Ep 611: Velocity Isn't Strategy – Pilothouse on the Andromeda Creative Trap

0:00Before we jump into today's all killer, no filler episode, a quick word about who makes this show possible. The D2C podcast is brought to you by Pilot House, the performance agency behind some of the fastest growing D2C brands in the world. Creative, media, and customer journey all under one roof. Performance and brand without the trade-off. Every Friday, we hand the mic to a Pilot House operator to break down what's actually working in their space right now. Want a team that treats your growth like their own? That's Pilot House. Head to pilothouse.co and now on with the show.

0:29Abby:There's like an old way of iterating. There's a new way of iterating where I think the biggest red flag is when I go into an ad account and I'm seeing a ton of small tweaks or repetition from the same ad. If you're going into your ad account and like 50 % of your ads are like 15 % off first purchase and it's not doing any brand awareness or any like education or anything that is really important for building a sustainable brand, then you're probably in a lot of trouble and you're not setting yourself up for a good Q4 this year.

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2:14You'll hear from industry leaders and experts sharing practical, data-driven strategies you can actually implement. If you're ready to stop guessing and start growing, you won't want to miss it. Visit triplewhale.com slash Whaley's. That's T-R-I-P-L-E-W-H-A-L-E dot com slash Whaley's to get your ticket today. I'm here with Abby and Taylor from the Pilot House Team Wars. I like to call them the art and science of ads. You like that metaphor, Abby, right?

2:44Abby:Yeah, I thought it was funny. You're the art one. and I think this podcast the topic came from this idea that I'm hearing it's it's kind of funny there was even a debate on it a few months ago between some few players in the space and it was this idea that more creatives is better you even saw it on on an ad the other day Abby from from a brand that was saying that velocity equals strategy from the art side of things do you think that to be true Abby I think that is so easy for anyone to do that I wouldn't call it a strategy I think Like if you don't have the logic and kind of the philosophy as to why you're building, you're just shooting arrows in the dark pretty much.

3:22Abby:With AI tools becoming more accessible, and I say this all the time when you add me on the podcast, but I don't know. It just feels like a game that anyone could compete in. So you do need that deeper strat layer with persona building, messaging framework, hierarchies there to understand what creative is actually going to work and move the needle in the account. So more is not necessarily better. You can fill it with more. I was actually just going through this. I've been running some ads or creating some ads for the DTC newsletter. And I have this one ad that I created that's working. And so I was on Claude and I was like, okay, and I make a bunch of variations on this central theme.

3:59And it ended up doing a lot of the same thing, changing a few words here and there. But I feel like the system is just going to read those all as the same ad and kind of throw them out generally, right? You need to think through it a lot more than that.

4:10Abby:Probably. Or your audience is going to get bored where, you know, you might, I know the ad, it's a text wall with someone and b-roll. No, it's new. I beat the text wall. We had two ads that beat the text wall. It's the ad that's been running for DTC for years now, actually, but we've just beat it in the past few months. So you'll see those until we start doing more. But Taylor, to get you in on the conversation, from a technical side, what do you make of that statement that velocity equals strategy? Yeah, I think it's interesting, right? Because when I'm thinking about that from the technical performance perspective, my mind goes to what is velocity, if we're saying velocity equals strategy, right?

4:49Velocity is supposed to be a combination of speed and impact. I think there is an element of truth to it. But at the same time, there's a lot of nuance there when it comes to do you trade, because you often can't have everything at once when you have finite resources. So do you trade more higher impact for more volume or speed? Do you trade volume or speed for more impact? And I'd argue that there are decisions that have to be made when it comes to that, that then will mean that it's not as simple as saying it equals that, right? Because each brand is going to be at a different point in understanding how they're connecting and acquiring customers at the end of the day.

5:33And there's a lot of planning and work that has to go into making that as impactful as possible. So I think long-winded way of saying no, I generally disagree with that statement as well. Just to stick with you, Taylor, on the technical side of things, what is the preferred account structure these days? Is it really keeping it simple? Is it all under one campaign? Do you have, I think what we're doing in the D2C account is we have a testing campaign and we graduate things up into a scaling campaign. And then we just, but I'm wondering, From your perspective, is there a best practice at this point into how campaigns should be structured to accommodate dozens of ads every week?

6:12Yeah, I would argue it's still the golden question, brand to brand, and account to account. Generally, the rule of thumb is you want consolidation. So the standard best practice is scale campaign, testing campaign, and then some sort of tactical or other kind of breakout campaign, like a catalog campaign, right? Right. However, it really, again, varies depending on the needs of the business. Like we have accounts where they have the classic inventory constraint. Right. Or and then when you're starting to work with bigger brands as well, where there can be a lot of range within the collections of products they have, you might have entirely different personas or segments that you're going after based on the product line you're advertising.

6:59So you might need a custom structure that then enables the use of things like value rules to bid up on that persona that you are seeing and like that's backed by both data and your strategy. So it's a tough one to answer, but generally, yes, there's a best practice. And then at the same time, there's still a case to be thinking critically through marketing fundamentals when it comes to structure and setting that up based on the needs of the brand. So hypothetically, in that case, would it be a situation where you're setting up different ad sets for each avatar, keeping them separate that way? Or would you be even looking at potentially doing different campaigns for each of your customer avatars?

7:37Yeah, it really depends on how you want to organize it and the level of complexity. I'm a big fan of separate campaigns for the sake of being able to quickly analyze it. But when it comes down to it, that's still part of the art and science blend of an ad account is kind of determining what makes the most sense based on all the signals you're seeing and how, you know, that's ultimately what our delivery team really thrives at is determining what are we going to do that's going to drive the most momentum based on the business goals and constraints of our strategy that are in place. From the art side or the creative side, Abby, when you come into a new account, and let's say it's an example of a client who did have a decent amount of velocity.

8:24They were testing a lot of creatives. What do you look for in those creatives to determine whether they are spamming the button or actually being strategic in their output?

8:37Abby:I think there's like an old way of iterating, which is what I learned like everything on ads about. And it really had to change in the last year. And there's a new way of iterating where I think the biggest red flag is when I go into an ad account and I'm seeing a ton of small tweaks or repetition from the same ad like two years ago because it was a longstanding winner. And I'm like, okay, well, now with Andromeda, you're going to experience ad fatigue and Meta's going to ping you for rising CPAs because your account looks the same. And also your consumer is going to get pissed because there isn't like a very pleasant customer journey.

9:11Abby:So it's the first thing I'd look for. The second thing I would look for is copywriting. And I think a huge red flag in like kind of signaling someone's just dumping mass creative into an ad account is doing almost that backward science of like, what is the copy? And can I trace logic based off of who I think their target persona was? So if it's something that isn't ownable to a brand, that's a flag to me because it's probably AI sloth. If it's something that is very much doesn't answer a consumer question where the consumer, like you would think of like, what questions would they have about my product based off of their persona type?

9:51Abby:Am I doing the proper job as a brand to answer that head on and try and win the click so they learn more? Then that's another flag. So I think copywriting is a really important one where it can kind of like slip through the cracks a little bit. A lot of people on the creative side care about visuals and like art direction, but copies just as important when I'm auditing a brand as well. I don't know if it was you, someone on this podcast said that they like to run the squint test on an ad library. So that would be the opposite. You're talking about diving in deep and making sure that your content and the ad text is telling a story to an avatar at a certain point in their purchase journey.

10:26But just from a, to make sure that things are visually different, that you should be able to go into your ad library and squint real fine and still be able to sort of just see that, that, that everything looks a little different or that there's diverse, diverse appearance in your ad. Is it, do you guys ever run the squint, the squint test?

10:42Abby:I don't know who said that, but I love it. Um, something that I did that I guess is kind of similar for a brand last month is it was, you know, I all own up to it. It was an error on my side where weekly and reporting, I was showing the same top scaled ads. And they were like, don't you make a lot of ads a month? They were like, are they out there? Do they exist? And in like the new age of Andromeda, a lot of our ad spend is divvied up between a lot of ads now. And it's really hard to show a really good visual representation of that without using like motion or triple whale. And I just should have in that moment.

11:16Abby:But what I did for them was went back and did like an April snapshot where I pulled all of the ads that we ran in the account. And it was a really good reset for us on the creative front because we were like, it did pass the squint test where we were all like, whoa, we're doing a really good job at executing on a lot of different like angles here for the type of persona. But also visually, like it's cool to see something look very on brand across the board, but very contrasting in nature because we know that we need it to be contrasting to win meta this age. So I didn't do like a squint test, I'd say.

11:49Abby:But what I did was more of like a mood board of like, what is our brand? What's running out there? And like, when I zoom out and I have them all in a collage style, what are my thoughts and what does it look like? And it was a really fun exercise. Very cool. What do you think about the squint test, Taylor? The squint test is really nice for looking at the important parts of the messages we agree we need to cover, knowing all of the strategic process we go through with our brands. So a huge part of onboarding a brand we work with is understanding who is their core customer and how are we messaging to them.

12:22Using the squint test is a great way to see, do we feel like we're amply doing that based on performance trends or potential gaps? Maybe we're not covering certain objections a certain way. We might be able to see where that might live by then cross-referencing the ad library with what we know about the brand and what we know either either drives someone to purchase or holds them back from purchasing. I'm a huge fan of it conceptually as well for that, because sometimes as something as simple as like getting the right, right message in to address a roadblock, stopping a ton of your prospective customers from purchasing can totally transform an account's performance.

13:00And that's easy to see it with the squint test when you're cross-referencing reviews on site, things like that, right. As you're researching. I think that's a really effective way to think we're, we're just going through that with agency, our community business, where we're just trying to think of the questions that are coming up all the time in these interviews to see who wants to join us. And then we're just making, you know, that people want to know the kind of people that are in the room. So we're going to create ads that kind of speak about the quality of the people in the room, or they want to know what the forum groups are like.

13:26So we're going to have Jeff, you know, come out of his forum group and talk about how exciting it was and what was kind of discussed and everything. So I think it's a really effective way to, to think about it. And even I guess in that world, like even if an ad isn't doesn't become a screaming winner, it can still become a really important part in the customer's journey in a way. Right. It can become like an assist point kind of on the on the account.

13:48Abby:Well, I think that's where attribution really matters to you, right? Like that's why we use like MTA tools, because sometimes we might feel really confident about like the messaging. We're like, yeah, this is answering all the right questions and speaking directly to who we want. but maybe it's not very direct and like go buy the thing so having lifetime attribution using a tool like triple whale and looking at like clicks and views or like first click if it did want to click but maybe it took a longer window and like a crazy path for that consumer to make a purchase is definitely important and dictating like did the ad do its job so attribution is definitely important how you look at like creative winners now as well so the impetus of this podcast is we've got brands coming to us being like, okay, I'm making a lot of ads, but I don't really feel I have a creative system in place.

14:39And they come to us looking for something like that. What goes into making a creative system rather than just spamming creatives? I think this is really probably like fundamental marketing.

14:49Abby:So I'm not sure how groundbreaking it is, but I definitely look at your ad account and like what's running currently and see if you can do an exercise where you bucket it out. So what's driving a brand awareness? and like what is brand and storytelling and then what captures people once they're in that consideration phase so they've learned about you at a high level you resonate with them somehow or they remember you you're they're in the funnel now like how are you educating them and nurturing them and then finally what are you doing to like convert them and get and get them across the line so I think if you're able to look at your ad account and easily like bucket a good amount of ads between those windows, then you're in a great spot and you're doing really good storytelling.

15:31But if you're going into your ad account and like 50 % of your ads are like 15 % off

15:37Abby:first purchase and it's not doing any brand awareness or any like education or anything that is really important for building a sustainable brand, then you're probably in a lot of trouble and you're not setting yourself up for a good Q4 this year. And then also looking at how you measure those because you could have really good, like I said, like really good awareness ads running. But if you don't have the right attribution tools, you're probably going to look in there, see a 0.5 ROAS from on platform, and you're going to go, well, this is awful. I don't want to do this anymore. But if you go into Northbeam or Drip Whale and use like a lifetime window, and you start to see those results come through like after 60 days, then it gets to be really exciting.

16:18Abby:I worked with one brand that over Q4 invested a lot of money into like a partnership with Nick DiGiovanni like the biggest cook youtuber like hundreds of millions of followers right so obviously that was like a big one at Nurture and on platform his partnership ad was awful like it had really good engagement but no conversions in North Bean it had like a six row as we were like well there it is like this was valuable and we want to keep using him going forward in the next year so yeah I would do that exercise like try to break them out in each stage of awareness and see if you have a good, good library.

16:56And then at what point are you saying, okay, actually half the people buy us and it's say, a person who buys us for them. And then half of our purchases come from being gifted from, you know, this, but the product is gifted. And so are you then building out sets of creative that speak to both of those people's journey? Like the look on their face when you give them this present, for instance, or are you tweaking your creatives to speak to two different avatars? And when do you know when it's worth evolving your lifestyle, your life cycle creative into multiple life cycles? So you're speaking to each person, maybe.

17:32Abby:Gifting is a really interesting one. And I might go too niche with my answer. So Taylor, I'd love your thoughts too. Because my world is very much in jewelry and apparel with a lot of brands that I work with. And when Valentine's Day comes or when Christmas comes and there's gift shoppers, you still look at our targeting and it's not like in the jewelry space, we start going all in on men or like, you know, away from women and hitting them with gifting messaging because it's never worked. But what does work is like someone like me getting hit with a strong gifting jewelry ad and me DMing it to my partner.

18:09Abby:I would love if you just went and bought this and nailed Christmas this year so I find it's kind of interesting for gifting in particular where sometimes it's not actually that technical and sometimes it is just like thinking of the customer journey in a very niche way like outside of the ad account as a whole like how are like partners interacting in real life is it that dm and is it that post share that you're looking for or is it trying to target men who actually don't really care about it was a jewelry ad and they're not going to stop and be like, yeah, I'm going to go buy this for my girlfriend.

18:41Abby:So. And I see generally the same pattern on my end where, and again, this is why I'm still a huge proponent of building social proof up through ads, right? Because a lot of the time what will happen is you've got an ad that is a concept for a product that someone wants to buy for themselves. And then as soon as you hit the gifting period, as you start to build that social proof, you know, people are tagging their partner in the comments, things like that. We see it time and time again, the algorithm starts shifting the budget to the other gender or something like around Valentine's Day or Mother's Day or things like that.

19:09And then those ads pick up and they get like an extra lift in momentum. So there are ways of building your creative roadmap to do both and grow with the rising tide rather than having to, you know, crazily change your ad account or anything like that during those moments. Question, should I be pausing ads that are not working or does Facebook not like that? Great question. Facebook generally doesn't love that. Usually what I would do is under Andromeda, we see more even spend between ads. But at the same time, there might be some ads where you're like, I think there's a lot of potential for this to scale and it's not getting spent.

19:47And we still do a lot of what we've always done, which is evaluate the leading indicators of why we think Meta thinks that, because there's going to be a reason that it hasn't become the top spender. And then weigh that against the risk of a breakout and understanding what the decay line usually looks like. Those kinds of methodical processes, those are the kinds of ways we look at that. But generally speaking, Meta wants more, wants to keep feeding it. It's better for my POV to just keep adding more in alignment with what you know about your customer and your strategy. and keep going from that way to fuel the whole system and add more gas to the engine.

20:23You mentioned social proof, Taylor. You say you're a big fan of driving social proof on ads, and I've seen that. We were talking about the NAT text wall. I think it's got 300 comments on it or something. And that's one of the reasons it was so hard to displace. How are you facilitating that? Are you actually running engagement campaigns early on, winners in order to build their social proof? Or what does that actually look like? Yeah, no, usually it's an integrated part of our strategy where what we don't really use engagement campaigns, because we'll typically use conversion campaigns, but just make sure that there is a certain amount of delivery, a controlled amount, so you're not overdoing it, going to essentially a retention campaign on meta.

20:59It's great for like a product dropout is perfect, right? You're adding a new product, existing customer might get excited, you build their lifetime value. And because they're excited, and they love your brand or your product, they advocate advocate for you in the comments. And then it starts to build, and then you move those up funneled or you run them in flexible campaigns where they start, usually meta is getting smart enough that it'll start there and then start to go up. You just have to be careful. And with the ability to view segments, if you're using an MTA, you can see pretty quickly whether it's incremental to new customers or not as you deploy it.

21:31But it's a huge part of, like at the end of the day, one of the biggest advantages of paid social is just the social part, I think. And the fact that you can get real comments with real reviews in there from past customers and it can really fuel everything for those new people looking at the ad and wondering if it is legit or it is worth the investment on their end. Very cool. So final words are, you do want creative velocity, but you want to be strategic about your velocity because iterations don't work. You need a strong MTA to make sure you know where all of this is going. Any final words on the art side of things, Abby, for these creative systems?