Ep 625: Brand Salience for DTC: Turning Creative Into Your Targeting Layer

0:00Rafael Gi:Before 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 Pilothouse, 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 Pilothouse 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 Pilothouse. Head to pilothouse.co and now on with the show. The Andromeda change is forcing marketers to become good marketers again.

0:34Meta seems to be forcing brands to think about how do you create relevant ads instead of just being able to push bad creative in front of the consumers that they want. Salience for me is how do people remember you and when. If you want to be considered for a purchase as a brand, you have to think about what are the groups of people that I want to be remembered by and what do I want them to remember me for. When you feel seen, you remember that relationship, right? So that's the power of being relevant, right? You're making somebody feel seen.

1:14Rafael Gi:Quick word from Paramount Ads Manager. If you've been living in paid social, you already know the problem. You're paying more every quarter for an ad somebody scrolls past in half a second. Paramount Ads Manager puts you somewhere totally different on TV's biggest shows across Paramount +, CBS, CBS Sports, Pluto TV, and more. Paramount's Skydance content makes up about one in five of all streaming minutes viewed in the US, and Paramount Plus drives 21 % higher ad attention than other streaming services. And it makes sense, because these are non-skippable, full-screen spots running right next to the shows people actually sat down to watch.

1:48Rafael Gi:No scroll, no skip, no little square buried in a feed. Just your brand in front of someone who's paying attention on the biggest screen in their house. Sign up today at ParamountAdsManager.com. Get your brand on TV's biggest shows by tomorrow. It's all killer, no filler, and I am here for the very first time ever with Pilot House's Head of Strategic Growth and Partnerships, Rafael. How you doing, man? Doing great. Apologies for the odd setup. My kiddo decided to build a fort this weekend and he will not let me take it down. It fits right in. I just feel like it's part of the creative constructs that we're going to be talking about today that you're just making visual for all of our podcast viewers.

2:33Rafael Gi:Give me your background a little bit, because in our pre-call, I thought it was really interesting the way your career has kind of merged the traditional worlds of agency and performance, and that's really what you're doing at Pilot House now. So give me the 30-second rundown. Yeah, 100%. I think prior to joining Pilot House and really helping on the partnerships and integration side, I spent close to a decade working on traditional creative agencies. Some of the ones that you see quite often at Cannes Awards like Rethink, Anomaly, No Fix Address, etc. And the last four or five years have really been working as an operator in internal scaling brands.

3:13And one of the things that has been awesome about joining the Pilot House partnership team is really being able to take the philosophy of blending some of those maybe disparate philosophies and pulling them together. So it's been really fun bringing in that operational mindset, as well as combining some of that traditional brand thinking with the technical expertise that our teams provide here at Pilot House. So that's been kind of the backdrop.

3:39Rafael Gi:And utterly essential is something I'm realizing through our conversations and conversations I have on this podcast all the time is no longer. I say this way too much on the podcast, but no longer can you just sort of hit the scale button on meta and have it find all your right customers again and again. You need to be helping it with a lot more of the strategic thinking that comes from the agency world. And one of the things that I wanted to kind of focus this talk on today was the statement that, again, we've said on the podcast a million times, which is creative is the new target and creative is targeted.

4:10Rafael Gi:We've been saying that for five years and you laid it out for me in a way that just made really strong sense about why this is the case and what that actually means and how to go about building your creative strategy out to make sure that you're taking that into account. So maybe walk me through that concept a little bit. Yeah, what's it called? I think I'm going to maybe share a phrase that we use internally quite a bit. I think post-Andromeda, when that phrase got popularized leading up to some of the algorithmic changes. We often say now that the Andromeda change is forcing marketers to become good marketers again, if that makes sense.

4:49So long gone are the days where the media buyer had complete control of who you could target, right? You can go into Meta's backend, figure out what are they interested in? What are other pages and brands that they follow? And then as long as you kind of set some key spend parameters, it's going to force push kind of your spend against that core consumer. So you're able to reach them. I think post-Andromeda, and this makes a ton of sense why they're doing this, but post-Andromeda, meta seems to be forcing brands to think about how do you create relevant ads instead of just being able to push bad creative in front of the consumers that they want, for lack of better words.

5:34So what's it called? The platform is forcing people to think about persona segments and then build them into the actual creative as a way to target people. And I think that is a big pragmatic shift that is truly forcing marketers to think and leverage more traditional methods again, you know, going back to the Mad Men days and just thinking about who's my consumer? What's the proposition I provide? How do I create a ad or advertisement that kind of captures their attention in that moment?

6:03Rafael Gi:And what was the term? You brought up a word. I'm a big word junkie. Love words. And I know the word salience, I've heard it, but you used it in this concept of traditional advertising. Talk to me about what salience is. Yeah, I think salience for me is ultimately how do people remember you and when. If we want to be considered for a purchase, as a brand, you have to think about what are the groups of people that I want to be remembered by and what do I want them to remember me for. I'll use an automotive example, right? So I'm sure if you watch TV or Super Bowls, et cetera, you see car commercials all the time.

6:43There's a reason why car manufacturers are spending millions and millions of dollars on TV advertising. It's because they want to build salience. Because ultimately, with a car purchase, it's so complicated. You have to be one of the three brands for the car model class that a customer remembers when they're ready to make that purchase in order to be even in the game. right like a consumer is not going to go through every single car brand every single model class that's way too much work so car brands need to build salience around a price point and a benefit amongst a specific group of people you know that's why for example Volvo is known for quite luxury and safety right understand style they're kind of like in the cusp of the higher end higher end market you know they know who they are and they're building saliency and memory around that.

7:33I'm really focusing on the sedan structure, et cetera, right? So when somebody in that segment or category thinks, hey, I want to upgrade from my Toyota, they think of Volvo potentially as a V-level luxury vehicle. So it's really building those memory structures once it starts hitting a bit of scale.

7:51Rafael Gi:It reminds me of the talk that Tony from Vessi gave at one of our events one time where he talked about when it rained, he wanted people to think Vessi. He said he wanted to own the reign, which I thought was a lofty goal, but that it kind of gets at the kind of strategy. We say the word strategy all the time when it comes to how important your creative needs to have strategy. And really that strategy needs to be working towards salience. Yeah, a hundred percent. And that's where the consistency comes in. And then I'll jump to a couple more examples. Prior to joining Pilot House in this role, I was leading marketing and brand and creative service performance and creative services at a nine figure global fashion brand.

8:32Right. When I joined in, you know, the memory structure we're building was we were performance apparel rooted in denim.

8:40Rafael Gi:Right. So it's like, hey, if you're thinking about buying Lulu, buy us instead. You know, we're made from jeans. It's different. But is it the right memory structure? From my perspective, no, because ultimately who's going to choose between a pair of jean shorts and a pair of like polyester workout gear that's lighter to go on a run or a hike. So we made a very simple shift. We said, hey, we are denim or a jeanswear brand that's actually rooted in an outdoor lifestyle. Right. So basically classic American apparel for people that live an outdoor lifestyle. So even just flipping the order and building the memory structure as a denim brand who creates apparel that feels like athleisure changes how people remember you.

9:25Rafael Gi:And that simple flip was one of our biggest levers of growth, you know, and building that memory structure around that, you know. And that Vessi example that you mentioned is brilliant, you know. Like, hey, if I live in a wet coastal market, you know, everything that Vessi sells is made for me. creating the memory structure. They're not just selling the shoes, they're associating apparel to rain. And so when we, you know, you're on the partnership side now, so we get brands coming in all the time and you're looking at everything, you're auditing their creatives, you're auditing their strategy.

9:57Rafael Gi:What are you finding is the missing piece or like, what are people missing when they come in, in regard to this process? I think it depends on the life stage. You know, I don't think there's actually a right or wrong philosophy or like approach to how you grow your business. It's just there are a couple proven principles at work depending on the stage of your business. So I'll give you an example. You know, we're going to, you know, in about an hour, I'm going to be jumping on a call with a prospective client. They're big, nine-figure brand that's scaled quite nicely. And then their efficiency is dropping.

10:31The shorthand is when looking at their core account is they've grown a business by being really great at creating viral wellness products. But they're kind of using that structure even though they become a mid-nine-figure business. So what's happening is in their account structure, for example, it's structured by product, not persona. so their new customers are getting 14, 15, 20 impressions, all different messages. So to the point around saliency, a customer can't remember what they're about because they're getting 14 to 20 messages about six, seven, eight different products before actually forming an opinion.

11:16And that creates wastage. And also it doesn't create saliency about what you do. It just creates saliency about what you sell in a non-efficient way because you're kind of spraying and spraying everything. to everybody. Yeah.

11:28Rafael Gi:And there's the opportunity that can actually affect you negatively. If you're not positioning yourself as a cohesive option for your correct avatar, if you're kind of all over the place, if you're not thinking about things strategically, you could actually have be having a negative impact, even though you have this idea of diverse creative, and I've got lots of different kinds of creative, but if you're not doing it strategically with salience in mind, you could be actually turning off your avatar. Yeah, exactly. Because you're serving things that are not relevant to them. And then also changing the impression, you know, that they have.

11:58Let's say, you know, a young 25-year-old came for a product that they care about and then they're getting served ads showing a, you know, 50-plus-year-old because you're generally praying and spraying.

12:09Rafael Gi:Yeah. Let's go back, just even back to the very beginning. This is something that we kind of take for granted, I think, but ads perform better when you are reflected in them. You know what I mean? Like this goes back to the very, This is basic about like memetic structures or whatever. But when you're out there looking for any given thing that you want to buy, the more you see yourself in an ad, the more likely you are to make a purchase. Is that correct? Yeah, 100%. I mean, the simple way that I used to put it when I led strategy teams on some of those agencies was, you know, it's a simple idea, right?

12:46Ultimately, you just follow the human philosophy that people remember not what you say, but how you made them feel. So to your point around the importance of seeing yourself reflected in the ad, every human has this experience. When you feel seen, you remember that relationship, right? So that's the power of being relevant, right? You're making somebody feel seen. At the end of the day, like, you know, one of the fun parts about figuring out how to crack the creative code is ultimately just building relationships at scale, right? How do you feel build trust, ultimately by offering value and then helping the other person see themselves in the relationship you're trying to build.

13:26And ultimately, once you build that relationship, you're creating a believer, not just a customer. And a believer is going to always do more for your business than a customer will. That's just transactional, right?

13:36Rafael Gi:And then you can get them through retention into an advocate. You go from a believer and into an advocate and then your own marketing channel even. Yeah, exactly. And then they kind of do that for you. And you're kind of spoon feeding them the story and the hook. So you can see, to go back to your specific question around what are some of the challenges you're facing. So those brands that are really going from that high eight figure, mid to high eight figure into that nine figure and above, you have to outgrow the tendency to overdevelop pray and spray and go through volume and start thinking about how do I win the customer versus sell the product.

14:18And I think that's quite a shift to make. Yeah.

14:21Rafael Gi:Well, talk to me about that. What does this process look like for a brand that maybe has come in and has been in this mode more where it's like, you're just making creatives and seeing if the system takes them. So this idea of spraying and praying, you're kind of coming up, maybe you're doing a lot, you have high creative volume, maybe you even have high creative diversity, but talk about how you take a brand who's doing that and then refocusing them. The thing that I find interesting is it's like the higher you get in this process, it's it's like the simpler your message becomes or like the more distilled your message becomes.

14:55Rafael Gi:So how do you take brands that maybe have a lot of diversity and really help them focus to saliency? That's a really good question. Maybe I'll start with like the operational shift. I think the main operational shift is simple hard in the sense that there's a need to shift from the platform owning the decisions to the brand taking back the decisions, if that makes sense. So like, you know, the general philosophy when you're smaller is all revenue is good revenue. So you kind of let the platform chase and find revenue. Once you hit a certain scale, that actually works to your detriment because you're not building saliency because saliency needs focus.

15:37You're kind of just wiggling out, right? So that's going to create a limiting factor. So I think it's shifting the operational philosophy that, hey, the platform's know best. And then having confidence that, hey, we built a business up to this point. We know who our customer is and why we are winning in market. And then structuring your accounts in a way that replicates your business model instead of structuring your accounts in a way that is beneficial to platform metrics. So one pragmatic example of that would be oftentimes I see there's often a spend discrepancy between what do you actually sell most versus what products are going into your media budget.

16:24There's a discrepancy, right? So you're spending 20 % of your budget on your product that is selling 80%, accounting for 80 % of the revenue. And then in platform, you're spending 80 % on your budget that actually accounts for 20 % of your revenue. So it's not aligned because it looks platform efficient. So being able to have a holistic business understanding and starting to structure your business where your business is leading the structural decisions around how your platforms are structured.

16:52Rafael Gi:Once you've shifted this operational mindset, you know, to be working towards salience, to be working towards strategy, what do we do next? Yeah. So once you have that in place, I think the other brilliant part, I think, about your question was, I think you asked, how do you get down to a simpler, simpler message? I think that component is really, really important because if you're like a$1 million business, right, you only need a small number of customers, right? If you are a$500 million business, the pool of customers you have to appeal to get much larger. If you're investing in 50 messages and trying to reach a larger pool, that gets quite expensive.

17:32So, you know, what creative agencies get paid a lot of money to do is figure out is what is that simple message that appeals to the broadest number of people that will also drive conversion. Because then you can build equity and create a compounding effect by building that salience. So that's where the kind of unit economics break, right? Another example of having to shift tactics in game, if you're sub 10 mil or 20 mil, it's okay to spend maybe track towards a four ROAS or three ROAS and you're spending 25, 20 to 30 % of your overall budget in marketing and advertising. right your economics work is still profitable right because you know small business you probably have product advantage not a ton of competition uh what's early adopters are looking for you so you can convert them pretty easily right but once you scale past that 20 30 mil other competitors come in there's copycats that are taking your base product and making it better so there's increased competition so you're going to have to adjust improve distribution add wholesale like it just doesn't scale out the same way.

18:40So if you're distributing that shrinking pool of media dollars as a proportion of your total sales and putting it into 20 messages, you're not going to reach enough people, right? So that is the power of having just one salient message. On the calls that we have our prospective clients, the analogy that I use is right now, imagine that you have one tank of gas, but you've purchased 12 cars and you have to divide up the gas tank between 12 cars. all cars are just going to go a very short distance. You're not going to get to your destination, right? So the game, you know, changes. You have to basically pick the car you want to make it to the end of that destination.

19:19And that's where like the power of having that single message allows you to do that.

19:24Rafael Gi:And the higher up you go, it makes me think of the famous Mad Men episode where he's pitching Heinz, which is funny because they actually just started using this campaign, I think last year. It basically made the product implied. It made the customer actually do the work to picture the product in their own mind. Like it was basically just showing the things that you would always put Heinz on, but it would have it without. And it would just be like, you know, like pass the Heinz kind of thing. And you don't even need to show the product because you've done such a good job with saliency. You have such a good refined message that all you have to show is the settings where you'd normally have this product and have it without.

20:03and then the customer does the implicit work themselves,

20:06Rafael Gi:which is going to be more powerful. Exactly, makes the link. Funny you bring up that example because I've worked at the agency that does that work for about close to five years. It was the first creative agency I've worked at. And yeah, they're really leaning onto the idea that Heinz is ubiquitous with ketchup, right? So I think the first execution was like a man on the street style. They went around and they were like, hey, can you draw a bottle of ketchup? No signals or anything. And people drew the classic Heinz bottle with the logo, without any prompt, right? So yeah. So I think that's where the power of that message really, really comes through is when you're able to understand how to connect with the broadest number of groups, broadest number of segments and people that will find value in your product with a single message that you can build equity and saliency in.

21:01And then that, again, builds that memory structure. So when somebody's thinking about your product, they consider you, then you're in the game.

21:09Rafael Gi:Can we go a level deeper? Because I think like creative diversity, creative being the new targeting, like how do you use saliency or memory structures to translate into the actual kind of creative diversity that Andromeda requires now? I think one of the points we didn't make early on is you said you understand why meta is making this such a priority. And I think that's because it's a real understanding of attention being the currency of our age. And if you've got all these advertisers that are just slamming out, you know, spraying and praying messages, that's not going to, even though it might create the right purchase signals, you know, with the right kind of tracking and targeting, it's not going to be necessarily a good experience for the attention of that user.