becomes like that cultural context and like the functional resolution of kind of like whatever kind of like brand or product that you're trying to sell. When they meet like that, you have like the ideal permission to speak to that audience.

0:47Aves: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. it's all killer no filler and i am here for another episode with adventures podcast host abes as well as daniel sendecki from the pilot house team for his second appearance welcome guys

1:28Daniel Sendecki:thanks for having us here i always feel like i'm coming home when i do all killer no filler

1:34Aves:yeah that's right very nostalgic your roots are strong with us for sure i'm excited to dive into some more creative strategy insights today a couple weeks ago we had daniel on we talked about creative as an intent resolution system, which I thought was pretty interesting. The way that we're talking about having to reach different avatars and really unlock problems or really, really have our ads have a high degree of strategy and intelligence in each one. Aves, you're always talking about creative. For today's episode, we're kind of hearkening back to a talk that we did a little while ago about the idea of how to build culturally relevant and cultural elements into your ads in a way that makes sense.

2:14Aves:And the term back then was the idea of cooperating with culture rather than co-opting culture. So maybe let's start with that. Where did that come from, Aves?

2:23Daniel Sendecki:That came from an episode of this podcast where I feel like we were just riffing with someone. And it came up because I think it's important to be explicit when we're talking about marketing materials and advertising as a venture versus, you know, making organic content or like an actual artistic pursuit. And so I think we were really starting to see this, in my opinion, like gap widen between the death of millennial brand and where we were going next. And there was this weird trend of brands really co-opting culture and acting as if they were an individual. And I just kept seeing it like time and time again, fall flat.

3:08Daniel Sendecki:So I think that sentence and that idea came from this observation that a lot of brands had started co-opting culture and it wasn't getting them anywhere in terms of actual performance. And it was also coming off as super cringe, which is a double negative. If you're going to come off as cringe, at least make a little bit of money. I'm never offended by that, but if you're not doing either, it doesn't make a lot of sense.

3:30Aves:And Daniel, back to our previous episode about creative as an intent resolution system. This was in the pre-chat here. We were talking about how even when you want your ads to find a way to meet people where they're at, but at the same time, you still need to have the intent behind it. As we were saying, it can't just be like, oh, Iran's crazy, buy a blanket. So talk to me a little bit about how you see building culturally relevant moments within this intent resolution system. Yeah, it's interesting. In the algorithmic environment these days, The model is like relevance, you know, response, and that gives you reach.

4:02Aves:And it's interesting to what Avery was saying, because like, if you look back into like, you know, the golden days of like Old Spice and stuff, and then like, the brand voice is like that primary strategy. And like, today's algorithmic environment is sort of like has killed that brand voice as like that primary strategy. So like, you know, those brands spent an enormous amount of energy crafting like these witty social posts and like this personality driven copy and like all this cultural commentary. And that made sense when the distribution model was focused on attention and then people sharing that through conversation and that giving you reach.

4:41Aves:But like the algorithmic environment is really just kind of like change the model a little bit. Right. So like the question for us now becomes or the creative question becomes like, does this message help the system understand who should see this, not like, is this clever enough to be shared? Right. So like, in many ways, like the clever brand accounts are like increasingly feeling a little bit irrelevant. Maybe that's what Aves is speaking to, not to put words in your mouth, Aves, but like they're optimized for a distribution system that just no longer dominates. Like it's changed so fundamentally in the past 10 years, I think.

5:19Daniel Sendecki:Yeah, I think what's really interesting and challenging and exciting for me is that you have to have both now. When we talk about how content is distributed, you need to infuse a piece, a single piece of creative needs to be infused with both intent and a problem and solution, as well as that witty cultural relevancy to truly win and dominate. And so it's so interesting. That sense of belonging that you're like,

5:48Aves:I belong with this sentiment in a way, right? Yeah.

5:51Daniel Sendecki:There's like a larger group. And so I always think about it as being, yeah, it's so interesting because back in the day, Old Spice would have had separate teams running that, I don't know what it was 15 years ago, like a Twitter account or whatever they were using. And then they'd also have a separate team based on performance. And those were two completely separate entities where now they have to both exist in a single ad placement. And then there needs to be several hundred of those ad placements that all do the same thing of infusing both intent and culture, which is, yeah, like I said, exciting.

6:27Daniel Sendecki:And it's rare to see brands striking both at the same time in a way that feels.

6:32Aves:Do you guys have any examples? I know, like, it's funny. I remember just in the run-up to Black Friday, like coming, seeing the ads that you were sharing for some clients, Abe. And I feel like you're uniquely gifted at like pinging the millennial brain in a way with, with how you're doing it, like providing that sense of belonging, whether it's through a tongue in cheek, a little bit of humor, you're not usually doing newsjacking or anything like that, but how do you think about cooperating with cultures, you know, when you're making ads?

7:00Daniel Sendecki:Yeah, that's a really good question because I, I no offense to you guys. I hate millennials so much. And I think all my older cousins know that I've given them a hard time my whole life, but something really switched in my brain when I stepped outside of the hatred and venom I had from millennial culture.

7:21Aves:I'm Gen X, so I don't mind. I'm Gen X. I didn't catch a story there. I'm good.

7:25Daniel Sendecki:Instead started really thinking deeply about like generations. I think I did a run on adventures where I talked about like boomers, Gen X, Gen Z. what is at the core of each of those generations in terms of like an unmet need because of the environment that they grew up in and I finally came around to millennials when I was doing that because I realized the unmet need is really stability and comfort for a lot of millennials and so bringing a like large amount of humor into advertising materials for a brand that focuses on millennials just started to click because I realized that these people mostly had a lot of loans.

8:06Daniel Sendecki:They wouldn't ever buy a home like grown up in really difficult times. 9-11, the financial

8:12Aves:crisis, COVID, we got everything.

8:15Daniel Sendecki:So I started thinking about things which is very, I guess, like therapeutic in nature, which is like, what is the core wound of a generation? And then how do I address that? When I'm talking to a Gen Z audience, it's really different because that core wound is more wrapped around identity. So it's about like almost forcing a perspective on their own identity and that's where you find success. And then yeah, with millennials, it was just trying to find the funniest way to infuse intent and like cultural relevancy into a single placement.

8:48Aves:With a bit of commiseration. I feel like commiseration is a bit of the word where it's like, it's the wink nod, like we've been through a lot, you know, that that seems to be one of the ways you infused it. I think relevance is like, Abe's used that word, and that's like the important kind of like underlying here. Like the culture isn't like disappearing as part of like the ecosystem, but like it's just changing rules. So like instead of driving distribution these days, it's now providing that like context for relevance that Avery is speaking to. So the crossover becomes that cultural context and the functional resolution of whatever kind of brand or product that you're trying to sell.

9:29Aves:And when they meet like that, you have the ideal permission to speak to that audience, right?

9:37Daniel Sendecki:Yeah, we've talked a lot on, I think, both Oculator Filler and Adventurous about speaking the same language as your personas that you're speaking to. because you can nail exactly what they need to see from an intent point of view but if the ad looks in their eyes janky it's not going to hit the same because you've got so i think about this all the time the like context in which people are intaking an app is so different than it was like jane was talking about old spice i think i did an episode recently about old spice specifically and those spots were so attention grabbing and people watched the full thing but you could never make those ads in a three to five second vertical video and do the same thing like you couldn't rebrand in that way now because it required you to watch the entirety of the 30 second spot which i think the first one was maybe i just i'm trying to remember because i just did this i think they uploaded it online during the super bowl which was really interesting it wasn't like run during the super bowl but they put it on youtube because back in that day youtube was all the rage so it's really interesting just thinking about how people like the context that your content is seen in and like needing to drive that saint language visual cues because back then people would go on youtube and look up an ad because it was entertaining and now all you want to do when you see an ad is like skip, skip, skip, skip, skip, or scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll.

11:07Daniel Sendecki:So having that like exact replica of what they see organically is so important as well.

11:13Aves:I did a podcast this week with a sponsor actually called Street Talk. Have you heard of them? They basically just do in-person street interviews as an ad format. And they're basically, I think it's an interesting format because it like bypasses the critical response a little bit to an ad, to that skip, skip, skip thing, because we're so used to seeing human conversations as native content that we're actually interested in. So when you're able to create interesting conversations, I think, I don't know if it's, if it's, we, I don't know if we test much of that in, in, uh, in the ads, but it's interesting to hear.

11:43Aves:It's like authenticity. People are looking for authentic moments and we're increasingly pumping more AI and more influencers and things like that. So I could see this ad format being one that, that that's useful in the future.

11:54Daniel Sendecki:Yeah, I like right at the end of the year, I started thinking and reading a lot about like the Dada era and thinking about ads is like, why would that be an ad and getting really surreal and abstract with how I was approaching ads? Because of that exact reason, Eric, I was like, people understand what an ad is going to look like. So I was really starting to and you guys would have seen that internally with some of the ads that I was personally making. I really started to invoke questions of why would you make this into an ad? How could this like, why would this exist as an ad? Like, why would a company pay money to put this in front of me?

12:30Daniel Sendecki:And I use that as a strategy. And it's similar to the like street interview. It's like, what is that? It works against what people expect, which is good.

12:40Aves:It's an interesting analogy there, Eric, because that kind of like streeter format is something that earned media and PR have been like have drawn on for decades. And like the kind of like everyday people interviewed in the street, like you see them in broadcast news segments or like those like Vox Pop style interviews. The implicit message there wasn't like, you know, our brand is clever. It's that like real people are experiencing this problem and like here's what they think, right? Like it's tension resolution. And like they really work because they kind of like surface that human validation to what you were speaking about.

13:19Aves:And good ones can take you through the full funnel. Good ones can, you know, and because you're maybe your defenses are down to the format, you can learn about something and learn its benefits kind of by the time it just I can see it bypassing some of the urge to swipe. Aves, could you, I know we don't love to talk about client ads that we've actually created, but can you talk, I'd like to just hear a couple of the examples of the ads that you're like proudest of that have worked that are like, that kind of embody this idea of, of speaking to this group.

13:50Daniel Sendecki:Yeah. So to use that like millennial, cause I feel like that's the brand you're referring to. Some of the ads that I'm proudest of are the ads that I was the most afraid to send to the brand director but they're really willing to play ball because it works i would say one is one that i call weird guy emoji which was me going through the archives of msn emojis and figure again that quick visual cue and it's like what person who was using msn would expect to see those emojis resurface let alone expect to see them in that type of format something else i was incredibly proud of this was a big Q for me sorry that was that was ICQ that was ICQ not MSM but

14:35Aves:it would work for me if I heard that if I heard that oh in an ad I'm gonna use that I'm gonna I just had a flash I had a flashback it was like it was crazy

14:46Daniel Sendecki:also in the almost like opposite direction I was very proud I started taking because I realized that when something becomes public domain you can just use it and abuse it so I started taking historical pieces of art and using them with like all this sort of intent and resolution that Daniel talked about but it was like in these really ridiculous situations which I know was like a big pull for millennial humor was just the like absurdity of the product we're talking about it's in the soft goods category it's one of those products I actually recently saw that CEO of Coach told me about this. If your category is not a necessity, like he was saying, people can carry their stuff around in a brown paper bag.

15:30Daniel Sendecki:If your category is not a necessity, you need to be that much more clever with how you talk to the actual person. And so I really think about that a lot. But yeah, I would say Renaissance art, MSN emojis, as well as I started thinking about single static placements as like comic book strips and i also do love a bit of that's such a nerdy thing to say but i do love comedy and like the architecture of a joke so i started thinking about like how can i break this up into yeah sort of squares in a comic book and like almost within the margins like cram jokes in there and just make it so that if you didn't get one reference you were gonna get another and it was just yeah i had the most fun just a wink right it's a it's a it's a wink at

16:23Aves:the audience and it's that feeling of if you get the wink then you're you're on the in group in a

16:27Daniel Sendecki:way right yeah what i saw too like the more i could drum up that relevancy through visual cues and these winks the more incredibly positive engagement i got on my paid media which i always or as a badge of honor like when i start getting comments that are like this is a funny ad whoever made this ad deserves a raise because as you guys know people in the comment sections of ads are not nice most of the time and most of the time they're like who made this like what idiot put this out so as soon as i start to see like and i will creep people on whatever platforms they're commenting on as soon as i start to see like true representations of our target segmentation and personas commenting that they like an ad, I tend to know that that is a good direction.

17:13Daniel Sendecki:But it's interesting, like what Daniel was saying with deliverability, we really started to see when we could find these places to enter their world and their culture, that era of deliverability sort of skyrocketed because of the algorithm, which was really cool.