Ep 639: "The Creative Is the Brief": Pilothouse on AI Storefronts and a 20-21% Conversion Rate Lift

0:00Before we jump into today's all killer, no filler episode, a quick word about who makes this show possible. The DTC podcast is brought to you by Pilothouse, the performance agency behind some of the fastest growing DTC brands in the world. Creative, media and customer journey all under one roof. Performance and brand without the tradeoff. 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 work is already done.

0:31I mean, you've already invested significantly in the personas that you're creating and ensuring that the messages match to them. Ignoring the post-click experience at this juncture will cost you more than focusing on the post-click experience. And like, that's what AI and the partners with whom we work and the focus that we put into the post-click experience at Pilot House now, that's what we recognize.

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2:19I'm great, Eric. Yeah. Like if you ever need me to come on, I'm happy to join you. I'm willing to talk about whatever. Well, I came up with a topic today because it's one that we kind of like early on in Pilot House's career. I feel like our expertise post-click was something that really separated us. It was this idea that, and I think it's now more relevant than ever, that like landing pages are so important to your avatar's customer journey. And I think you just told me you've got some cool things that we're building there. So I'm excited to kind of dive in there. Just maybe start us off high level.

2:55What is your high level theory of the customer journey and the post-click experience and what brands should be thinking about today? Sure. I mean, like metaphorically speaking, the post-click experience is like the middle child of the marketing team, right? It's like media drives all the traffic there. The brand, they own the site. And the page in between kind of like belongs to nobody. And it kind of just sort of exists. And one party assumes the other party is loving it. And everyone's neglecting it, right? So in my experience, every creative, every brand team has a Notion page somewhere tucked away called like landing page priorities Q3.

3:37And it's been that way since like 2022, right? It's just nobody. It's the last thing that people think about. Is it more relevant than like when I think about Andromeda and I think about Meta specifically and this idea of really meeting customers where they're at, having a whole range of creative that speaks to not only who they are, but the circumstance they find them in. Liam came on the podcast a little while ago and talked about circumstance testing, which I thought was really interesting. Have a custom landing page, and also the ability to create custom landing pages has never been higher in the world of AI.

4:10So are landing pages more relevant than ever today? They've always been relevant, but it's always been very, very difficult to kind of like execute them. And we've directed a lot of our energy and our efforts in segmentation and personalization to like the pre-click creative. And that's where all of our efforts have gone, right? Only recently with the advent of AI has the execution of landing pages and how quickly we can deploy them, like finally catching up. So now, because it's a little more effortless than it used to be, we're spending a lot more time focusing on it. Just a quick one before we get back into it.

4:53I want to know how deep are you planning to discount this Q4? Most brands are guessing. So we're building a benchmark report called Beyond the Discount. If you run a D2C brand, we want your data. The survey takes five minutes and your answers stay confidential. Every brand operator who completes it is entered to win a$1 ,000 gift card. We're expecting a few hundred entries. So these are probably the best odds at a grand you'll ever see. The link to the report is in the show notes. It closes August 23rd and we award the prize August 24th. All right, back to the show. How do you decide when a client comes in when you're going to be driving to their storefront, their PDP, or you're sort of saying, okay, we actually, we have a very clearly defined avatar here.

5:40We want to make sure we have a customer experience for that avatar. Like, how do you determine when you want to get creative post-click? Frankly, there's a few kind of almost technical prerequisites that with the tools that we use and our approach, there's almost more technical prerequisites than there are brand or creative prerequisites. And like the way I think about it is it's easiest and it's best for the brands with whom we work if they have, for example, they're on Shopify because Shopify makes it very easy to start managing the post-click experience. that they have a significant enough budget on meta to be able to actually kind of like test the differences in landing pages.

6:22And then we can deploy a landing page strategy against those kind of like platforms that then like ladder back into the creative strategy. So it's almost more of like a technical prerequisite that makes spinning up landing pages a lot easier. Otherwise, we fall into that, the same trap that we were like two, three, five years ago, where we're waiting so long to deploy a landing page that the juice just isn't worth the squeeze. Can you walk me through an example where you created a landing page, a post-click experience that beat the control that maybe the brand kind of came into us with? And what was different about the landing page experience?

7:05Why did it make it more effective? Yeah, frankly, we don't see a lot of the brands with whom we work coming in with customized landing pages. That generally means we're driving to maybe a category page, probably the PDP, but there is no significant post-click personalization. So the tools that we've been deploying do take that into account now. They almost look at the creative in MetaCreative in this situation as the brief and then match the message and match the experience to that creative. Now, that's a far massive departure from like showing up in driving a customer to a basic PDP page and actually welcoming them and customizing.

7:51It's like the analogy I like to use is like, imagine you walked into a store and you were like, I want a 65 inch OLED TV. And, you know, the salesperson was like, yeah, no problem. We've got that. And then handed you the catalog. Like you'd be like, you'd probably turn around and walk out in frustration, right? You know what you want and you weren't being met. You're just kind of like showing up in this room with no furniture in it. So like now we know so much and invest so much in the right message, the right targeting, the right interest based focus. We can do that on the backside now. And we just haven't haven't to that point when we do.

8:34And in kind of like the most recent pilots that we've been running on the pilot side, when we do that, we see about a 20, 21 percent lift in conversion rates. And that's significant. Now, this approach, like using AI to generate landing pages in near real time is new to us, but it is compelling enough that we're continuing to kind of like go down that road and invest it. Love it. Let's shout out the tool that we're using because it's a real interesting one for us because I've been, you know, this is I think my sixth year we've been doing DTC. And I think one of our first major sponsors, first major sponsor for the event that we did, we had a bunch of their team members and founding team members come over to Victoria, which was fantastic.

9:15It's the Black Crow gang. And I know Black Crow has kind of changed their value proposition over the years. I think starting in maybe attribution and some predictive stuff, but they're really zeroing in on this shop building post-click experience. Talk to me about maybe why we chose Black Crow and you alluded to it there. Literally, we're creating landing pages on the fly, but talk to me a little bit more about like what this tool does and why we like it. Where we came from was likely where everybody's finding themselves now. Now, we were using AI to kind of really compress the generation of landing pages and that experience, but we were defaulting to tools like Claude, for example, or even ChatGPT and others, which are great, but they don't solve a lot of the problems that Black Crow does.

10:02So we can look at a piece of creative and use that as a brief for a landing page and generate a nice personalized landing page in Claude. That's great. But what really attracted us and what really kind of like sold us on the partnership with Black Crow was that we can enjoy the same amount of message match, but like their background in predictive analytics and understanding the customer in browser really allowed them to improve the dynamic experience of the landing page itself. So while we were segmenting and personalizing previously with AI augmentation, what Black Crow offered was kind of like near real-time personalization.

10:44Like that's a significant difference. For example, Black Crow will remember that, you know, like there was a consistent persistent session across or a persistent idea across sessions. And they will understand if a user is returning to the landing page and can serve up like a different experience, which provides significant lift when it comes to things like conversion rates and return on advertising spend. This episode is brought to you by Triple Whale, the AI operating system for e-commerce. Just a quick gut check for brand owners and media buyers. Have you started your Black Friday Cyber Monday planning yet?

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11:53Real benchmarks from tens of thousands of brands so you know what performance should actually look like for brands just like yours. Free tools to set goals and forecast outcomes. Strategy guides and checklists covering ad performance, retention and conversion. And AI-powered tactics you can put to work before BFCM week hits. The best part? It's completely free and there's no login required. Just go to triplewhale.com slash BFCM and start planning today. I remember when I had an event company, we were working on all these ideas, sort of like sequential remarketing, where when someone's come back, it triggers them into a new audience and they get a new creative.

12:32But we're trying to do that with pixels and audiences and things like that. But to have it actually happen in real time post-click is pretty interesting. So how many variations are we? Like, are we literally spinning out variations for all winning creatives kind of thing? Or how do we decide when to apply the Black Crow magic to a post-click experience? For sure. And I won't speak for Black Crow here, but I can talk to what's been working with us thus far in the pilots that we've been running on the pilot house side. The brands that it's worked best with so far are those that don't have a massive long tail catalog, but that we can concentrate on a few top SKUs.

13:10And really, the ability to generate landing pages, the timing is really compressed. You're looking at a minute or two to literally translate a storefront or a landing page from creative into a new experience. So you're kind of only limited by the amount of testing and the budget that you want to do, right? Thus far, it's worked for us to focus on top SKUs and then roll it out a little bit more slowly. Just to give you a sense, in the pilots that we've run, we're starting to move towards more of a significant spend. So what I'm quoting to you in terms of like lift in conversion rates and stuff like that, they're not just like a little ad set that is kind of like sitting over in like the corner of a client's ads manager.

13:55Like we're starting to see these Black Crow powered storefronts on the pilots that we're running, like starting to really consume like about half the budget that we're putting out there. So like a fairly significant spend. And that's a long ways to answer your question, Eric. You're basically limited by the amount of creative that you have in your ads manager and your budget. And then how diverse are the pages? Are we talking small tweaks? Are we talking button colors? How diverse are the pages and the experiences that end up being made within the same campaign, for instance? Great question. I would say as diverse as the creative that they are derived from.

14:36So like you, and this might not be the right analogy, but the way that I'm looking at kind of the creative on meta in this sense is like the ad unit now is the brief for the storefront. So Black Crow AI does a good job of looking at the message, looking at the copy, looking at the image, then diving into Ads Manager and then looking at the targeting and the interest, etc. And then deriving a storefront that matches very well that message. So the variables are endless. The nice part about it as well is that you don't have to give up control. At the end of the day, these aren't completely dynamically generated pages.

15:20You can go in and exert a little bit of control over brand-safe images, titles, etc. And you can go in and you can adjust them on the fly as well. So it does offer a little bit of a customization and a little bit of a safety net as well for those brands that are concerned around brand safety. And then it sounds like we're talking mainly around sales pages, essentially, or we call them, I guess, sales pages, sort of direct response focused, having the testimonials in the right spot, having the reviews in the right spot, those kind of things. But there's also like post-click experiences that are either like squeeze pages or advertorials or quizzes or things like that.

15:59When we talk about post-click, are we mainly talking about sort of advertorial-based sales pages? Or does it encompass this idea of, you know, squeeze pages and quizzes and things like that as well? I mean, look, when we're talking customer journey, it is all-encompassing, right? It depends what you want to do at the end of the day, right, Eric? Like the storefronts that we're talking around Black Crow AI are very focused on like a certain part of the funnel and like a certain conversion moment. But when you're looking at kind of like the whole customer journey loop, right, the post-click experience for a brand seeking awareness to one seeking consideration to one seeking like ultimately conversion is going to change.

16:41And the content that you serve up as part of that post-click experience is going to change. and something like Black Pro AI is very good down funnel when you're looking at like it's, you know, I use the term landing page to describe what they do, but it's more aptly a storefront more than anything. So that should reveal kind of like what the focus is there. But yeah, for the customer journey and where we're talking about like backing out the customer experience, you're right. It matters, right? Like it matters where you are in that journey. I think it was two or three years ago, we started reporting on this idea of the death of the third party cookie.

17:19And I feel like the rumors of the death of the cookie have been greatly exaggerated, because it's like all of these things, like, you know, this idea that we're going to lose the vision as to where customer who a customer is and where they are in their journey. Have you seen any degradation in that data? Or is it long live the cookie? Where are we with cookies? i mean like you know what what a talking point three years ago and like honestly like in retrospect what a nothing burger right like the can was kicked so so far down so far down the uh the street that yeah that we've lost the can right so i think the reports of the third party the death third party cookie were greatly exaggerated and like frankly replaced by uh the ability to target while ensuring that personally identifiable information kind of like remains personal, right?

18:09And remains private. So I don't think like we as marketers really gave up much in that transaction. And today with the kind of insights that we derive from AI, we're in a better position now to be able to target those people that frankly want to receive our message. And you're talking about a 20, 21 % conversion lift, which is extremely substantial. What are reasons that brands aren't doing this at this point? Like, what are brands saying where they're like, no, we don't really want that 20 % conversion lift. Like, what's going on there? Honestly, I think that's a holdover, right? And, like, if you had asked me, like, the economics never worked.

18:45We know that personalizing creative is cheap, right? Like, we know you can go write five hooks and pump out five statics or, you know, five pieces of creator-generated content. No problem. We're good at that now. but like personalizing destination pages like back in the day used to mean building five pages that had to go through like design dev like qa deploy like it was months literal months right so teams would build one page and then pointed everything at it and then maybe would update it once a year and it fell to a couple of owners like media owns traffic and brand or the web team whomever owned the page.

19:23And then that lander really belonged to nobody. At the same time, that click got way more specific, right? Ad platforms allowed us to target and get down more narrowly. And we started to understand the benefits of niching down in our messaging. But the destination stayed as broad as it was. Now we can take that same scalpel that we're taking to creative and we can take it to the landing page and the economics work now. So the honest answer is, as marketers, I think we're only coming to terms now that the post-click, we've always recognized that the post-click experience is important, but the economics never worked.

20:01And now it, generating a post-click experience is as easy as that pre-click experience, right? I feel like it's a debt. We all are living with these like big pools of debt about like, what is possible? And we're only like, I just yesterday was like, you know, I've been using Claude for everything and I'm pulling like things into Claude and spreadsheets into Claude or whatever. But I'm just like, Claude can just go do all that. Claude could, I've just sort of like yesterday had this like cascade to be like, oh my God, I just need to connect Claude to ClickUp and to Riverside and to this and to that.

20:31And I can stop doing all this. And now I need to get to the next debt level I have is to get it to a system where Claude knows once I've recorded a podcast and it just knows when to do all these things automatically. We're sort of like, we're very much human in the loop still, but it's like everyone sort of has these pools of data, but what is even possible with AI that we're all just kind of coming to reconcile? For sure. I mean, like for me, what was really instructive or like really illuminating was like, oh, okay, we've got to create a post-click experience. Now we've got to write a brief.

21:00Like, here we go again. Like, what are we going to do? Then I came to the realization, like the creative is the brief. And like in this day and age, like, you know, taken to its most reductive and like pushed all the way up to the top of the funnel, that pre-click experience, whether it's a static ad or a video, like that's the brief. And now we can take that creative and feed it into the system that you're talking about. And what is output up at the end is an experience that matches that pre-click experience. So there's really, the work is already done, right? It's really just kind of getting your house in order after the fact, right?

21:37And it's not as difficult as it used to be. And And in fact, it can all kind of like be streamlined into one brief now, more or less. This takes me way back to my Google AdWords days. This was like 2006 or 2007 even. And I coined the term way back then, funnel congruence. And it was just this idea when we were first advertising on Meta way back in 2010, 2011. And we were making our ads kind of look like the Meta platform. We were running ads for toolbars or this or that. and we were kind of making the ads look like the meta platform. The ads looked like the meta platform worked best. And then when we created a landing page that looked like the ad, it worked better.

22:18And it's like this concept has been around for a long time. But as you say, it's just a matter of it being super technically feasible now. And like you say, the work is already done. It's just a matter of realizing it and jumping in. Yeah, we've always intuitively known that like message match was like inherently important, right? But we just didn't have it. We didn't have it in us as marketers to kind of like fight that battle. And like that's the real difference in the age of AI is it's like it's a great level set. The strategist can now own or orchestrate the post-click experience much more easily.

22:58And we don't need to engage IT and or like the media team or whatever. The strategist can create the post-click experience and then provide that as part of the whole customer journey that their message is targeting. And that's frankly the big difference between even now and 12 months ago. All of this can live within the remit of a strategist or a content manager or a generalist, quite frankly. Let's leave it there. All killer, no filler. If you want to work with Pilot House, you want to work with Daniel, you want to work as we become Black Crow Kung Fu experts, you just got to go to pilothouse.co, fill out a form.

23:40Say you heard this podcast and you want to work with us because we want to work with you. Any final words for those brands out there considering embarking on a landing page journey that they haven't already? What I would offer is like the work is already done. I mean, you've already invested significantly in the personas that you're creating and ensuring that the messages match to them. ignoring the post-click experience at this juncture will cost you more than focusing on the post-click experience. And like, that's what AI and the partners with whom we work and the focus that we put into the post-click experience at Pilot House now, that's what we recognize.

24:17All right. Well, we'll leave it there. Thanks for coming on again today, Daniel. This was great. Thanks so much, Adam. Really appreciate it.

24:28Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not getting the DTC newsletter, you can subscribe for free at directtoconsumer.co. And if you want to learn more about Pilot House's all killer, no filler services, take off to pilothouse.co. I'm Eric Dick, and this has been the DTC Podcast. We'll see you next time.