The intersection of marketing, product, and creativity with George Howes from Magic Brief

0:01The role for the creative right now and the future going forwards is really around taste and curation and genuine good novel ideas and ways of thinking about things. and it's been interesting even being on on twitter over the past like week or so with the launch of open air's new model and you see like hundreds of people posting like things that they made whether it's landing pages ads or whatever and saying like it's so over it's over for creative people and first of all you look at the stuff that they're posting these are bad ads and they're bad landing pages but you just managed to make them in seconds so i think the world is going to be filled with a lot more kind of slop in terms of just like now that anyone can make anything Welcome back to Wild Hearts.

0:42I'm your host, Mason Yates, from the investment team at Blackbird Ventures. When George Howes left Eucalyptus, Australia's fastest growing health deck startup, he wasn't chasing another unicorn. He was chasing a feeling. The feeling of a team that moved like a single organism. The feeling of making thousands of ads a month with every team member wired into the same pulse. What's working and why? The feeling of a perfect feedback loop, from customer insight to add performance to creative execution. That feeling became Magic Brief. In a world where creative is now free and the internet is drowning in slop, George is building a new kind of marketing machine.

1:21One where taste matters, insight matters, and feedback becomes the superpower. Where AI doesn't replace creatives, it unlocks them. Magic Brief isn't an analytics tool. It's not an AI copywriter is something deeper it's a new system of record for creative intelligence in this episode george shares why most smart tech fails and how magic brief avoids the trap how he built a product that mirrors the 15 principles of eucalyptus's marketing team why the most creative people in the world need feedback not freedom what it really takes to build fast and make it feel like magic. This episode is a masterclass in marketing for anyone building at the edge of AI, creativity, and product velocity.

2:06Let's get into it. I would love it if you could summarize the last 12 months. Last 12 months have been nuts. Even the last couple of weeks, we've had such a surge in demand. I think part of it is coming off the back of OpenAI's new model. And you're just seeing marketing teams around the world going, how can we make the most of this? This is breakthrough technology. Now it's virtually free to produce creative or statics at least. And the most important thing that everyone is trying to get to, and we're doing a good job of right now is, well, what is the thing? What's the ad that we should make next?

2:40And we've spent the last two years essentially building for this with what we call creative intelligence. So it's like looking at the wider landscape, looking at your own ad account, your own marketing channels, even the comments that people are leaving on your ads, building off that and then going, this is the ad that you should make next. So we feel like we've really got into an interesting spot and there's a lot of momentum in the market around it. I'd say it's also been interesting for us because we've had this huge surge in demos where anyone on the team who's not an engineer, anyone who can use Google Meets is on Google Meets doing demos.

3:12So it really is just getting the product out as quickly as we can. And then there's questions like, well, should we move back to self-serve should we let anyone adopt the product right now because there's the demand for it but i think from what we've seen the customers that we on board right now and the kind of quality of the conversations that we can have and show them these novel insights off the back of their own accounts in a single onboarding call like that's really made a lot of sense so it's that balance but there is a temptation to go okay let's let's let everyone in and it's a hard thing to kind of balance between particularly starting out and and having the company here in sydney australia with so much of our market pool coming from the US and Europe, where you go, even though we've built an early muscle and building a product that people can adopt and see the value and wire asleep, it is that cool to have the best experience and the best showcase of the product.

4:03Being able to sit with someone on the call really does make sense. So a lot of the time and energy over the last few months has just been building this go-to-market muscle in the Northern Hemisphere, and we're hiring for that right now, as well as handling all of the demo calls that we possibly can. So it's been, yeah, last 12 months have been crazy. We've doubled the size of the team. We've built a whole set of new products and have some real flagship brands and agencies on the product today. So they've been crazy, but they've been good, good crazy. How would you describe the product at the moment?

4:35The product has two main pillars to it. The first is what we call creative research so that's getting a view on the wider landscape in terms of what's working in your market what are the messaging the themes that the creators the formats that are driving results and then the other part of the product which we're really doubling down on and we're seeing a lot of traction with is what we refer to as creative analytics so that is establishing this feedback loop with inside your own team where you can have essentially the surface that sits on top of the ad accounts and the actual data and then the decisions about what gets made and coming from eucalyptus that was one of the things that i really took away from there where part of the reason that we could build such an impactful marketing muscle inside the business was everyone at any one point in time had an understanding of what worked what was selling product who they were selling it to and really understanding those motivations and drivers within any of the ad accounts or the channels.

5:32So Magic Brief and a lot of the core tooling that we've built is just enabling exactly that. Like how can you have any person in the team at any point in time know this is the ad that I need to make because I've got the underlying data and I understand kind of, well, this is how we should develop that or this is how we should iterate on that ad. I'll read out from the investment memo our thesis on magic briefs business remains unchanged and this is just sentence one over the next 10 years all marketing teams will look like eucalyptus and performance marketing internal teams of creatives and engineers producing and buying ads they can immediately test and iterate on I'm sort of realizing as I read it's probably your words will simply be called marketing those teams will need a tool that enables them to collaborate on creating ads, brief their production teams, track ad performance, and compare that performance to their competitors.

6:27The output of these teams is more revenue for the company. Magic Brief can be the tool that helps marketing teams drive that extra revenue. Does that resonate? That was written at the end of 2023. Does that remain true today? A hundred percent. It's more true than ever. When I left Eucalyptus, I remember this. I wrote a list of 15 traits because people would always ask the question like what was different about eucalyptus in the way that you did marketing like how did the function and the business scale so quickly and there were these 15 principles these 15 traits that i wrote down that i believe to be the underlying traits that that drove the performance of such an incredible marketing machine and an incredible team at eucalyptus and i was looking back at that list a few days ago and it really has become and that was written years ago now the checklist that magic brief has been built off you look at the traits and then the features that we have in the product now and the alignment is so close in the sense that that's a point of friction that's something that a team does really well that's a trait that really makes like a marketing function stand out and those same features are almost mapped one-to-one so i feel it's more true than it's ever been like most marketing teams will look like eucalyptus or these kind of powerhouse teams around the world where they develop an ability, kind of almost closer to the discipline of product or engineering, where you're running an iteration cycle, you're testing, you're learning, you're doubling down on the winners versus traditional marketing, which was my background working at large agencies like Widen Kennedy and Colenso BBDO, where we would spend months, sometimes years working on an ad versus like Eucalyptus, where for each brand, we were putting out thousands and thousands of ads every month so it's like a change in and mindset and a change in the way that you build a process or you build a team but yeah every good team will end up looking like the kind of discipline that was built at eucalyptus and many of these standout teams around the world right now so it's an exciting time and i i feel that it's it's almost weird right that you've got performance marketing and then you have traditional brand marketing or whatever you want to call it shouldn't all marketing be able to perform and it's weird to even view them it's totally it's weird to view them as these kind of two different entities or formats or channels i think maybe a lot of that was driven by back in the day digital advertising would have more been like the web banners like dynamic product ads or it's like the last time that you see the picture of the handbag before you buy it and people treated it as kind of like the conversion layer kind of like the quick wins versus what marketing has become today on digital channels, where it's like short form vertical video, a crazy level of storytelling, or just being able to interact with an audience.

9:16And then how can you look at that and say, well, that isn't a place where you can build a brand. And that's just a place where you can show kind of discount codes and get a kind of conversion. And I think that mindset, if you can adopt that of, well, how do we tell the right message to the right people on the channels that they live in and the places that they sit and show them the things that they care about and kind of double down on that. That is how you build like an amazing marketing function versus we can only do these things on said brand or we can only do these things on said channel because those are the rules.

9:48Like the world changes fast enough that it really should be like, well, how can we reach the people that care about us and how can we give them something that they care about and kind of meet halfway and end up with a conversion and a product that they love but at the same time still show the reason that this that this company was built or this company was started through that kind of same channel so it's an interesting time in marketing and i think a lot of people would benefit from going well let's just think more holistically about the people that are buying our product and the way that we can reach them because you look at the types of relationships that creators or content creators have with their audiences that have been built purely through platforms like tiktok where it's just short form vertical video and you go, well, if they can build a relationship like that or where people will wait like hours and hours just to have a glimpse of them or go to some kind of event that they put on or their product will sell out straight away.

10:42Well, why can't that same channel, that same platform, that same way of making work build a more traditional brand in the way that people think about it? So I think that's kind of an interesting misconception that has plagued marketing for too long where you have to look at these things as these kind of like absolutes and you kind of have to look at them as the these two purely independent channels in their own right and i think that was part of the benefit as well when when you talk about that feedback loop or refer to marketing as building a muscle or building a machine a lot of that comes from well how can we have a repeatable way of understanding what's working sharing that with a team and graduating that to different channels and whether you're making a tv ad whether you're doing a billboard whether you're making a hundred more facebook ads those learnings are still relevant and they still drive those same results so having that mindset of a real feedback culture and a real like empowering everyone to kind of test and learn and there's no there's no right there's no wrong like you're better to test and learn than you are to think oh maybe that doesn't suit the brand or that's kind of off the tone of voice that we would have normally put out or whatever it may be so i think it's a bit of a mindset shift but it's an interesting one now george i'd be insane not to ask you can you please pull up the 15 principles and walk us through what you wrote many minutes ago but still remain to be true let me find them 15 traits here we go one a tight feedback loop between media buyers and creatives so a real shared understanding of like between the person who's running the ad reading the data seeing what's working on platform and the people and the team themselves who are making the ads like i i would say that is the most important one and a lot of them kind of build off the back of that number two a culture that encourages testing rather than making slow subjective decisions number three metrics being the whole team's responsibility not just the media buyer for the ability to quickly generate novel concept concepts based on previous winners five a deep understanding of your audience and what your audience actually cares about.

12:45Six, a process that enables rapid creation or reworking of creative based on new learnings. Seven, shared and regularly updated messaging matrix across your products and audiences. Eight, a shared understanding of what has driven past performance in the account. Nine, a shared understanding of the best practices for a particular channel or medium. Ten, being able to understand what is actually driving success and iterate from that. Eleven, the ability to go up and down, not just sideways. So being able to dig deeper into insights or messaging rather than just creating a set of replicas. 12, the ability to follow the eye of the cultural storm, which is something that my boss said to me a long time ago when I was working at Widen Kennedy, like just being able to stay on the pulse and kind of move with the speed of culture.

13:3213, a clean and repeatable process for each section of the creative process. 14, the ability to discover and act on competitive formats, concepts, or insights. And then 15, a culture that enables the team to consistently take bets, which can have outsized returns. I feel like that describes your product. A hundred percent. It really does. And like the roadmap for it, there should be like a, on the website, like these sort of - Yeah. Those are the traits that, and the thing is like teams that understand those traits, they're the best customers of the Magic Reef product. Cause like, that's how we want to work.

14:07They see the product and that's been built for our team. So there really is kind of alignment with this new way of working and performance advertising. And it's amazing to see kind of that alignment with everything that we've built just fit so perfectly with kind of teams around the world. It was interesting to hear the number of times that you said shared understanding and how, in particular, to use your words, creative intelligence comes into the game. if you could explain a bit more about how the product has been set up to capture the advantages of open ai's for our image generation model and and the models to come off the back of that that would be really helpful framing so we can sort of draw a line between the shared understanding and then how you get to catch the the upside i'd say like one thing that is interesting and when I look at so much of the martech that exists today people try and solve the wrong problem like they try and get to this like one shot solution where it just ends up with this final output and the output is worse than what most good marketers could have created but they didn't really give them a kind of service where they could actually get involved with the process and make that ad better they tried to just get like to an absolute end result and part of that is through like the quantity of output.

15:29Well, I can give you 500 ads right now and I can generate them in seconds, but having 500 fairly average ads doesn't really do anything for a business because you've got to pay to test all those ads. So you're in no better place than you were really. You've just had that kind of huge output given to you. The best place to be in as well, here's 10 ads. And I feel pretty strongly that five of these are going to become these like exceptional outliers in your ad account that are going to drive the performance of your business. So it starts there in terms of when you work backwards, if we're not giving someone the final output and we want to have a way where someone can impact the creative process and end up with an amazing piece of work that really drives an ad account or their entire business off the back of it, how do you let someone interface with that?

16:13And the first thing is you have to let people understand, well, what are the traits that have worked? Is it that particular a creator? Is it the way that they said something? Is it the thing that they said? Is it the way that we showed the product? Is it the kind of pain point that they build on? And you look at that and you go, okay, there was something there. Let's turn that into a brief. Okay, let's create three videos that are iterations of things that we've seen where those traits were true and create a new script. And you go through a creative process and that can be guided, right? Like you can have, even inside Magic Brief, we have AI recommendations now.

16:49So we'll look at the ads that are in your account and go, there's real opportunity here. If you create an iteration of these three ads, you should change the hook of this ad. You should change the call to action. You should replace this content creator. Like we give you kind of these shapeable answers that you can then go on and create the ad. And you can still do that in a way where every step of the process, you can agree or disagree with what we're saying. It's like getting feedback from a human. Like you can choose to ignore certain parts of what someone said to you. It doesn't necessarily have to end up in the straight output.

17:20So it's having this kind of shapeable surface where you can show someone what you're thinking, show them the underlying metrics, give some kind of hint of where to go next, and then help them kind of form that process. And a lot of teams, like I'd say the biggest weakness in marketing teams where they're not performing as strongly as they could is they don't have that kind of, they don't have the feedback loop built. Like they're not looking at what worked last week and they're putting out the assets that they make this week based on those learnings. And whether that's kind of like a disjointed internal process, whether they're using an agency that doesn't really understand the true kind of USPs or the drivers of what works for their business.

18:01And there's that separation or that lag, or there's kind of that gray zone between what works and what is getting made. But if you can enable that, that is the thing that really drives a huge amount of performance. And that was a tricky thing for us because it was tempting with all of the data that we have inside the platform you have to try and stop yourself building another just analytics platform where you're just like we've got all these metrics we can show them in interesting ways we can graph them out and kind of build another google analytics or whatever it may be so we've been focused on building a platform where like the work itself is front and center and the metrics sit alongside the work for example, we will show a grid of all of the ads in your account.

18:44We'll label which parts of the ads are working, which pieces you should change. We'll have the recommendations that you can pull out of those, but we really focus it on, well, let's focus on the work itself. And then second to that, the underlying drives of what is working and the metrics that accompany them, even wrapping things together. So we have these wizard scores inside the product, which shows you how well an ad is doing at stopping someone's attention in the feed, how well it does at holding someone's attention how well it does at driving them to the landing page or the product page and then how well it does at getting them to convert and with inside that there's a ton of different metrics that we're referencing but we just break it down into these scores so you don't need to be a media buyer or like an analyst like you can just look at the grid see what's working and what's not and double down on that and i think examples like those that is how you build the feedback loop.

19:36And that is what I wanted when I was at Eucalyptus. Like surely there's a better way than going into Facebook ads manager, which is largely just a table of data that looks like a spreadsheet. Like surely there's a better way to infer repeatedly with a large team of people, what is working, what we should double down on. And we used to do these, these creative whip sessions at Eucalyptus and we'd do them like once a week on a Friday and we'd sit in a meeting room and we'd have like a presentation where we'd have screenshots of the ads that were working and reasons why we thought that they were working.

20:07But by the time most of the people had left the meeting room, you'd forgotten what the insights or the drivers were and then came back to work on Monday and you made the ads. And I just kept thinking, there's got to be a better way of having the creative team who are producing the work that's driving the company forwards. We've got to have a way where at any point in time, anyone on the team knows for any of the brands and any of the products, these are the things that are driving these products forwards and this is what we should double down on. So that is why I guess I have this kind of like obsession or use the word feedback loop a lot.

20:39Cause that's really like building that, that cycle where it's test and learn, test and learn, but you can't test and learn if you can't understand what's worked and you can't show the people who are making the ads that on a regular basis and that easy to understand way. You've given me sort of a eureka moment. What really resonated with me is, Oh, like, what do we call ourselves? Like we're not an analytics company, company, not just a marketing tool. Who are we? What do we call ourselves? Have you had a eureka moment where, oh, this is the category we're creating. We're sitting at both sides of capturing context, analysis, cultural, et cetera, et cetera.

21:17And then the other side, we're telling you how it is so that you can then sit in the middle and be that manager that does the task better. Yeah. I mean, it's a great point, right? We found it hard for a long time to name ourselves in terms of what are the category that we sit in like what's the name of product if you were to search it's not like we're kind of like a crm or we're not a analytics platform and the kind of pure sense so it's like it's hard to to explain to someone kind of like well what is the thing that we're building and i think it's kind of a bit abstract but creative intelligence is the closest thing that we've got to where it's helping people make good decisions about what to make in their marketing function based on a large set of data.

21:59Part of that being their own ad account and their own performance data. And then also the larger kind of landscape of what people are testing with inside their larger industry. So it's a hard one to land on because it's not like we're going into a category where it's like we're a product management tool or a CRM. We run like a lifecycle marketing product. Like it really is kind of becoming a new way of thinking about marketing, a new way of working in marketing and therefore maybe a new category in terms of the product that we're making right now. Definitely. I've just seen a lot of companies in a similar wedge and I do like creative intelligence, but I'm excited to see how this plays out even further.

22:37What do you think the role is for, let's go with creatives in the backdrop of OpenAI's model release. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on how their role changes. I'd say what I feel to be like the strongest kind of role for the creative right now and the future going forwards is really around like taste and curation and like genuine good novel ideas and kind of ways of thinking about things. And it's been interesting even being on Twitter over the past like week or so with the launch of Open Hour's new model. And you see like hundreds of people posting things that they made, whether that's landing pages, ads or whatever, and saying it's so over, it's over for creative people.

23:21And first of all, you look at the stuff that they're posting. These are bad ads and they're bad landing pages, but you've just managed to make them in seconds. So I think the world is going to be filled with a lot more kind of slop in terms of just like now that anyone can make anything. If you look at the rate of photos that are getting taken right now because everyone has an iPhone and you go, well, a big portion of the Western world has had professional grade cameras in their pockets for the last five years. A lot of people are still terrible at taking photos. And not that that matters, but there's always going to be a place for people that really understand and excel and think, I want to take this seriously as a craft.

23:58And I want to get good at understanding the principles of how to take a good photo. I feel like that's going to be the same in every creative discipline where someone just goes, okay, I've now have a new set of tools where I can do something better than I could yesterday. And I'm going to double down on that. I even saw someone post on Twitter that they're going to generate their wedding photos. so they don't have to pay a wedding photographer. And it's like, you're missing the point there. This isn't what it was made to do in the sense that there's some things in life where you do things because you want to capture that moment or you want to have a genuine kind of real piece of creativity, not sweet, I'm just going to upload pictures of me and my wife and that's going to be the wedding photo.

24:38So it's interesting to see the reaction when you have changes like this in the world where some people go, okay, I can just shortcut. I don't really care that much about the quality of the end result, but I can get there quickly and I can get there for free. And then there's other people that go, this is a new set of tools or I can make something that wouldn't have been possible two weeks ago. But I can really have an impact and get to a piece of creative or whatever endeavor it is and be like, I'm proud of this work. And it's been enabled by the changes in technology. So I think it's almost like picking what side you're on to a certain degree and how you want to use it.

25:13do you just want to output slop and the world is filled with things that kind of are pretty mundane and different repetitions of versions of things that have already been made or do you want to create a kind of new style a new piece of work a new way of thinking about things a new like funny novel idea that really can kind of change your business or the way that someone thinks about you or the world so i think it's it's never been a better time to be a creative and even though there's a lot of fear mongering where people say oh this is the end of certain roles this is the end of certain skill sets i think like like anything there'll be people that take this and really do run with it and end up with incredible results and incredible outcomes and it's just if you can position your company your creative team yourself in a way where you can really kind of ride on this wave and get to better outcomes like those would be the people that are rewarded and And those would be the people that kind of keep creativity and culture moving along in a way that is interesting.

26:11If we look back at the prior year, can you describe just how your product has changed with or in tandem to updates that the foundational model companies have made? Just so we can all get a sense of just the advantage of sitting on top of that at the application layer. Good question. one of the most important things that we focused on is like how to understand a piece of creative like how can you look at an ad and infer the same understanding that a human would have ever looked at it like how does this ad make me feel who appeared in it what was the ad about what were the specific traits like the kind of tone that they used when was the product mentioned like you've got a whole bunch of these things that you inherently just understand if you watch something as a human, but we had to come up with this pipeline for understanding ads at a crazy scale because we've got like millions and millions of ads inside the platform and billions of dollars in spend.

27:12So we have to process these ads and understand these kind of underlying traits. And that is something that is becoming kind of easier and cheaper to do with the new models that come out. So having that kind of core understanding of what makes an ad and what makes an ad work, that has been something that's kind of been an incredible uplift that we've managed to kind of sit on top of and build around. And a lot of what we do now as a company and the product that we're building is, well, if we have this amazing understanding of millions of ads inside the platform and billions of dollars in spend, how do we actually build on this to the point where you're noticing these patterns, these similarities, these kind of drivers across industries where it's like, hey, within the certain product type, everyone's talking about this.

28:00A few people have mentioned this, but the people that have mentioned that are really seeing results. And you start to see these kind of like sweet spots within industries or markets or product types where you can double down. But that all comes from being able to look at such a wealth of data and context and kind of pre-existing references. And we can do that because of the underlying tech even things like transcription the fact that you can now transcribe things for next to nothing and look at the underlying transcripts of an ad and what you can infer from that if you wanted to pull away the same insights and the same learnings you'd have to watch thousands of ads and make annotations about these were the things that were mentioned these are the things that would be said these are the same themes so we just released a couple of days ago a new part of the product where we use ai to add these tags and you can see the tags that are being added to your own ads and your own account.

28:53And then in a matter of seconds, you can start just building these comparisons. So I can see out of every one that we've ever used in an ad, these are the age groups, like these are the concepts, these are the formats, these are the things that actually win and drive results. And we even see it with people going, okay, out of all of our content creators, who are the ones that are driving results out of all of the agency partners, which are the one where the spend's going behind them. So you can see in a new way, like a breakdown that just wouldn't have been possible if we couldn't understand ads and we couldn't kind of draw these correlations or tag these traits using the underlying models.

29:28You mentioned off camera around one of the self-serve learnings. I wanted to just replay part of that conversation. So what did you learn about self-serve last year? I think self-serve is an amazing way to have just a very low barrier to entry to the product where anyone at any point in time, any level of intent can sign up and experience the product. And that is great for certain businesses at certain times. And that was like us where in the early days when the product was less mature and we were kind of focusing entirely on the development of the product, we didn't want there to be a barrier or we didn't want there to be a distraction for the business on thinking like, well, how do we go to market?

30:12How do we build a sales team and a go to market motion in that sense, where we could just focus on the product. And that works because we brought thousands of people into the product. And so many of them are still our best customers today in terms of the way that they use the product. And they use it as this kind of like daily driver. And it's part of the way that they make marketing. And that's been one of the most exciting things, seeing someone leave an agency or a brand, move to another brand or agency. And within the first a week buy Magic Reef again at their new workplace because it's just this is the way that I want to do marketing and I can't imagine working without the tool.

30:47So I think self-serve opens up to a lot of opportunities like that where you can have people just experience the product at any point in time, any level of intent, but then you do get to a point and I think that's a point that we've got to particularly over the last six months where the value that you can give particularly to kind larger marketing teams with larger budgets you want to make sure they're really understanding that value and it's worth having that call and taking someone through the products and just kind of explaining not only why you made it but like how other teams are using it the value that they're getting out of it and i think if you stick to purely self-serve you kind of miss those opportunities to have these like amazing teams come in and get their interactions and see their kind see their reactions to the product and then build on that.

31:37So it's kind of getting that balance right. But for us, we've started to see so much traction in the US and Europe in terms of just a real pull for the product that we've built. That has been a driver of, oh, let's set up a go-to-market function and really kind of center ourselves there. But I think the underlying muscle of building for self-serve and PLG, you carry that through forever because it's just a way of thinking about the product where people can understand the value. People can onboard other team members that weren't part of the demo and they can still understand the value of the product.