Jones Road's YouTube Playbook with Cody Plofker

0:00Hey, Brett Curry here. Welcome to another edition of the e-commerce evolution podcast. Today's a little bit different. I'm going to share with you a recording that was done live at an exclusive invite only event in New York City. I'm interviewing my friend and client and just a guy that I have a ton of respect for Cody Ploughker, former CEO of Jones Road Beauty, co-host of the Marketing Operators podcast of my favorite marketing podcasts on the planet. And so we go deep here on YouTube and you choose YouTube success. And Cody's just a brilliant marketer if you've listened to his podcast, you know that. But I want to get his take on YouTube. Now he and I work together. OMG runs YouTube for Jones Road Beauty, but I want to get his take and share that take

1:03with you guys. And so we dive into everything from creative. When does Cody feel confident in a creative to move forward with it? When does he feel like it? Maybe we need to go back to the drawing board or we need to edit this a little bit. What creative link is he most excited about on YouTube? How does he think about educational content on YouTube? We talk about some of the journey that Jones Road has had with YouTube. And then also we talk about causal measurement. YouTube is notorious for under-reporting the actual results in platform. And so Jones Road leans into Infer mentality, which is what we recommend as well. So you get to dive into the marketing mind that is Cody Ploughker. And I get to chime in a little bit as well. Now I also want to mention if you've never been to one of our live events, this was actually recorded at the Google headquarters in New York City. These are invite only events. If you'd like to attend next year, next year we're planning on two of these events. Hit us up, go to omgcommerce.com, fill it the let's talk for them and just say

2:10invite me to the next YouTube event. There are some requirements to attend, but they are free to attend for qualifying brands. And so with that, let's dive in and please enjoy my interview with Cody Ploughker. Let's talk YouTube. So this guy speaks at like meta performance marketing summits. He's on the marketing office podcast. He's vibe coding and I always put a Y instead of an Ion coding. So it's coding anyway. That's really nerdy thing. But he's vibe coding, doing like CRO and stuff like that. But where does YouTube fit? Like from your perspective, where does YouTube fit into the mix? I'm a big fan. I mean, it's always been like, we'll call it between 10 and 20% of our mix. And when things have been really good on YouTube, like business has been really good. I'm definitely a really big fan. I mean, obviously meta is going to be a big share of NGDC brand, but you know, it's such an important channel for so many reasons. It can reach new people. Everybody's on it. It's the new TV like I'm a huge fan. You don't need like endless supply of creative. Creative is really important, but you know, it's one of the only platforms where you're getting

3:12really like full screen attention from somebody. So the quality of impressions is great. So huge fan think every not every brand, but definitely for the right brands. It should be like a really big part of your strategy and mix. Love it. Let's talk creative a little bit because Cody, you know, we we we we we slack a lot on YouTube and creative and stuff. And I remember we're working on some creative concepts together. We're we're slacking about it. And you mess with me and you're like, I don't think it's going to work. Like this this round of critics only is going to work. And like I think it needs a little more. And as I think you're right. And so so from your perspective, how do you and this this is a little bit different than matter of the platforms. How do you look at a YouTube creative? When do you look at YouTube creative and say this needs a little something extra before we start running this? I think I heard you say brand formats earlier when you're talking about YouTube. And I think that's a good way to look at it and just like how I think about YouTube as a channel in general like it's probably like a quasi like direct response and brand awareness channel. It's not like TV where you have a 15 30 second spot. And yes, you can get an offer in it, but you're it's really a top of funnel channel. It's not like meta or

4:13something where it's just bottom funnel and you like you're just you have to buy right then and there. And so I think having you need a compelling story like I don't think it can just be product or offer. You do get a lot of time if you do it correctly to get people's attention, right? People are not scrolling. They're watching a video. And so as long as you could get a good hook, which is extremely important, right? And then retain their intention. You do have their attention so the quality of impressions are really high. But you do what I found is you do have to be a little bit stronger on the direct response side. So those videos and particularly were part of like a hero TV video shoot. And I just didn't think they were punchy enough. So you need to go to hook. But I think when you're scrolling social a lot of times and people have sound off, you need a good visual hook on YouTube. Often it's on TV, half of it is on TV. Almost everyone obviously is listening with sound on. So I think audio hooks are really important. Obviously there's a whole you don't pay unless it's a five second watch. So you can actually try to like be strategic about that and almost like qualify who it's for and who it's not for. And then you still need good pacing. But it's not like the end like super quick like paid social pacing and then having a good story.

5:18And one of things I too probably misconceptions like we've always found long form does better. Just performs better. So those were short. So like mashing things up, taking some branded assets, TV things and adding more direct response. You see that's kind of what we did with that one. And then also everybody thinks you need like the most polished creative in the world. And you don't always need that. You know, you can get away with and sometimes get better performance out of things that do feel a little bit grittier or you can mash them up as well. So we get a lot of that. So yes, sometimes it's it's a slightly longer ads. And I mentioned under 30 seconds, you could test it but like that we don't love that. So like 60 90 to a minute and it doesn't have to be exact either. Like it would be whatever the link you want. And so that works really well. And one of the other things that's nice is you know, I'm a pay social or TikTok short form channel. Creative is well fatigue in a week. You know, you you have to be have so much volume. This feels a little bit more traditional. Yes, there's an algorithm. Yes, things fatigue. But we've had ads that are running in our account for two, three years. So you do have to test. You should be testing weekly or biweekly.

6:22But if you get something that performs, you you can write it pretty pretty well. Yeah, I love that. And that's one of the one of the biggest benefits of YouTube. And I think there is something to be said about like for medetic talk. It's just like a volume player. I was just get a bunch of ads in there. We're not overthinking it. We're trying to we're trying to find winners that way. With YouTube, you do be a little more strategic. You have to think about it as you as you launch it. We still got a test and find out, but you can be a little more strategic and and absolutely right. You don't have to nail it with polish. But sometimes like the higher production ads, they do work on YouTube. And sometimes they don't work on meta. And so you can kind of like wherever you are in the journey, you got some TV ads, probably making work on YouTube. You're all UGC or creator, probably make that on work on YouTube as well. But I love the way you set it. I want to underscore this. It can be longer, but it's got to be fast paced. It doesn't have to be like crazy fast paced like some tick talk ads, but it can't be slow. It's got to have a pace to it. It's got to have that direct response element to it as well. Other things that you would as you look at like these were the winners

7:24for James for Jones Road on YouTube or other brands you met. What are the what are the characteristics do they have? I'm always a fan of like quasi educational stuff. So again, it's not just a YouTube video educational, but you know, just understanding why people are on that platform. And that's right, it's either to you know, they're looking for something. So they're searching and kind of using it as like, hey, I need to go mo my lawn or I need to learn how to do this. So they're in a learning mindset or it's in an entertainment thing, right? It's the new TV. And so you shouldn't just be like, hey, here's this product. I have this product by it. Like the more you can make it feel like it's something that people are getting value of, regardless. And I think the same is true for anything paid social, but I think it's really important here. But you do have to obviously weave in the right sales mechanisms and direct response things into it. So I think if you can kind of like blend that and tell really good stories, that can be really helpful. Yeah, absolutely. And what what has been kind of the journey for Jones Road? Like I think you guys saw really good stories. And of course, Bobby is dynamic. I mean, you watch her and you're like, trust her. Like I just totally

8:25like she's an icon type of thing. How how have you guys progressed in how do we get the right mix of all those elements you just described so that we can build these great YouTube ads? Yeah, I mean, you do have to produce specifically for it or you don't have to, it's recommended, but again, it doesn't have to be this like $300,000 TV shoot. You can you can definitely start taking paid social assets. Obviously, you should launch your your nine by 16s that are performing well. You still do want them and have them in the mix. And then there are a bunch of services or you know, we've worked with some, but with where editors where you can kind of add like frames and backgrounds. And even like you can do this on your TV ads where you can you can run a 16 by nine landscape video, but with nine by 16 vertical video in it. And then like your logo or QR code or just some like B roll on the side of it. And you can just get you can test a lot cheaper and and get some more longevity out of stuff. And then when you have some of that works like one of things that we've done well is like, or we used to do, we would get traction organic social

9:26would perform, we'd run that paid social iPhone style. And then we would go and when we did a production, we're not like just blindly being like, okay, this concept will work, but we kind of know this hook, this story is working. And we would kind of produce it in a little bit more produced way. So I think those can help a lot. Yeah. And so you you recently did it was I think for the foundation stick launch. Some of the creator shots that I saw looks you guys did those, right? Like you brought creators into a studio as well. And so sometimes what you're doing is you're running ads from creators on paid social stuff. They shot stuff they filmed. You're understanding these are the hooks and things that work. Now we're going to go let's go professionally shoot some of those as well. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah. Just like I think one of the I guess it's like top down versus bottoms up where like traditional brand campaigns are like, hey, here's this concept for this campaign. We're going to do we're going to have like a big hero spot. And then from that hero spot, we'll go and edit a few variations of it, right? And it's still important, especially for like a brand campaign. And we did that for the foundation stick launch. But I think when you do that, you want to get as many just as much like footage as possible

10:30because then you can edit. So we had TV spots, things like that. But we brought them to Brett's team and we're like, hey, here's here's what we have. I think they're a little too polished for performance, right? How do we add a little bit better editing in this? How do we add better hooks? How do we make them a little bit longer? Mash them up. And it'll faster pace a few of them as well. Exactly. Yeah, just just have them hit a little bit harder. So that's like a good way to do it. Like if you have like a big campaign or a shoot, I want to extend TV. Like even one time when we first ran TV ads, we, I was like, all right, we have them. Let's run them on YouTube. What we found, the, you know, the engagement was very good on them. So watch time was very good, right? I forget the name of what you would consider a hook rate was very good on it, right? But obviously the, the conversion was not great. And so we just took the intro of those, took some of our, you know, UGC assets were performing well, put them together, sped them up, put some music on it. Like there are ways to extend the life of it. But then again, the other way is bottoms up, which is like use the algorithms on social platforms, even organically get some traction, even if you're testing

11:33statically, like just know what hooks work, what types of concepts are working, right? Like scale those. And then when you hit some fatigue and need to go into a shooter, produce, you have a much better understanding of what's resonating. Yeah. So I love that. I think you can, you can treat some YouTube content a little more modular where you can say this hook from this video. And then this demo from this video, like those two are really working. And if we think about the transition, like they could work well together. Sometimes it's like Frankenstein and it looks like garbage, so you can't always do it. But sometimes you look at it like, wait a minute. I think, I think the winners here bring them together. And now we got a really smash hit. And some of them, your brand team is not going to love some of them. I'm not proud of you have like, we had like the gray backgrounds, you know, when you we had like a four by five in the middle and like a black or gray background. And I'm like, they don't look amazing. But also sometimes that is what gets attention. And is what's going to get people to respond to. Yeah. And you don't want stuff that just looks like garbage. But sometimes like transitions that aren't super smooth and things like that.

12:34Sometimes it still just works. So you get you got to be willing to do it for sure. Well, even because you get some of that like movement and you got like the shaky movement. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Okay. So marketing operators podcast. I've been talking that up. Not that you guys need it. But for the whole show here, why do you do the podcast? And I guess specific questions too. But like, why do you do it? Like, could you guys pour a lot of time into that? It's fun. I mean, fortunately, it's easy. We have like a company and production company. So like we just show up and chat. But it's like something I would do for fun regardless. Like, it's just you can never know enough. And I think having a network of people that you can learn from and reach out to is like the best thing. And so I'm able to just like learn like the two co-hosts I have. It's Connor who's a CMO bridge. And Connor who's the head of growth of Hexcloud, like, they're just really, really smart guys. And so sometimes I'll just like have a question for them. And they're not great at texting. And so if I don't get a reply during the week, I'll just ask them on the pod and be like, and so there's just so much I've been able to learn from it. And then also,

13:36you know, having guests on as well. I also think sometimes trying to teach, I guess it's nice to, you know, be able to teach and hopefully people can get value. But you also kind of learn and get to check your own understanding of things if you're trying to teach it and communicate. And then also like because of that, if I, you know, if I want to reach out and people are familiar with it and you know, whatever like now I have a lot of friends who are in this place who I can lean on and I've given them value by them listening. And I can be like, Hey, I'm launching this new thing. What do you think I should do about this? So just having the network is really helpful. Hey, thanks again for tuning into the Ecommerce Evolution podcast. I want to take just a minute and talk about my agency, OMG commerce. We've been helping Ecommerce brands for 15 years. And that's like 100 Ecommerce years. And our specialty is finding opportunities for growth that other people miss and unlocking channels that you're not currently maximizing. For example, YouTube. Most brands are sleeping on YouTube and my belief is it's the biggest untapped opportunity for

14:36your brand. We're also good at adding up to eight figures in growth for Amazon brands. And so if you're looking for scale and growth, profitably, that's what we do. We love the chat with you. We love a review. Your current marketing efforts show you where there's missed opportunities and craft a specific plan for you. So visit us at OMGCommerce.com. Click the Let's Talk button. And we'd love to schedule a complimentary strategic review with you with that back to the show. It's amazing. One thing that I found too and I know this is true for you as a host is I think about marketing all the time. I do it all day long. I love it. But every time I listen to the podcast, there's like some little nuance or even like when you and Connor from Ridge are talking about YouTube, I'm like, oh, I didn't think about it quite from that angle. And like that's super, super valuable. Yeah, even like my team would listen to a few of them and like just be like, oh, they were saying that we should test that. Like there's just great ways to get ideas of tests and things to implement.

15:38So one of these you mentioned, and I saw Ridge do this, you mentioned like, hey, you got a nine by 16 or whatever vertical video that's on social. One easy thing to do and we just, this is not a fancy name. We just call it a 16 by nine conversion. So you take that, you take that vertical video and you put something next to it. And then it looks to you. You saw a little bit of that with the Jones Robutie ads where it would be like the two people, one person putting on the makeup and one before she had it on or the foundation. I mean, but I saw Ridge do this where like half the screen was the ad. The other half was the wallet. It was just there. But it would like move the little bits and then you have like the logo and the URL and maybe a QR code and stuff like that. But you look at it and you're like, that's pretty simple, but it also looks good and it works, right? So what have been some of the any other good YouTube lessons from the pod or things that have been like things you've tested, learned, observed about YouTube from the pod? One of the most important things I think to YouTube and something I've been a really big proponent of and I think the industry is getting much better at is how you think about

16:41measuring the channel. It can be one of the most effective channels for reach acquisition, whatever you want it to be if you're measuring properly. And I think so many teams are so used to measuring paid social on a, you know, click attribution basis. And obviously you talked about incrementality a lot so far in measurement and just in general are the entire industry is getting much more sophisticated as things get more challenging and and everything. But you have to measure YouTube properly because half of it, I don't know the current stats, but half of it is happening on a TV. There's going to be no clicks there, but it can drive a tremendous amount of, right? Like not even reach. It's not even just top of funnel, but like acquisition for you if you measure it properly, especially if you're in like house has a lot of data on on this. They published really good things. Amazon as well. There's there's much higher Halo effect from video channels like YouTube to Amazon to wholesale as well. And so you might think and I've seen a lot of times where brands don't think that YouTube is performing well because it compared to a meta on a click attribution basis. And it's actually providing, you

17:43know, much better returns. It's it's longer terms like one thing that we saw before we really got sophisticated with income mentality measurement. There was a much higher like revenue multiplier over time. So like whatever our one day row S was compared to like a 28 day was much higher on on YouTube. We were able to reach new people, right? New to brand who maybe took a little bit more time to mature. The value of them was higher, right? And then obviously there's much higher delta from like a click to a view, you know, in terms of revenue. And so just knowing how to measure it properly and making sure team is aligned there is really important. We hear people, you know, people say, Hey, like what do you think the one day click row S is going to be on YouTube? I'm like, it's going to be terrible. It's going to be like if that's all you measure, then we should not do that. Like do something else. But the impact will be there. And I heard you guys say, again, going back to the pod, but you talked about, I think you said this or maybe it was one of the conners, but like there's maybe been and there's ever been maybe a better mid funnel acquisition

18:45channel than meta. Like it just it just crushes for mid funnel. But what you get within a pretty short window is kind of what you're going to get. Like you look at a post-trim and window for meta, there's a change a whole lot. You look at a post-trim and window meaning you run a test and you kind of just observe for a longer period of time on YouTube. Sometimes it explodes. And so how are you, how do you view incrementality overall? And then I've got some more nerdy questions for those that are like really building incrementality roadmap. I guess some nerdy questions. But how are you viewing? Because I know you're a fan of incrementality. How do you view it in general? I mean, if you have to pick one like one measurement system for your business, that would be it. There's pros and cons of everything. There are the pro of like a in-platform attribution or multi-touch attribution. It's really fast. You get a lot of data. But the con are it's going to overemphasize bottom funnel channels that are click based. And there's no it's not always incremental. There's no causation.

19:45Sometimes the best channels in platform are the worst from an incrementality. Everybody's probably had stories of a board member executive. Why are we spending more on also retargeting? I'm not going to say another show. Maybe why are we spending more retargeting? I was like, well, we can't. Also, it's actually not even incremental. The thing that's driving retargeting is actually the thing that doesn't look good that you want me to cut my budget on. So I think incrementality can answer that. And then there's mmm. And I don't know anyone who really likes their mmm. It's slow. It's complicated. Again, it's also not causal. It's a correlation. Which like going back to school or whatever. You can't have causation without correlation. But you can't have correlation without causation. It's like it's maybe telling us, but it's not a complete picture. And so incrementality is the only one that is causal. It's the only one where you are doing an experiment and you're controlling one variable at a time. And so you're able to say, hey, this is a region where I'm running YouTube ads. And this is the reason that I'm not running YouTube ads. And everything else is the same. And I'm getting this many more customers in that region. So that's the benefit of it. And you get an incredible amount of precision.

20:48The downsides is you don't get results within a day. It's two weeks at the earliest. If you're trying to do anything moving up funnel, you really need to be much more patient. And you get a snapshot in time. And so a lot of brands will test incrementality. And I'll say, this is how this channel was performed for us. This is the Irohs of that channel. What's like, that was the Irohs of that channel in September for two weeks at $5,000 a day in spend. But you also can't run a test all the time. So we're not, you know, we're running businesses, not like controlled science experiments. So you do have to put the pieces together and kind of compare a few of them to see like how things change. But definitely who's trying to again, especially when you are not going to have great click based attribution, right? Like no one cares about what your your your your clicks are on TV because there's no clicks. And I almost think it would be easier. Just like sometimes forget about that completely because there's there's a huge impact like even just within a Google account, like you're your shopping is going to look better. Your Pmax is going to look better. Your brand search is going to look better. But again, if you're if you're also measuring, you know, your

21:48organic search, like it drives it tremendous amount of that. So there are ways to look at it. And you can do things. You can look up post purchase, right? And say, hey, as I'm spending more on YouTube, right? Are more people saying they're finding on YouTube? Is my organic search and my direct traffic going up as these going up? But then again, you know, if you're on an Amazon, if you're in wholesale, you can either just track trends, but also run income, tality experiments and see a lift in those channels as well. I think the most powerful thing I heard you say is your board is wrong about marketing and to prove them wrong running from a tality test because they're going to get you to run more remarketing or more whatever. And so what's also the only objective thing like everyone, my challenges with attribution is you could change you could change all the different models and everyone has a different interpretation of it. And although if you look at a first click or a last touch, and this is the only one where it's like, we ran this test, these were the results of it. And it's much harder, especially if you're, you know, a marketer and you've got to go and fight for budgets with a board or something like that. Like it's the only one where you can really like be backed by data and be like, this is a

22:51result of this. This is why we need to be putting more into it. Love it. And you know, I've been a part of several income and income tality tests together, like working on stuff. It's one of those interesting things. I really, I really kind of view this like a sports team, right? Like you watch you watch a coach for a major college sports team or NFL or something and like, highest of highs, lowest of lows, man. Like those wins are fun. The losses haunt you in your sleep, right? How do you view like different tests? Because we've had some smash tests. We've had some weird tests. Like, how do you view individual tests? You can talk about this a little bit, but how do you view individual tests for income and tality? And then how do you kind of think about you like an incremental road map, a testing road map? Yeah, again, in one test, it's just going to tell you, snapshot a time, those specific considerations. And so one test is really not going to tell you that much. When you start multiple tests, then you can kind of start putting the pieces together. And one of the, you know, big scientific candidates is reproducibility. And if you can run a test, we'll call it a, you know, non-brand search test. And you run it different periods a year,

23:54different budgets, different strategies. And it looks good in all three. You can be like, okay, I'm pretty confident now. Like, that's been strategy. I think the challenges when either you run one test and it looked good, but maybe it was a promo period or something like that, right? You can't just pick, oh, YouTube is great. Well, maybe it's great during a promo period or maybe, you know, not. And so you do have to really take stock of like, what is changing amongst those tests? Like, we had a bad test where we shifted a lot of our budget to a new launch. And that was our high pop this test. And we shifted it back and performed significantly improved. And so you just have to look at the variables between them. And hopefully when you do multiple tests, but also again, the one of the good things about incrementalities, you get very little data. You look at, hey, what is our incremental revenue? What is our spend? What's our incremental revenue? What's our incremental row S? Right? But you don't get like, you know, you're not looking at impressions. You're not looking at conversion rate. So you have to then like back in 10, big, okay, let's have a hypothesis. What did we change? Let's go try to like validate that a little bit. Like did our conversion rate drop? Did our spend to these placements go down? And then that informs, like, that informs your next test in your

24:58roadmap, right? It's like, have a hypothesis, run a test, go and validate it or look at data to kind of tell you a story. And then it's like, oh, you know what? Like we, we didn't, this one didn't do well because we saw these placements shift for our next test. Here are the things I want to iron out. And either, you know, you should be changing one variable at a time. But sometimes when your performance is so bad, you don't really have a choice. And so sometimes we'll be like, oh, cool, these are the three things we're going to change all of them, you know, because I think if we change one, we're, it's going to be just too long. We're running a business, right? We're not, we're not just doing testing for fun. Like somebody that's going to take bigger, bigger swings for sure. Yeah, one, one interesting thing I've seen is there's a big brand that a lot of you guys would know, but I didn't get permission. So it's true to me details. But they've got like three peaks throughout the year, right? One's back to school, one's holiday, and then there's another one. But they found that, like, they spend into demand and things go really, really well. So if they lean into YouTube hard for those peaks, highly incremental. They lean into YouTube other times of the year, not very incremental. But it's different, right? Like other brands you can run YouTube

26:03during slower periods of the year and see great results. And so like you really have to think about it seasonally and what's going on. And then, and then have a POV, have a hypothesis and then keep testing. Yeah. Awesome. Very good. So, hey, let's, let's see. Wanna hear what's next? What's what is next for Cody Ploughaker? So if you're not following Cody on X, do that right now. Like open your X app, follow Cody, pay attention to what he's doing. I've gotten really into to Claude and you have been Claude Pilled as some say. I'm checking out other things HQ like he's on HQ, which has been great. I think oddly enough, you're the one, you convinced me to trade HQ before you did, which was weird. But what's next for Cody? And what are you doing with AI, man? Because you're like, you're cracked, as they say. Yeah, I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to take any jobs. That's definitely. Don't think no job offers for Cody. It would have to be the perfect thing. So I'm probably

27:04not going to do that. I'm going to obviously take some time going to Austria next week. So a little family vacation. And then just like trying to explore and find things that I think are fun. You know, again, like I, I, you know, was just working and there was so much not fun parts of jobs. I'm like, what would just make me excited to, you know, wake up and build? And so I think it's such an incredible time right now. Everyone, not everybody, but I know a lot of people who are, you know, leaving bigger brands and starting their own brands. And obviously with AI, it's, it's really such an incredible time where you can do a lot. And so that's what I'm excited about. So I guess I can't share too much, but I will have something watching soon. And it will be very, there'll be a good mix. We're working with a really good team and, and, you know, people, I really want to learn from, which will be great. And I think that's really important. It's just like, don't be the smartest person in the room, get around people who, who you really respect and want to learn from. Do stuff where you're, I'm just like, what do I want to do that I'm fired up to work the next day? Like if I do some consulting calls and I'm like, I don't look forward to it, I'm just, I'm not going to do that. And then obviously AI, I'm just like, you know,

28:05very, very obsessed with it. And so it's just, that's what's fun and to plan around with it. Yeah, I found that like during my AI journey, there's a few voices and I'm paying attention to for like, what should I test next, what should I try next? And you're one of those voices. I really I really pay attention. We are nearing the end of our time. Are you cool for you open up to the audience for a couple of questions? So let's do this. We've only got a bright time for a few. But what questions do you guys have for Cody related to anything we've talked about here? So we got a question right in front here. Um, an incrementality roadmap. How do you guide companies and brands on starting that process? That's a good question. I haven't. So I can tell you how I think about it, but I haven't. Um, you have to like, so is this just like, how would you start incrementality at a new company in general? Yeah, how would you build it? What's the purpose? What's like the goal or problem you're trying to solve? Yeah, hypothesis. I think the biggest one is like,

29:06first principles and hypothesis driven. Like, what's the issue? Are we do we think we're, you know, overspending? Do we think we're understanding? But I think asking those questions and like, what is our hunch? What do we think by multiple data points? Um, and then also what's going to be the make the biggest impact to the business? You know, if we test, uh, Pinterest that we're spending a thousand dollars a day on and that looks great. We spend two thousand dollars a day. Like, is that really going to move the needle or if we're spending, you know, 50 grand on a channel and we find it is looking terrible and we can reallocate that. So just like having like a some framework for how you think about the priorities of the test, what's going to make the biggest impact. And then obviously what's the goal? Are you, you can use incrementality to find channels that are underperforming and cut and and all of us have some channels that are underperforming, but also what's really performing well and we can go scale or what is something that, you know, we need to fine tune our strategy a little bit. Great question. Pin over here. Hey Cody, big fan on the pod. Um, thinking about like digging into YouTube, how do you and in crypto-tality? How do you look at, um,

30:12allocating slots to baselining versus new tactical opportunities? Like, it's something we're focused on right now, which is like, how much do we want to spend baselining? It's saying sequencing period of a period we're improving versus testing the irritality of a tactical improvement. That's really good question. Um, it depends how good of a feel you like you think you have for the baseline, right? And if it's probably been a long time or like things change either in the business or your strategy, it probably makes sense to take some time and just like, all right, here's where we're at right now. Um, and not to get two in the weeds of like test setup. I guess you could do it like if you ran a three-cell, you could get a baseline and then let's say you're trying to run a new strategy. So now you got to hold out, you can go because you could do a two-cell or three-cell. And then it's like, all right, let me test my business as usual and then let me test one other change on this one, whether it's spending more, whether it's different objective, and you could kind of test both. Otherwise, if it's been a while, like yeah, probably makes sense, take two weeks, get a baseline, and then you can build a hypothesis of where to go from there.

31:13Do the two-cell versus the three-cell, getting nerdy up here. I love it. Uh, so more and more on a break if you want to do a chat about that. I think we have time for one more. Yes, Johnny. Hey, Cody, what was the kind of startup experience on YouTube as a channel for you that first year or two and what were potentially some of the shockers or hurdles that came up that weren't expected? That's a really good question. So we probably started spending on it when we were, you know, it was probably the second channel. Like we probably, obviously Google, but it was really mostly like brand and stuff like that. There was never telling on brand and I was always like really bullish on that. I thought it would work really well for us. And we probably got a point where you're spending like five to 10k a day before we did incrementality. And it was kind of like, how is it working? You know, it's like, it's probably not working terribly because it's, you know, it's enough of our spend now. And like I would notice if it wasn't, you know, like our MER wouldn't be as good, but I'm like, maybe we should be spending more, I don't know. And so we would look at, obviously we would look at NorthBeam, we'd look at in platform, but it's not going to look good

32:16at other places. Post-purchase looks really good. So there were multiple sources and some look good, some look didn't, some didn't look good. And how to hunch it was, it was good. And this was even before I like knew about incrementality because post-purchase was good, because total business was good. But again, like didn't have the confidence to scale it based on I was, you know, what we were comfortable with at the time was click-based attribution. And we also had a challenge where, you know, we were very reliant on one channel and meta and we weren't reaching enough new people, right? But also wasn't really ready for TV. We didn't really, you know, want to go and do a $200, $300,000 shoot and test, you know, complete new thing. This felt more familiar. So that was when we brought it on. I actually think that was our first house test ever. I think they even like called it the Cody for a little bit, but we tested YouTube because that was our hypothesis was like, hey, we think it's doing pretty well. And we need to first of all, first question is baseline. Is it doing as well as we think it is? How do we proceed from there? We either have to cut it, re-evaluate our strategy, or we found it was actually really, really good.

33:19We found there was longer post-treatment, much better incrementality factor, which is how does your incremental results compare to your platform? So that was it for us. We kind of got to the point. And it was like, all right, it's worth investing in this new measurement philosophy and strategy, because we think we can make it like much better decisions. And we just like didn't really have the answers. And so I think that's pretty common where a lot of brands will do things well, they'll find performance, but like a lot of finance teams are like, hey, your results are so much better on this channel versus YouTube. Like, why am I going to be more budget for it? And markers will just have a hunch of like, no, like, because other ones that are closer to the action, they scale budgets and they see the business look better, but they don't quite have the tools to prove it out. So it was really helpful for that. Amazing. All right, that is officially time. I'm watching the countdown timer. Wasn't that good? Man, it's awesome. Give it up for the man, Cody Ploughcar. Hey, as we wrap up this week's episode, I want to mention, if you're a great brand, if you're scaling high seven, eight, nine figures in D2C or on the channel, we should potentially talk.

34:23We've worked with some of your favorite brands and we'd love to consider working with you as well. We are masters at unlocking new channels like YouTube, unlocking new scale on platforms like Amazon, where we can add up to eight figures and new growth. We've got multiple ways we can work with you. So we can do the full service thing and work like a partner with your team and really run everything. Or we can offer consulting. So maybe you've got an internal team that really knows their stuff, but there's an area they don't know really well and they'd like to get some consulting. We can do that. We also have tons of free guides, free resources, free materials. You check out all of that, get started at omgcomers.com and we can't wait to help you scale profitably.