The Marketing Millennials: Ecommerce Trends for 2024 and Beyond
Eric Dyck, President of the DTC Newsletter, shares his insights on the importance of storytelling and how it can be integrated into every aspect of your brand, dissecting the evolving landscape of social media platforms and the opportunities they present for marketers.
Summary (Generated with Bash)
In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, the Marketing Millennials Podcast hosted by Daniel Murray offers invaluable insights and lively discussions with industry pioneers reshaping the marketing world. Here, the spotlight shines on storytelling, a cornerstone successful brands master across all platforms, from cocktail parties to advertising campaigns, underscoring the idea that compelling narratives drive success.
Marketing Storytelling: The Key to Success
Emphasis on narrative-driven marketing as an essential strategy for connecting with audiences.
Discussion with Eric from DTC Newsletter and Podcast highlights the importance of integrating a brand's story into every marketing effort.
Innovative Tools and Strategies
Introduction of Black Crow, a predictive marketing tool designed to enhance e-commerce marketers' effectiveness by leveraging Shopify data.
Exploration of the DTC market trends, focusing on efficiency and storytelling to navigate the saturated digital ad space.
Adaptation and Growth in Marketing
Insights into how brands should diversify their marketing funnels, emphasizing a shift from Meta platforms regarded as middle to bottom funnel channels, to broader, omnichannel approaches including TV and PR for top-funnel efforts.
Reevaluation of platform strategies, particularly the use of Amazon and TikTok as significant channels for reaching and engaging new customer bases.
Looking Forward: Marketing in 2024 and Beyond
Predictions for future marketing trends, such as the rise of efficiency and the significance of storytelling in differentiating brands in a crowded marketplace.
Case studies like Kanye West's Super Bowl ad and its unconventional, direct-response approach fuel the discussion on creativity and risk-taking in marketing.
In summary, the Marketing Millennials Podcast illuminates the critical role of storytelling and adaptability in marketing. Through candid conversations with seasoned marketers, it becomes clear that the brands of tomorrow must continually refine their narratives, embrace new technologies, and be willing to venture into uncharted territories to achieve enduring success.
Read the full discussion in the transcript below 👇
232 - Ecommerce Trends for 2024 and Beyond, with Eric Dyck
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the No BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray, and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the **** up. I think you just have to constantly be storytelling as a brand and building that story into kind of everything you do across your ads, across every platform. If you're not telling a compelling story when you tell your coworkers or you tell someone out at a dinner party, like what you do, if you're not, if you're not telling a compelling story about what it is you're doing in the world, then you're a lot less likely to succeed. Black Crow is the performance marketing tool whose job is to make e-commerce marketers better at their jobs. It's a pretty sweet predictive model that uses your Shopify data to automatically make all your digital marketing channels more efficient, targeting and retargeting shoppers most likely to buy. Visit blackcrow.ai flash Daniel to get 30 days free trial and a thousand dollars credit for your first monthly contract. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. Today I have Eric of DTC Newsletter, DTC Podcast. If you guys don't follow that, it's a great read if you're in the e-commerce direct to consumer space. Would love to, for you to introduce yourself, tell everybody how you got into marketing and then we can go talk DTC marketing. Love it. First of all, I'm not a millennial. I act like a millennial, I think because I've been in tech for so long here. I'm like a, I'm a cusp millennial kind of Gen X-er under the wire, but I feel I identify as millennial even though I'm over 40. How do you feel about that? I feel that anybody could be any, I think sometimes I have my Gen Z moments. Sometimes I have my Gen X moments. I think marketing is all about learning from every generation. So I love it. I love it. That's a great way to put it. Well, I got into marketing. I had a film degree. I went to university and I ended up at it with a film degree, which is a good degree for like learning to think outside of the box, I would say. Then I ended up in Victoria, British Columbia, where I am now. I started working for a company that was called Never Blue at the time, and it was one of the most successful affiliate marketing agencies. Right when affiliate marketing was kind of switching out of the mode where you were like building websites and optimizing your SEO and kind of making money on the long tail, this switched to sort of like an arbitrage style digital marketing where we were actually going out and I was tasked with like right away, we had this whole suite of offers, things like dating networks and toolbar downloads and all those type of things that were on affiliate networks, ringtones. And then my job was to go out and figure out how to actually make money with those products by arbitraging them online, specifically with Google AdWords way back in the day. So you're building campaigns, building landing pages and optimizing every single aspect of your campaign because if you didn't, you'd lose money. We were essentially sort of digital mercenaries out there where we can make a lot of money if we can optimize to a great margin. But it was very like profit driven marketing. And I remember back in the day thinking like, I wonder if all agencies spend like this and you know, realizing that no, no agencies at that time were really focused on performance marketing. It was a lot more, you know, remnants of the traditional marketing where you have these big advertising budgets and you're optimizing to different KPI, but you're not really ruthlessly focused on profit the way we were. And so this is way back, way back in the day. And I kind of like worked in this performance marketing space for many, many years. Got an opportunity to join the iStack guys, so the affiliate world conferences. Right around that time, I joined the affiliate world conferences as they were like, hey, let's make an e-commerce community. Let's make a marketing community. Let's do more events. So I kind of got involved with them and started bringing together this audience of people that were affiliates, but we're then getting into like dropshipping and we're getting into all this, this other way to make money online essentially was with creating these, these lean e-commerce brands. I remember I met the founder of Oberlo in like 2015 and he's like, you know, you can just like go on Alibaba and flip a product directly. So I remember those early, early days and now I've kind of stayed in the space where those, those performance driven lean e-commerce brands are, are changing into these more sort of like purpose driven D to C brands. And I kind of got, I got another opportunity to start, to start up this media company with my friends over at Pilot House, which were friends that worked with me way back at that Never Blue company. They started a performance marketing agency based on this profit driven marketing perspective. And I joined them as a 17th team member to kind of just start making content with them about performance marketing. And now the agency is 170 people and my team on content is 15. And we're in, in year three, we've worked with some of the biggest sort of clients in the world. Every week on the podcast, I talk with amazing D to C brands as well as like leaders from the agency side. So I feel like I kind of sit in the, in the spider's nest in some ways on, on a lot of cool things happening in this D to C space, even though I'm not actually doing a lot of e-commerce marketing myself at this point where we're marketing the, the, the media company as well as the education products that we're creating. But, but yeah, that's me. I mean, let's go into the trends. I mean, you're talking to some of the biggest names in D to C and e-commerce. So let's go into some of the trends you are spotting and you're hearing in the market. I think the first one I draw attention to that I've come across a lot lately is people. I've come from this world of performance marketing, profit driven marketing, and specifically Pilot House is a meta first agency. I think we, you know, we have a full omni-channel presence. We represent every, every traffic source. But I think I come from this world where when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail and everything looks like a good case for Facebook ads. And I was recently talking with a, with a brand owner and he was talking about the full marketing funnel. And I think of Google as middle and bottom of funnel because you're not actually, you're capturing intent rather than creating it through like an interruptive feed. Whereas with Facebook and TikTok, I think of, okay, well that is top of funnel because you're introducing new people to your brand. You're also trying to convert them right away in a direct marketing funnel, always on Facebook. But basically I've been talking to more and more brands that really don't view Facebook as top of funnel, really view it as middle or even bottom of funnel and are really prioritizing once they've reached a certain stage, a larger stage I'd say, they're really doing more outside of the box top of funnel efforts. And I think specifically I'd say TV and PR are the ones that kind of fit in there best. The brands that get to a certain phase that there's a lot of brands that have built themselves, you know, really using social media, really using Facebook ads specifically. But I think like once you get to a certain point of market penetration, once you get to a certain point of distribution, it really makes sense to shift budget away from the strictly performative ad platforms and go more into true top of funnel brand building awareness and then basically use different technologies to attribute that spend as closely as you can to sort of really quantify the halo effects that these higher funnel brand building efforts have on your lower funnel efforts. And I think the brands that do that well are growing faster than brands that are just maybe hitting the scale button on meta, which is kind of what I feel like a lot of brands were able to do kind of over the pandemic years a bit more. I could see why people are saying that because if you think of direct response, it is more of a convert someone now and convert someone now means you're really capturing the demand in the moment. And I see some brands in meta doing prospecting audiences and top of funnel things. But it makes sense that they're looking elsewhere because the market is getting a little saturated. There's a lot of other things and you could do both on meta. But I think that's an interesting point that people view it just as their metal funnel bottom of funnel channels now. I think with TV, you just find a different category of consumer in a way too. You get an older audience quite often with TV and who are more well off quite often and are more prone to maybe make purchases from things they see on TV. So I think you get that aspect for it and you just get – there is a bit of like, oh, this is a brand that's on TV. And then you kind of like bump up a category in people's minds, whether you're in the retail experience or you're seeing an ad online. There's sort of like, I think, a bit of a brand credibility halo that kind of comes with TV. And of course, there are a lot of ways to make TV super performative now as well. So I think it's kind of all coming together. It's funny, like I came up in the D2C space where D2C brands kind of wore that, direct to consumer brands wore that as like a badge in a way like, okay, we're D2C. Everyone now, everyone who's in retail needs to be D2C and everyone who's in D2C has their eyes on retail as well. So it's a really kind of full circle moment, I'd say. It just makes sense once a platform gets less and less attention, you need to go higher funnel to get that top of funnel of attention that you can reach broader where before meta, you could reach so many more people for cheaper, cheaper CPM, cheaper cost per click, cheaper cost per acquisition. And now it's like, it's getting more and more saturated because people understand. But I think that's a great, great point that you're making that it is kind of becoming more of a medium funnel, lower funnel channel and in the world of D2C. There are just bigger audiences out there roaming around watching TV and there's better and better, more efficient ways to buy that media. So I feel like for brands that have maybe plateaued or that have maybe even seen negative returns on platforms, it's probably worth exploring, taking like bigger shots potentially with some TV stuff down the way. I think that's the other thing. I just did an interview with Ezra Firestone and he was just mentioning candidly that like all three of his businesses have been kind of flat this year. And I think that's a theme I'm seeing not across every brand. A lot of brands are still growing amid this, but I think a lot of brands and hearing talk from both the agency and some other high level people at different platforms that I've talked to recently, like the big initiative for 2024 is to get more efficient because over Black Friday, Cyber Monday, everybody felt that even to keep the same numbers, I think a lot of brands were flat or even down year over year when you look at the Black Friday results, this numbers. And I think that was pretty common across the board. And then the ones that were flat, the message I heard from them was that they had to do more to get the same results. They had to send more emails, they probably had to spend more, they had to be a little less efficient in order to do it. So I feel like 2024 is a year about people getting more efficient overall in their funnels, you know, really focusing on CRO, of course, ways to just kind of like maximize the value of every click once you purchased it. Are you seeing a similar thing in terms of brand growth over, you know, the last couple of years in this one? I think, I mean, obviously, I think efficiency is just every is the word of since middle of 2023, because burn rate had to go down for a lot of brands. And also more people forgot that to optimize their funnel in a really great way. So now more brands are focusing on how can I optimize my landing page to have every little point optimized? How can I run more tests? So I am optimizing, how can I make my experience better when someone comes in the funnel? How can I make my product experience, they're actually caring about the full journey now where a lot of marketers for the last five years were caring about how can I get just every and anybody and everybody into that top and figure out I don't care if there's a little bit of leaks, but it's cheap right now. Let's just get as much people or have enough money to spend. And I can't I can't be inefficient while spending because I'm still bringing these big numbers that are on paper. The way a recent vendor was talking to me about it was that like, yeah, you now have these like strands, like you kind of think of your customer lifecycle as this like linear thing now in a way. Right. And and the more that you can reach your customer at each relevant stage of that journey with a message that's appropriate for them there, whether it's, you know, whatever product they're being exposed to, you might like this, like it's just the more ways you can kind of segment your audience and reach them with a message that resonates with kind of where they're at. And we also now live in this AI world where there are platforms where you can do this and you can you can do things a lot more dynamically. You can segment and message more than you kind of ever have been able to. That's something that that I'm seeing as well as people moving through that funnel smartly as as they can. Like what's the famous there's the restaurant that gives you different colored napkins for every time that you visit them, essentially. So they know when it's your second visit, you've got a red napkin and you get maybe a free dessert. And a third time you get. And I think that's just a good metaphor for the kind of customer experience experiences that will win kind of in this environment where there's a lot of a lot of heat on. I love that restaurant example of coming in a couple of times, like because they know that the third time the retention rate is way higher for that customer. And they will come back 70 percent of the time if you get them in the third or fourth time. So I think thinking more about retention is a huge thing that people are thinking about right now. I also think that I was talking to another DTC founder the other day, and I think it's going back to the best products that are winning because before you can sling, like you said, Alibaba things and because it it worked because it was easy to distribute. It was cheaper. It made sense. Financially, people didn't didn't know how to do it that well. So the ones who got in early are winning. But now it's the product. People are the ones who are creating the best products are coming out on top or telling the best stories. I'd say, too, that was one of my other points. Like, I think obviously great product wins. And I see that time and time again when people have really innovated a space. I think I think that's one thing I a theme on the podcast is people coming in into industries that are old and that haven't changed in many, many years. I had a guy come on that was runs a, you know, eight figure shock surplus business. And it was like as a customer, he was just trying to figure out like how these shocks actually work and how they might feel in my car. And no one had ever made content that actually tries to, like, help people understand the experience of trying different shocks. And it's this one little niche industry. But he just started making content about a better way to shop for shocks. And now, like three years later, he's got a 20 million dollar like shock middleman company where he's manufacturing his own white label shocks and doing all this other stuff. And I feel like if you're I think there's all the best brands are still have that story of like, hey, there's a better way to do things. And I think you need that brand story to go through everything you do. Right. You need it to go through all of your ads. If you're doing TV, it needs to be the story of your TV. You need to have it in your welcome sequence. sequence, you know, and maybe a plain text founders email right off the start. Like you just want to make sure that you're, you really, I think the best products win and the brands that can tell the best stories about their products will win kind of even more. Consumption habits have changed because we went through a period of COVID where everybody's indoors, consuming a lot of things indoors, because that was what was happening there, they couldn't do anything, but now people aren't getting have hobbies, they are going outside, they're going to dinner with friends, they're, they're trying a bunch of stuff. And at the same time, they're short form video exploded, these different niche channels have came up. So the amount of depth that you can build with your audience has gotten lower and lower. So the point that you're saying now you have to tell better stories because you're not the only one on the platform and they only have a fine amount of time before someone probably was scrolling more on Facebook and more on Tik TOK, but now they're on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, all these platforms, and they're trying to, and they're going to do their hobbies and their, so their, the amount of time they're spending on these platforms are even less and less. I really like what Dunkin' Donuts did for Superbowl, right? They've got, they had their big celebrity campaign with Tom Brady and Ben Affleck and all about the, the Boston raps and everything. But now I'm getting followed around on Tik TOK every fifth video with like a new blooper or whatever, or, or like little 20 second teaser where they just like, they had these three celebrities for a day, they filmed their main thing. And then they spend another three hours filming, I don't know, a dozen other little teaser videos to kind of make more with less. So now don't you get hit with the main narrative on, on the ad and then you're followed around with entertaining social content all the way through. I think that's a brand that someone who did it, did it well on Superbowl and is capitalizing, basically like extending the spot because it's the same spot, the same characters, they're essentially extending, they paid so much for that top of funnel attention at the Superbowl. And then they're just extending the spot by extending the narrative through all of these short videos that have done so well. Yeah. I was talking about this earlier about Uber Eats did it very well too, where they, they teased, they teased it and then they did the spot. And then as this spot came, you go back on TikTok and it's, it's, it's there again, and it's all, it's that narrative of Victoria and Jennifer Aniston and David Beckham is just all over your feed. So I think that the omni-channel approach of not only hitting you one place, you have to hit people when they're doing different things in their, in their life. They're watching the Superbowl, they're scrolling on TikTok or they're on Instagram or they're on Meta, whatever they're, they're doing, you're hitting them with a different story, different narrative, different consumption method. It's the age of storytelling for, for brands in a lot of ways. And, and there's never, I think that's the other thing I see, like one of the guys I had on the podcast, you know, Colin Landforce and Orin John, these guys that are like influencers in the e-com space. Now they kind of do these, these, these social videos, where they talk about like the golf drop shipping space or the high fashion e-commerce space or whatever, they're just huge proponents, proponents of how it's, there's such an opportunity for each, even individual entrepreneur to have a voice. It really, I think that's the other trend I see is, is more people like literally as entrepreneurs being willing to kind of go out there and put their face, put their own story along with what they're doing with their brand. And it's a bit of a mental block. Like I'm good. I'm good at talking on podcasts or talking in podcasts with people in conversation when it comes to like turning a camera on myself and trying to spit like a, a direct to camera, you know, insightful video, I have, I have a lot more trouble, but I feel like brands that can just get comfortable talking to camera on these various platforms. I just think, I think it will benefit them a lot long-term. Black Crowe AI makes you better at customer acquisition, full stop. Connect it to your Shopify stack and watch their predictive model supercharge the performance of your digital channel. Take Meta for example, Black Crowe predicts target audiences that are most likely to buy, driving the right users to your site from your Meta ads. Then helps you retarget customers past seven days with true first party, privacy friendly tracking. Visit blackrowe.ai slash Daniel to get a 30 day free trial and $1,000 credit for your first monthly contract. We've gotten a couple of trends here is efficiency, storytelling, Metas, middle, bottom of funnel, consumption behaviors. What, what are some other things you're seeing that are going on? I'm a huge fan of Amazon. Every time a brand comes on the podcast and they're not on Amazon, I'm, I kind of, I'm really, I think it's few and far between at this point, people that, that aren't like, I think consumption behaviors are so set on platforms like that. Some of the cool examples I've seen recently are how aggressive you can be on Amazon ads. Amazon ads is, I think a couple of months came out. It's like the fastest growing ad platform right now in terms of it's not the biggest obviously yet, but in terms of investment dollars pouring into it, in terms of like all the things that Amazon's doing to like extend their ad inventory across football, across like all these different places, across prime to all the subscribers that now have commercials again. But opening up to the possibility of like really what you can do top of funnel on Amazon ads is really interesting. Like it hasn't come out yet, but we had, we did a podcast with a, a mushroom coffee brand that pilot house is working with and they're seeing huge top of funnel on kind of unexpected top of funnel growth by going after keywords that indicate that someone is tired of the incumbent. So like in this case, it's literally like you wouldn't think you're, you know, an audience that you might go after on Amazon for a mushroom coffee brand would be like Folgers, like people that are tired of Folgers, but they're, they're building these big campaigns where they're getting their disruptor challenger brand, even though it's a totally different product, like in the faces of people who are tired of the incumbent and they're seeing big, big growth. And I think it's taken a lot to like, it's taken a lot of faith on the part of the client in order to invest into these areas that aren't really low hanging fruit. They're actually putting them into these places where they're not the product necessarily that someone's looking for. But because there's so many of these like challenger type brands that come on the podcast and that are kind of in our space, I think there's an opportunity for them to get more aggressive with the kinds of competitive keywords, the kinds of spaces that they're pushing themselves into in ads. And I think that would apply also to Google, for instance, as well, for any of those brands out there that are sort of real true disruptors in the way that mushroom coffee would be for, for, for Folgers. It's also, for example, TikTok as becoming that search engine. So if you can make something Folgers alternative type TikTok content, or I don't drink coffee anymore. I went to mushroom coffee. If you can start creating that type of content, because for example, when I go to a new city, I will search best restaurants and let's say Vancouver, and I will look at all the TikTok videos of people saying here are my favorite restaurants. So if you can create content, those type of content on multiple channels where people are searching for alternatives and expert opinions and those type of thing, I think you can really disrupt what you're saying the market that way. And you can tap into this audience that you might not think is yours, but if you tap into it in the right way at the right time, you can make it yours. You can, you can steal that market share if you have the right product story. Right. As you're saying. Especially when you're saying, I think one thing, especially in B2B too, is like everything is now a commodity. So the only way you're going to win is telling a better story, having a better product, having a better, having better marketing, having a better founder story, having those little things matter now where even in B2B, e-com, D2C at the beginning where there wasn't that many people going direct to consumer on a website, and if you had a website, you could probably dominate. Now everybody is like a must for D2C, same as B2B where there's only one software for that, and now there's a thousand softwares for that. You have to win on story and product and word of mouth and reviews and all that good stuff. And the other thing that's really big, you know, is TikTok shops basically, just like the, the aggressiveness that kind of TikTok shops have come into the space on. And then more recently, I think the affiliate program that they've created where you can just basically, even if you don't have a big presence as a brand on TikTok, you can get your products up there and then you can get other creators to create content about your products for an affiliate share. It just reminds me of like the Tabs guys or the Tab, Oliver from Tabs Chocolate. And this other thing called the Shadow Work Journal. I don't know if you heard of that. It blew up a couple of months ago on TikTok. And what they did is they basically hacked this affiliate program that's now available. They basically had creators sign up additional accounts that would be like Tabs San Diego or Tabs, you know, whatever. Basically you'd create an affiliate account for Tabs and then any sales from that with that UTM or whatever would be credited to that person. And they had a network of like hundreds or thousands of these like micro influencers that were making Tabs content as secondary accounts for them. It really took advantage of that TikTok organic algorithm where, you know, you really can, if you make some decent content, it's one of the best places in the world to still get organic reach. And now I think they've taken that learning. They've seen brands do really well with that approach and they've kind of built it into their affiliate program. So I think a lot of brands, like when TikTok started heating up, a lot of brands were like, Ooh, you know, they felt the pressure to kind of go in and look at it and do it. And I feel like some have figured out, and I think a lot of brands have middled with it and backed away from it. And I just think if you look at usage trends, if I look at my own usage trends, like I use TikTok more than any other entertainment app at this point probably. And I think you look at younger people, real millennials and Gen Z's, I think that trend is probably even, it will be even more pronounced over the years. So I feel like the TikTok affiliate program, these TikTok shops should be enough to get more brands really kind of invested into, into TikTok as a platform. Cause I think it's only going to grow in terms of market share over the next couple of years. There's always use cases for every, all of these things we're talking about because Amazon and TikTok are more cheaper, lower and everyday shopper type stuff that you can go where like luxury branded might not make sense to, to be on it, maybe in a small present, but like you could find ways to do these SEO tactics or these content plays where you can find your niche inside of these different platforms. So is there any other big glaring trends that people should think about for 2024 and beyond? I don't, it was interesting. I brought it up in the pre-interview and I watched all these, these Superbowl commercials. And one of the ones that really stood out to me was of course, Kanye West, where he goes out there and just says, I spent all my money on the spot. I didn't have any money for creative, go to my website. I just think it's a really interesting case. I know Kanye West is a very problematic figure for good reason, but I find it's just such an interesting case. First of all, he's, he's sharing screenshots of his $20 million a day. So we're like, I'm like, Oh, is this, it's like Sean Frank. It's just like one of us on, on DTC Twitter here, you know, blasting our screenshots. The fact that he, like they, he innovated with Yeezy, right? Like the Yeezy shoe brand with Adidas, like he created a silhouette of a shoe that like didn't really exist before. And now, and then it became like one of the most popular silhouettes of shoe and then they made, made billions or whatever. I just, I think of him as such an interesting entrepreneur where he's, he's A, he's, he's screenshotting, he's, he's using scrappy creative. I think scrappy is a word or humanized or lo-fi creative is something that always gets talked about at our agency because often that lo-fi creative can work better for direct marketing than a lot of things. And then for him to come out and then for him to launch his new style of clothes, which I think are hyper minimal. I think he's probably got the cost to manufacture them down fairly low. Can see like, I think the t-shirts just have a cut open slit. They're like all one piece of fabric. The pods that he's created are this, are this new like way of thinking about a shoe in a lot of ways. Like they're, it's a brand new silhouette. And so even if for, cause he's launched all these clothes for $20 on his website, which I think is another bold, like DTC kind of attention grabbing move. And I feel like I was talking with some members of my team and they're like, he must have taken a bath on that. His margins must be nothing. Like, first of all, he's created all these manufacturing methods where you should be able to manufacture this stuff very cheap. And second of all, like he's just seeding, he's seeding the market in a lot of ways in my view, because it's like if all of a sudden people are like, Oh shit, I should wear these hyper minimalist sock shoes or whatever. If that gets over, there's going to be a lot of people that hate them, but there's going to be a lot of people that love them. And if that gets established as like a new thing as a new mode for footwear, it's a big, big shot he's taking. So even if he loses a little money on these like hyper low priced goods now, I could see him doing well in the long run. I don't want to come off as too much of a Kanye stand given how problematic he is, but I'm pretty impressed with this whole strategy he's orchestrated here. I also think there, since this Taylor Swift was part of the Superbowl, I think there's a lot of Gen Z attention on, on the Superbowl. And I think Gen Z and Kanye are pretty like part of their culture, I think. Cause if you, if you look at Gen Z, their footwear, I would say one in every five people, Gen Z people I see are wearing Yeezy things. If anything, it brings attention to, I think that ad was meant for just Gen Zs who are watching, who are grabbing their attention to be like, Oh, I forgot to buy my Yeezys or I need to, but it was a good direct response play. There was a couple like the Turbo Tax one, that one. I think Yeezy is a well-established brand in the Gen Z market. So they can do more of a direct response, less awareness type ad, where some of these brands needed to rely on more top of funnel, more broad reach, more other things to get more sales in the market. He did what? 2.5x ROAS. So it's like, you did pretty well for that Superbowl ad on day one. Yeah. It's going to be interesting to see how it goes over, but like, and again, he's, he's taken a big shot too. Like if he's able to establish this manufacturing line or people like the way these shirts look or these shoes look like he's got an opportunity to be, to be sitting on another billion dollar empire. And it's like, he can't keep getting away with this. He just, I don't know. And now he has no one to tell him no right now. He doesn't have Adidas or doesn't have Nike to kind of keep him in check. So it's going to be interesting to see, see where that goes. Definitely not a fan of Kanye, but I think that the strategy. strategy pre taking Kanye out of the question. I think doing something different is always a way to go in the market. I mean, he could have, I think he could have had a better audio experience, at least, but that and but it did feel very organic. I just got I just got on the TV and wanted to speak to people vibes. So I think I think it did his job, which is the goal of a direct response ad is to do his job. So got people to say he sold yet 20 million 2.5 x ROAS on that day one. Pretty good. So we'll have to follow and see how it goes. But I think I think the big takeaway there is that is that is that scrappy creative, first of all, being willing to experiment with scrappy creative. And, and being willing to take Yeah, take big shots as brands. I think what's it called liquid death mountain water is doing it so well, with their constant evolution of how they think about their advertising and their recent like meta advertising play where you can, you know, sign up to buy an ad slot on the bottom of their case, which I thought was a really cool, big play for them as well. So they're there's someone else I watch all the time. And feastables as well. And feastables has just made some they're having to rebrand from from DS nuts from a lawsuit on DS nuts. And they've just made it so you can't buy any of their products on e commerce that you can only buy them at store. So I'm really interested to see what they're doing with that. It's just a very interesting time. I just think it's also I think that you see the companies that are allowed to take risks are always the ones that are seeing quicker grow. Some people are doing sustainable things. That's like, the battle I always have in my head is, yeah, you could do this one thing, get drive, whatever revenue, but is it going to keep the brand forever? Or is it just a one time money grab play that you're doing? And that's never nobody's ever going to catch on. So it's like that balancing added off. Am I building a legacy brand? Or am I building just quick? It's really interesting. I just got off a call this morning with one of our reps at Google, actually. And he he's part of this new team that's been spun up to go talk to agencies that are profit driven agencies for Google specifically. And that's that's very much what pilot house is. And it kind of speaks to what I kicked off with a little bit about, he was saying that there still is the bulk of spend on Google's platform that isn't like ruthlessly optimized, it's optimized towards higher funnel metrics, as opposed to being ruthlessly optimized to profit. And what he was saying was that Google is starting to see this trend, where the people that are more aligned, or the people that are trying to create profit driven marketing, they're creating more longer term value in the space than the than the companies that come in and do big, big, you know, burn your money brand, brand buys or whatever, right. And so they're trying to find more and more and foster this idea of like profit driven marketing. I think we're still in a very good spot in this like DTC world where there still are so many of maybe not the brands as much, but some of the big players in the agencies are in the world still aren't looking at performance in the same way. So I think it does create an opportunity for the challenger brands is for the challenger agencies out there to be more performative and profit driven and ultimately create a better long term customer experience as well in doing so which is kind of interesting. What's a marketing hill you would die on? I used to say content until a guy on my podcast recently ripped me a new one for talking about how content is this. It's this terrible word. It's just like, you know, you can put anything in content, but like, as opposed to storytelling, and I think you just have to constantly be storytelling as a brand, and building that story into kind of everything you do across your ads across every platform. If you're not telling a compelling story when you tell your co workers or you tell someone out at a dinner party, like what you do, if you're not, if you're not telling a compelling story about what it is you're doing in the world, then you're a lot less likely to succeed. And then you have to kind of keep putting content out in the world, you've got to like, I think, the famous Canadian author that wrote program or be programmed. And I think the same is true about content or storytelling. It's like if you if you're, make sure that you're putting your story out there into the world, or otherwise, you're just going to be the subject of someone else's story. Yeah, or someone else is going to tell your story for you. Exactly. Right. That's not the same thing I say about personal brands as well. It's like, you can either let someone tell your story for you in other rooms, or you could take the narrative in your own hands online. So people could tell a story to other people about you. So it's the same, same thought process. Lastly, where could people find what you're doing? So I'm Eric on Eric, Eric Dick on LinkedIn. But if you go to direct to consumer.co, you can check out our newsletter, our podcast, we send five days a week, we, the newsletter is a combination of what we do on the podcast. And then we also have deep embeds across every section of that pilot house team where they're constantly feeding us actual strategic tactical best practices across Google, Amazon, retention, Facebook, all the different platforms in there. It's funny, we pay every time they provide us like insight, we pay them $100 gift card, we've got this great sort of ecosystem going where we're getting really great actionable things from the front lines of each of these platforms kind of into the newsletter on a daily basis. And it's served us well, for sure. And podcast is lots of fun, too. But this was this was fun to be on here, man. Thank you for coming on. I appreciate the insights you've gathered from all those newsletters you're writing all those guests that are coming on your podcast, it's always good to hear what the pulse on the current market is, because some people are ahead of the market, some people are behind the market, some people are present in the market. So it's good to hear the views of what these big DTC brands are doing right now. Anytime, brother. Thank you so much. Cheers. Thanks so much for listening. Tune in next week to hear more great insights from marketing schools operators. If you haven't already, please consider subscribing to the marketing millennials podcast and giving it a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community. Transcribed by https://otter.ai