Scaling Offline Marketing

Offline Marketing best practices from the minds that led these campaigns at digital native companies across a number of different industries. We learned how to leverage Offline Marketing as a performance marketing channel to drive measurable growth and scale.

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Highlights

• 10:50 – Molly adds on best methodologies for offline channels
• 12:29 – Yousuf explains how every method has its limitations
• 19:14 – Avital shares how to measure the ROI/ROAS of offline Marketing Efforts
• 23:14 – Molly gives an example from LTV in NatureBox
• 30:23 – Yousuf shares a method that worked with a limited budget at Eaze
• 36:09 – Avital names the offline channels that have been successfuL during Covid
• 40:36 Gavin shares on how he sizes opportunities before investing on them
• 51:03 – Molly shares on indicators to look toward when you know you need to add a new channel in
• 53:15 – Gavin gives his opinion on importance of local testing

Speakers:

Avital Caspi, Freshly, Wix, Adore Me – Avital Caspi is a performance marketing consultant with more than 10 years experience driving growth and achieving scale through offline channels for $100M-$1B consumer-space startups. Before taking her consulting practice full-time, Avital led Offline Marketing at both Adore Me and Freshly. Today, she helps growth-minded brands like Harry’s tackle key offline issues like when to introduce a new offline channel, how to structure and execute test campaigns, identifying realistic CAC goals and how to effectively measure the effectiveness of offline campaigns without the attribution brands have grown to rely on with digital channels.

Yousuf Bhaijee, VP of Growth at Eaze, Ex-Zynga, Ex-Disney ClassDojo – Yousuf is a growth executive with 13+ years experience at Eaze, Zynga, Disney, Life360 (IPO), CSC Generation, and more. He spends his time as a contributing writer at Reforge where he publishes “word-of-mouth acquisition” research, and as a growth advisor for clients such as HP, Ergatta, Plushcare.

Molly Laufer, HomeLight, NatureBox – Molly is passionate about the inflection point when a company begins to diversify their acquisition portfolio outside of digital channels and is ready to dip their toes into emerging/offline marketing channels to achieve scale without compromising performance metrics. She has a decade of customer acquisition experience from early stage ecomm (first employee at NatureBox.com) to real estate tech (HomeLight.com) and scaling offline performance marketing channels for a range of consumer tech companies and startups in-house, as an agency strategist, and as an independent growth marketing consultant. She has directly managed 7-figure monthly media buys across a diverse set of offline channels with a focus on return on ad spend and marketing profitability. Her channel experience spans linear & connected TV, audio (including podcast, streaming, terrestrial, and satellite – both endorsement and produced audio), direct mail and OOH with a holistic understanding of media strategy and buying, creative development, and analytics/attribution.

Gavin Carr, Honey, Ro, Candid – Gavin is an experienced Growth Marketer specializing in Traditional, offline, and endorsement media. He currently leads a performance marketing team at Honey dedicated to user growth encompassing these with some of the fastest growing startups in tech and commerce such as Dollar Shave Club, Candid Co, Ro and now Honey. 

He enjoys solving business solutions when it comes to growth marketing and creatively testing into new media types for efficient scale. 

Host: Anish Shah, Founder at Ruckus – Anish is the CEO & Founder of executive search agency Ruckus. Anish has worked in-house in Growth roles at Snapfish and Getable. He started Bring Ruckus as a Growth consultancy 11 years ago working with 40+ clients, then re-focused his firm on executive recruiting for Growth leaders.

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Read the Full Transcript:

Grace Portillo (00:00:02):
Hello everyone. And thank you for joining us. This is Scaling Offline Marketing. We shall be introducing our guests shortly, but first a couple housekeeping rules. This webinar is being recorded. I will send an email with the link once the event ends. And I have the recording also just a quick reminder. There’s a chat. We can feel free to ask any questions there or any remark. We’ll be checking it and making sure it gets answered. All right. Anish, on to you.

Anish Shah (00:00:44):
Hey, my name’s Anish. My background was actually running growth at different companies, both full-time as a consultant, spent 11 years in San Francisco, moved to New York, about two and a half years ago. And then began recruiting for clients kind of with the whole idea that people who have experience and knowledge within marketing growth analytics, not build your own teams, launch own campaigns. We’d be a better fit to recruit than folks who don’t have experience within these areas. So I ended up building up an executive recruiting firm. We’re now a team of 10 and we basically recruit for high growth startups, mostly within growth oriented roles. And generally in on the more senior side.

Avital Caspi (00:01:24):
Hi my name is Avital. I actually started my marketing career in Tel Aviv Israel. Few years ago I moved, four years ago to New York. I started my career in the digital side and I guess when I worked at weeks.com, I got the opportunity to do the switch and to move from the digital side to the offline side, it was very challenging, but also fascinating. And since then I’m doing offline at Wix. When I moved here, I started walking at the Adore Me. I had a offline marketing there and two years ago I moved to Freshly where I started the offline team started there TV, marketing campaigns and have been there since.

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:02:18):
Hi I’m Yousuf. I’ve been in well, I’m based out of the Bay area. I’ve been in growth for about 12 years or so. Primarily B2C companies companies like Disney, Zynga, Eaze, CSC generation, Class Dojo. And most recently I was for three years at Eaze in a consumer growth role building out their growth team. Most of what I talk about will be based off of Eaze because the company’s a cannabis delivery startup, really large 10% of California’s cannabis tax revenue. And we were not allowed to do most of the traditional digital channels. So we really had to figure out out to hone. Right now I left Eaze. I’m doing a little bit of consulting couple side projects on scaling word of mouth acquisition and excited to share my experience.

Molly Laufer (00:03:16):
Hi everyone. My name is Molly Laufer and I’m based in the Bay area. I’ve been working in startup marketing for about the last 10 years, and I got my start as an early employee at NatureBox, which is a direct to consumer e-commerce snack company. I actually started in influencer marketing but made the jump from kind of online influencers to podcast hosts. So podcast advertising was really my first jump into offline marketing. And then as the company scaled got more involved in managing channels like radio and TV. I was about, I was there for about four years. And then I spent a few years at an offline performance marketing agency working across primarily audio and linear TV for a number of consumer tech companies. And most recently I spent about a year and a half at HomeLight, which is a real estate tech company where I managed our TV and our radio and direct mail program. I spent the last couple of months breaking out on my own. I’m now a growth marketing consultant. I’m specifically focused in the inflection point when companies are ready to jump from the digital side to the offline side, and I’m excited to be here and probably will be sharing most of my experience from NatureBox and HomeLight, different companies, different, you know, industries, different different audiences.

Gavin Carr (00:04:32):
Hi everyone. My name is Gavin. It is nice to see some familiar names on this on this chat today. I I started my career back in, back in New York on the media agency side. So working with larger, larger brands from off from the offline world and then sort of got into the growth world after moving to Los Angeles and joining Dollar shave Club and came in there focused on TV and radio, but started to adopt other channels and growing out the influencer program there and then have been working with a few other brands since then. And today at Honey, I lead a team of offline marketers focused on growth, scaling those channels which consists anywhere from, you know linear TV, to streaming TV, to influencers, direct mail, out of home, podcast, radio, et cetera.

Anish Shah (00:05:39):
Awesome. So for all of you lovely people who RSVP to this event many of you put in questions that you’d like our to today’s offline marketing experts to answer. So we picked out the 10 of them that, that we all felt were, were kind of interesting and would be to chat through. And so this is the first one. Whenever, whenever offline is kind of brought up the first question that everyone kind of asks is like, how do you nail attribution? And that’s also the toughest question and it’s also the one nobody ever feels confident in, in that they’ve really nailed it. So I know that there’s the spike model. There’s some newer stuff that’s popped up. You can do coupon codes. I’d love to learn. This is, this is honestly like we could probably talk the entire hour on attribution because it’s the hardest thing to get. Right. But I’d love to learn from all of you guys we’ll start with Avital, then Gavin and Molly, then Yousuf like,

Avital Caspi (00:06:38):
Yeah,

Anish Shah (00:06:39):
How do you, how do you approach it? And what’s worked what hasn’t worked. I want to hear about spectacular failures, everything.

Avital Caspi (00:06:45):
All the dirt. Yeah, it’s a great question to start and, and definitely the hardest one because coming from the digital side, you’re used to, you know, the conversation is always about first touch, last touch, multi touch, the problem with offline, sometimes there is just no touch. Sometimes people are coming without UTM source. I, without the UTM parameters with all kinds, from all kinds of channels and it’s really hard to say, okay, you are, you actually watch the TV at you. You came from direct mail. So the idea is basically to try to combine as many different models as possible and hope this will lead you to the right direction. So it can be there, you know, looking at the uplift from before you started the TV campaign, after you started the TV campaign, and basically trying to understand what is this incremental lift and, and what is the contribution to your volume, to the number of new customers?

Avital Caspi (00:07:37):
Of course you mentioned promo codes, you mention you can also look at how did you hear about us survey? So you put the survey after you after the customer purchased and you ask him, how did you hear about us? If he answer TV, you basically know he’s a TV person. You can also, when you have enough data, you can also combine regression models, like marketing mix models to try to understand the contribution of your different offline channel. So basically you hope that all of these are going to direct you to the right directions and give you the answer, but you never get to an accuracy. So don’t get your hopes to high.

Anish Shah (00:08:16):
You haven’t figured out the magic bullet that no one else has been able to figure out. You can’t tell me that right now.

Avital Caspi (00:08:21):
No.

Anish Shah (00:08:25):
And Gavin.

Gavin Carr (00:08:26):
Yeah. I mean, you know, similar thought process, there there’s no true magic sauce just yet, at least that not that I’ve found, but you know, you have to, you know, we, we look at it in a few different ways where again, it’s, we’re looking at, you know, the vanity URLs or promo codes. So that, that helps you, you know, be able to optimize within a certain channel, right? Because you have benchmarks against each other within that, within that channel. As well as a baseline lift, if we look at a pre-post test local tests are, are great too for this because you have your control markets, you have your test markets, you have your national baseline, you know, depending on what stage of the, you know, brand that, that, that you’re at and what the budget levels look like as well. The, how did you hear a survey is very helpful as well. You could add, you know, you could see sort of what that percentage mix looks like and add multipliers to that direct conversion from a URL or promo code. And then also testing you know, testing different media mixes across the board and seeing how your overall dos and overall performance backs out. So there’s, there’s a few things to, to, to look at and you sort of have to triangulate all of it together to get a good understanding.

Anish Shah (00:09:55):
When you say dos, what do you mean by that?

Gavin Carr (00:09:56):
So, oh, sorry. So like direct and organic traffic and then some, some branded, branded search as well.

Anish Shah (00:10:04):
Okay. Interesting. Sounds like you, you guys go with a little bit of a Frankenstein model as well. Just try to try to like take every single source and like stitch together.

Gavin Carr (00:10:15):
There’s a little bit, I mean, we also do have our, you know, our, our multitouch attribution, our medium mix modeling tools as well. So, you know, I I’d be remiss to mention that, but it’s a little bit of all, all of it. Right. I think it’s important to see the, the full picture.

Anish Shah (00:10:35):
Cool. Any thoughts Molly or, or Yousuf on how you’ve sort of approached it?

Molly Laufer (00:10:43):
Yeah, I’ve never heard it called Frankenstein model, but I Frankenstein approach, but I like that I might start using that from now on. You know, I always say there is no one best attribution model. And anyone who tells you that there is one is, is, you know, hasn’t seen them all. It’s really, what’s, you know, it’s really making sure that you’re looking at your, your tools internally. I always say don’t rely on one off the shelf. Third party don’t rely on what one agency’s model is telling you. You know, it might be a good signal. It might be a good indicator. But having other sources internally to triangulate, I always like to think about kind of direct signals. And so direct signals are things like Avital and Gavin mentioned, you know, that could be like a vanity URL for a podcast or a promo code for a radio ad or a spike model in TV.

Molly Laufer (00:11:30):
And so when we talk about spike model, we mean, you know, commercial errors on HGT at noon, what happens in terms of site traffic and conversions from 12 o’clock to say 12:05 PM that’s kind of a signal it’s like an early indicator. But it certainly doesn’t represent kind of everything below the iceberg. So, you know, I think on one side it’s having those immediate signals to say, you know, is this one TV channel potentially driving a more immediate response than another TV channel, but like Gavin said, looking at your overall direct organic and branded search over the course of a campaign, whether that’s a week or a month to say what’s the overall impact of this media spend and then tracing it back to those indirect channels to say, where can we make changes? But I love the Frankenstein analogy. So I might, I might, I might borrow that one from you.

Anish Shah (00:12:17):
Nice.

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:12:19):
I can add my perspective and experience. So the one main thing is that every, every method has its limitations and what you are trying to go for is get enough data to make a business decision. So for Eaze as an example, the decision was, do we spend more on billboards/ bus ads, or do we spend less? And then where do we spend more? Where do we spend less? If we can have that data, that’s all that really matters. You put an air bar around it, that’s great. For us, what worked really well was an attribution survey that was, you know, how did you hear about Eaze, select all that apply and like to connect the dots, why that worked so well was after someone’s first order when the attribution was when the email was sent with the survey customer satisfaction was so, so high, no pun intended that the response rate was really, really, really great. You know, we had 30 to 40% of people, new customers, self-reporting how they heard about Eaze. So, you know, using some statistics, we could come up with a, here’s a pretty good cost per acquisition from billboards and bus ads with an air bar that was good enough for us to make business decisions.

Anish Shah (00:13:37):
That’s great. So it sounds like the, the H.D.Y.H. “The how’d you hear about us” was really the, the most effective kind of attribution method that you were, you, you were kind of relying on over at Eaze

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:13:49):
For the Eaze use case. Now, I, it’s definitely not going to work. Like if you’re response rate is low yeah. And you figure, and then you have to figure out something else

Anish Shah (00:14:00):
Makes sense. And billboard is different from TV, right. Cause there is no spike model. You, you know, your, your, your Billboard’s up for a week, so you don’t really have a spike. Right. So I guess you have, you have to do something a little bit different there.

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:14:12):
It builds more slowly.

Anish Shah (00:14:14):
And I think all of you basically give a, give a, a, a great and fair answer that it is kind of a, a melding of lots of different data points coming in, but of those attribution models was methods. Was there one that you kind of relied on more than others, because obviously you can’t look at all the different kind of angles all the time to make your kind of quick judgments on whether something was performing or not performing.

Avital Caspi (00:14:38):
Yeah. So the, the best one, the immediate one is this after purchase survey. And I feel like it’s also helped you, even if it’s not the accurate answer, it helps you like compare like week of a week. They like day on a daily basis. You get, you know, an understanding of how TV’s performing and you can adjust, as opposed to, let’s say marketing mix model that will give you maybe an answer once a quarter.

Molly Laufer (00:15:01):
And to add to that, you know, one piece of advice I like to give to brands, even if you haven’t advertised online or you’re potentially thinking about it is doesn’t hurt to throw up about how did you hear about a survey even in your early stages whether you put that post purchase or, you know, in an email survey but it gives you a really good baseline too, and throw channels on where you’re not advertising, right. If you haven’t turned on radio, throw radio on as an option and kind of get an idea for sort of what’s your customer fault response rate you know, what percentage of people say a marketing channel that maybe you’ve never even been on yet? And you can always subtract that. Almost like use that as a baseline and subtract it from what you’re seeing, when you actually turn on the channel, they’re very low cost. You know, doesn’t take a lot of tech implementation. You can even do some testing where maybe you throw it against 10% of your checkout. So you make sure it doesn’t, you know, hurt conversion rate or, or hurt satisfaction or anything like that. And start to get some learnings now, before you even turn on the channel, it’s a, it’s a great way to, to, to kinda lay the foundation before you even start putting money behind it.

Gavin Carr (00:16:01):
It’s, it’s funny to see a lot of that phantom reporting as well, when you have when you’re not running on certain channels and you get you know, certain percentage of those responses.

Anish Shah (00:16:11):
Really. So you’ll get like 2% who, so like I heard of you from radio when they never actually, when you don’t have any radio ads.

Gavin Carr (00:16:18):
Yeah.

Molly Laufer (00:16:19):
And you could,

Avital Caspi (00:16:20):
For some reason

Molly Laufer (00:16:22):
There’s competition in the space, right. Maybe they thought it was Eaze, but they, they actually heard it was a different, a different delivery service. Like, you know, consumers, they’re not, they’re not perfect. Right. The customer’s not always right. And, and that can can help you quantify that.

Anish Shah (00:16:37):
Okay. That’s fascinating. It’s interesting, actually, that all of you have mentioned. How did you hear about us surveys, as being one of the chief ways? I, I actually thought that that would be like one of the lower ones because you, you know, I don’t know. It just, it just as a consumer, why would I fill that out? I, it just sounds like, like, like a waste of my like five seconds, but no, I guess it’s worked out pretty well for you guys.

Gavin Carr (00:16:57):
You know what it does also though it helps sort of even if it wasn’t the last touch in terms of the media type that the consumer selecting it’s like the highest quality touch that they’re selecting.

Anish Shah (00:17:09):
Gotcha. So they may have, yeah, they may have seen the TV commercial, but they may have gotten five other touches, but the TV commercial resonated with them. Very cool.

Molly Laufer (00:17:21):
Help to identify that path too, like that touch path because you can actually see if you’re putting it in your like checkout flow. You can actually see, well, this person actually converted on a paid brand search ad, but they responded TV. And so you can see the difference between what the consumer remembered and the path that they actually took. And that can be really happy. That can be really helpful when you’re trying to kind of make sure you’re not double counting or sort of deconflict the touch points you know, across your different digital and online channels.

Anish Shah (00:17:49):
That’s fascinating. Do you ever turn off, like if you really, really, really want to closely test how much say TV or billboard or anything is running, do you ever just say let’s turn off everything else for a week or maybe for a day or two, if you can’t do a full week have you really ever tested that or no, just it’s just too, too much of a mess.

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:18:14):
We have not. And that’s because if you turn it off for a week, you likely will not see the impact. Like, you know, if when we shut off bus ads, we still had people responding for months after the bus ads were.

Anish Shah (00:18:31):
Yes.

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:18:33):
So like, unless it’s like a massive, massive increase over a decent amount of time or decrease we didn’t expect to see any Delta.

Anish Shah (00:18:43):
Okay. And also I was curious about the reverse, like shutting off your, your digital channels like maybe just turning off, paid search for a few days and seeing if it had any decrease or anything like that. But that just might be a terrible idea. So we can jump the next question, Grace. So how do you measure the, the ROAS of offline marketing efforts? Is it pretty much the exact same as how you would measure a paid social or a paid search campaign? Or do you kind of approach it a little bit differently?

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:19:23):
I approach it a little differently. So for, you know, this comes with a, more of a performance marketer bent, but as an example if for our channels on average, we’re willing to spend $50 to acquire a user because something like billboard or out of home, or even experiential has what we believe is like a meaningful brand value impact. I will bake that in. So instead of $50 being the target, I’m willing to spend that I’d be willing to spend at $80. And that’s kind of like how we at least try and you know, put a nod towards, okay, there’s value that this is driving outside of just direct performance marketing.

Anish Shah (00:20:07):
And is that extra $30 just built in it that exact $30 number? Is that just kind of arbitrary or is there kind of science behind that?

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:20:18):
It’s, it’s arbitrary, but it, it’s kind of a factor of the current moment in time. Like if our, if we’re other channels, if we don’t have a lot of other channels that will influence our decision, how much we’re willing to spend above the CPA target as an example, but if we have a lot more and there’s a lot more room in some of the other ones, you know, it’ll be, it’ll be less liberal in of the, the upside or the benefit we’ll give for brand.

Anish Shah (00:20:51):
Okay. That makes sense. Any other thoughts on how you kind of approach Roaz for, for, for offline?

Avital Caspi (00:21:00):
Yeah, I don’t necessarily bake in the brand impact, although it’s helpful, but I think the most important thing here is to understand who are you, who is really coming from a specific offline channel because there is a different thing, like doing this after a purchase survey and, and all this like Pharmac code you don’t get a big certainty that these people coming from the specific channel. So the is to, to go and search for the ones that maybe fill the survey and also use the promo code. And also I don’t came in the five minutes after a TV ad was aired and identified this group that is 100% coming from PPV. And then calculate the arrival for this group and assume that this applies for all the other people who come TV, which we dunno for sure who they are.

Anish Shah (00:21:56):
Interesting. Sounds, sounds difficult.

Avital Caspi (00:22:01):
We have good data there

Anish Shah (00:22:03):
Yeah. Any other thoughts on how, how you kind of approach ROAZ and how it does, or doesn’t differ from, you know, the channels that people are a little more familiar with, like paid social and paid search.

Gavin Carr (00:22:17):
I mean, I have the same process as Avital where it’s, you know, isolating the, the users, the consumers that we know came or were very confident came from, you know, these channels, whether it’s the promo code, the how’d you hear about us, the, the, the URLs, the, the spiked attribution, the spiked traffic – isolating them up, you know, applying a Roaz or ROI on it. And then just using that sort of as a benchmark.

Anish Shah (00:22:51):
Cool. Makes a lot of sense, especially if people are actively kind of giving you that data again, and, and, and to that have you noticed a a difference in kind of LTV from offline folks versus paid search or paid social folks? I’d love to explore that.

Avital Caspi (00:23:15):
Yeah, I noticed, oh,

Anish Shah (00:23:16):
Sorry, really quick. For, for those that don’t don’t know, LTV just means kind of the worth of a customer over their lifetime. It stands for lifetime value.

Avital Caspi (00:23:29):
I don’t know, not necessarily different LTV from offline to social, but what we noticed is when channel is heavily dependent on promo codes and discounts the LTV will be lower. So for example, direct mail, which is very much heavily direct dependent on promo codes. We see TV, which that is much lower than than TV, for example when we don’t show promo code at all. So this is something we notice.

Molly Laufer (00:24:04):
Yeah. I hate to give like blanket advice of like, these channels have higher LTV than others. because a lot of times the answer is like, you know, it depends on the brand and product, but one of my favorite examples of this was when I was at NatureBox. We found that our LTV and the revenue generated from from podcast consumers specifically was significantly higher than what we were seeing on, on paid social at the time. And, you know, that’s, that’s for a lot of different reasons, you know, we were a recurring subscription product. And so, you know, when you have recurring revenue you want to be able specifically to really look back and say, all right, well, which, which channels are driving that higher recurring revenue. You know, I think for something like podcasts, for example, you tend to be, you know, the listener of a podcast ad tends to be well educated, you know, tuning in for, for content they’re educating themselves.

Molly Laufer (00:24:54):
And so we would see that translate really well to recurring revenue for, for a subscription product. And the same is, has been the case for, for other, for other companies that I’ve worked with on Sirius XM specifically, you know, again, Sirius XM is a channel where your, your consumer is paying, I think something like $180 a year to have access to, to that to that content. And so for products that may be higher price point or again, recurring revenue you may start to see that, that those channels are driving significantly higher LTVs than a Facebook. You know, a Facebook consumer where maybe they’re just scrolling and they’re like, “oh, that’s that sounds interesting. I’ll check it out.” So I, I hate giving like blanket advice, but specifically there have been a number of times where I’ve seen podcasts in Sirius XM drive much higher LTV across you know, across many different products than social and, and even just kind of like direct and organic traffic.

Anish Shah (00:25:45):
Okay. No, that, that, that’s great. And, and don’t worry, I, I won’t turn you in if that like ratio inverts with some products somewhere down the line, but no, that’s exactly the answer I was looking for. Like, did it create higher revenue, LTV, whatever then, then the other channels.

Molly Laufer (00:26:02):
Right, that then you take that back and say, well, actually I can afford to spend a little bit more to acquire a customer on podcast and now I can spend a little bit more to invest in the channel and try new things. So, you know, I, I, I feel like we would’ve been really limited in our, in our scale on podcast, had we not specifically looked at the revenue we were driving, you know, per new customer from the channel. So, you know, different, different channels, different targets.

Anish Shah (00:26:24):
Absolutely. And less crowded too. So

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:26:29):
I can add one thing adding to Avital point that she was making around promo codes which I think is really spot on for us when we, when we did stuff like street teams the LTV was inherently lower because you, we would be handing out a card that actually had a promo code on it. That was just normal part of the process. And that brought down LTV. But if we were handing out without a promo code and just having them convince people the LTV would be higher and we tested that, but just the decrease in conversions that we got from not adding a promo code made it like not worth it to do from a, how many conversions can you actually get from this tactic?

Anish Shah (00:27:13):
Interesting. So circling back on that, does that, are you essentially saying that those users who did get those, you know, in person cards maybe like stuck around for longer and had better retention and therefore their LTV was better? Or am I making a…

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:27:30):
I, I think

Anish Shah (00:27:30):
I’m a heavy assumption.

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:27:32):
I think I’m saying not so much the card itself, like, did they get a card, but what the card had on it, if it had a promo code, their LTV was lower than if it didn’t, but if they had a promo card, we were able to get more conversions from a street team member being out on the street not having it. And the increase in conversions was so low or was, was so dramatic that it only made sense to do it with the promo code on it.

Anish Shah (00:28:00):
Makes sense. So the total aggregate revenue was, was, was probably a lot better with the promo codes than, than, than going full price. Cool. we can jump to the next question, Grace. I just love little images next to all the questions. What’s the, what’s the best way to get started with offline marketing? How does that change if you have very little budget to allocate to offline channels? That’s a great one. I think a lot of people on this call right now are probably just doing digital and trying to figure this out themselves. Like what’s step one.

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:28:42):
I can hop in if, if no one else wants to start.

Anish Shah (00:28:44):
Oh yeah. This is just anyone jump in. There’s no sort of like round robin or anything.

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:28:49):
Yeah. You unmuted. So why don’t you start?

Gavin Carr (00:28:52):
Sure. yeah, I mean, again, it’s yeah, it’s sort of to, to Molly’s point on the last question, it depends on the product and, and, and the audience. Right? Who, who are you speaking to if it’s, you know, if it’s you know, if it’s life alert, then you’re probably going to want to test into linear TV. Right? And at that point you’re able to isolate the offline channel you want to test into and then, okay. How do we structure this test? What’s the, what’s the minimum what’s the minimum investment needed to get a significant read that we’re confident with. So, you know, it really does come down to your, your core audience for that product. What’s also another sort of like hacky thing to do is, you know, we mentioned the Heidi house survey and you know, I think it’s really important speaking with your customers. And so, you know, putting out a, a survey, asking them sort of what media types they, they use, you know, just asking, just asking them where they spend their time. And that could give you a good sense as well of like, okay, like maybe we should actually go into podcast or radio or, you know, some, some other channel. And so those are, you know, those are sort of two points I have on, on this one.

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:30:12):
I love those points.

Anish Shah (00:30:13):
That’s great. That’s a great piece of advice. Just ask someone where, what they, what they consume. I, I, yeah, that that’s really easy.

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:30:23):
I have two things to add. So the first one is, if you can do what I call a sizing exercise, you can typically eliminate like 8 of 10 things like growth experiments, and that applies to offline as well. Like you can do the back to the envelope, math and figure out that X, Y, Z offline channels does not even make sense to test. That’s number one. And number two, if you have very little budget, get really scrappy. So one thing I did was as, just as an example, is I went outside a festival, outside lands and it made my own picket picket signed, which was like, it’s own small mini billboard that said Eaze, you know, get marijuana delivered $20 off. And I just, I got two ambassadors to do it for free as well. And we posted up right by the entrance where the majority of traffic was, and we just saw like how many conversions that we get that day as a proxy for like, does this tactic kind of work?

Anish Shah (00:31:24):
Yeah. I

Gavin Carr (00:31:24):
Love that idea by the way. That’s cool.

Avital Caspi (00:31:27):
Yeah. And if you don’t have the budget for TV, let’s say your audience is on TV and, and it’s exact one, and you don’t really have the budget to know, to, to get into TV because TV requires, you know high budget to start. You want to generate this week. You just want to generate the frequency. And it’s not always like the best place to start if you don’t, if you’re linked in budget. So you can always start with something small, like OTT where the budgets don’t know that high, you can just get, you know, get a feeling, get an understanding of if your product works on video and quality, if your product works on, on a TV format and then go from there.

Anish Shah (00:32:07):
Great. And, and can you for the folks on this call, explain kind of the difference between OTT and like, you know, normal TV.

Avital Caspi (00:32:15):
Yeah. Sorry. OTT, I mean, everything that is basically connected. So if it’s Hulu or Roku or Sling, or any of these platforms, basically you buy…the buying experience is very similar to the digital the attribution, not so much, it’s more, more, more complex. But at least you can, you can control the frequency. And you can, you can enter there this word with, with a much lower budget than linear. The scale is lower, so you don’t get the scale of, of linear, TV but it still, you, you get them read, you get understanding if if this channel works for you.

Anish Shah (00:32:54):
That’s great advice. What’s, you know, part of this, part of this question also kind of relays to what what’s maybe the easiest and fastest way to get up and running with with offline marketing. Like what’s the channel and how do you kind of create a process where you can get up and running within, like, let’s say a week, or maybe even, you know, less than that. Are there any good ones that you guys would recommend for that?

Gavin Carr (00:33:22):
I think a week is pushing it.

Anish Shah (00:33:24):
Okay.

Gavin Carr (00:33:25):
But yeah, I, I mean, in terms of getting, getting stood up quick, I mean, it’s just, it it’s being, it’s being scrappy. It depends on the resources that you have. You could create creative in house, if you could use, you know, if it’s, if it’s audio, if you could just, you know, you have a, a melodic voice. I hate the sound of my own voice, but if you know, someone that that’s that’s in the organization can do the reads for you, or, you know, use, use people in, in the organization for some of your TV ads, things like that. I think that’s a, that that’s a scrappy way in terms of resources in terms of getting stood up quickly, I think it’s, especially in the beginning you know, using using agencies is, is definitely the, the way to go.

Molly Laufer (00:34:12):
Yeah. I definitely echo the sentiment on, you know, if you’re thinking about targeting a slightly holder audience you know, call it thirty five forty five plus, and you’re evaluating TV versus radio you’re speed on audio is so much faster to, to Gavin’s point, it’s a lot faster to put together an audio ad. A lot of people forget about the creative production side of it. It’s one of the reasons why podcasts can be a faster channel to speed up again, because you’re not doing any creative production in advance, likely you’re relying on the host of the podcast to do the read, but, you know, just because you’re ready to it. Doesn’t, you know, you really have to think through inventory. So for example, Q4 is the time of year where audio and podcast as all advertising channels get really crowded. And so, you know, if what’s it’s August now, so it’s like, if you’re thinking about a big push in Q4, you know, you probably better get moving if you want to, if you want to do audio on, on podcasts and, and, and radio and things like that.

Molly Laufer (00:35:06):
Whereas in Q1, there tends to be a lot more white space. There’s a lot more inventory. Your prices can be better. You may be able to spin something up faster. So again, I hate saying it depends. But, but it, I feel like a week would probably be pretty aggressive. But even on the podcast side, you know, a host might not have a avails for a couple of weeks. And so those back and forth conversations it’s, you know, it’s not as easy. It’s typically not as, you know, self serve and, and quick as as spinning up a Facebook campaign.

Anish Shah (00:35:34):
Makes a lot of sense. Thanks for that. Jump the next one, the, the icon again has COVID changed anything in terms of offline marketing would maybe an offline channel be better now than it was before obviously now that everyone’s kind of stuck at home what have your kind of COVID experience has been, or the answer might be it’s changed nothing but would love to learn?

Avital Caspi (00:36:07):
I can start. So for us at Freshly first when mark arrives, basically the demand for the product went up anyway. So all the channels became super efficient wanted to have, you know, to have food at home, not going out to do some, you know, grocery shopping. And so basically just the demand naturally went up. But on top of that, what we saw on TV is people staying more at home, like you said viewership is going up. CPM is going down as a result. Not only that a lot of the advertiser freaked out and pulled back money from TV. So we had a lot of opportunities to fire sales. So getting, you know, these nice spot that usually cost 10 thousands of dollars, we, we, we could purchase with nothing. So basically great opportunities on, on TV and, and CPM goes down, made TV super, super efficient for us. But for us it was like TV was the best one, but direct mail also looked great. People were at home reading, their mail response rate, went up radio, not so much radio when people were not driving. We actually saw CPA goes up there, so we had to pull back. So yeah, this was the impact.

Anish Shah (00:37:32):
Okay, nice. So I guess it was positive from a financial perspective for you guys. Cool. Any other COVID experiences, either helping or hurting kind of your campaigns. We can jump into the next one. This is a pretty hard one. How do you size an offline opportunity before in investing in it? Do you talk to other companies in your space? Do you rely on agencies for, for baselines or guardrails? Like what goes into the research process?

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:38:21):
I can start here. So for me, there’s there’s two things. The first one is create a funnel and there’s two parts of that funnel. Again, and this is with the more perfor performance marketing bent there’s conversion rates on site. So if you actually get someone to the site, what’s the conversion rate for them getting to sign up or whatever you’re looking for just in general. And then the other part is, you know, you’ll typically get from the media that you’re buying some estimates of impressions or, you know other metrics. And just from that, you can typically get down to all right. Here’s one key assumption, which is how many site visits do you get per impression? And then you can kind of like size like, okay, is this reasonable? If I need to get this many people to the site in order for this to be ROI positive or not, and that way you can at least say, okay, these ones absolutely will not work.

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:39:27):
The more you do stuff, the more comps you also get. So, so as an example, when we did bus ads after running up, we were able to get a pretty solid funnel and funnel data, and we knew how many bus impressions on average it would take to get someone to the site and then to convert at a CPA that we wanted. An opportunity came to us for wrapped cars, you know, where they, you know, they take an entire car and they wrap it, just doing the math. We were able to figure out, okay, in order for this to be ROI positive a wrapped car would have to be 75% as effective as a bus in order for it to be profitable. Now, for us, it was like very clear that, okay, it’s a, it’s a pretty big stretch to assume that a bus is going a car is going to be 75% as effective as a bus. And so we were able to say without doing it, this probably is not going to be ROI positive. Let’s look at some other opportunities.

Anish Shah (00:40:26):
Nice. That’s a pretty methodical approach as well across all of that. That makes a lot of sense.

Gavin Carr (00:40:33):
Yeah. I, I, I like to, I, I like to leverage third party data. There’s a lot of, you know, big data companies out there. You know, Nielsen’s a, a great example and trying to, and, you know, again, it depends on your budget and what, what you’re able to accomplish with your resources, but you know, you’re able to really see what that, that total population is of a, of a, of a media channel of consumers that are using that media channel. And what’s the composition of your target audience against, against those media channels. And so what is your max potential? And then, you know then looking at your O of reach and then looking at your own site metrics and your own, you know, internal data saying, okay, our conversion rates are X, Y, Z. And we think that, you know, we could, you know, we could hit X percent of this target at whatever frequency and X are going to convert. And so that’s sort of the way that, you know, it’s sort of marrying the two, the two approaches there.

Anish Shah (00:41:44):
Nice. And so of third party data providers, you, you you’d put Nielson at kind of like the top of your list?

Gavin Carr (00:41:52):
Nielson’s good. MRI is another good one. Who else? There’s there’s a, there’s a few other one Millward Brown used in the past as well. Yeah.

Anish Shah (00:42:08):
Cool.

Molly Laufer (00:42:09):
I have two ways that I would answer that the first is to piggy back off of what Gavin said is specifically on the podcast side there’s tools where it’s, it’s sort of like smart listening tools where you can access to see where your competitor’s advertising, where are companies who are trying to acquire a like consumer. So let’s say you’re a home services brand. And you’re trying to acquire homeowners. You can look to see, okay, what are other companies that are trying to acquire homeowners? Is it Angie’s list? Is it refined mortgage companies? Are there banks, are there, are there services that are specifically targeting homeowners? Where are they advertising? And what do their trends look like in advertising? It it’s, you know, it’s not going to sound very exciting, but there aren’t a lot of new ideas in marketing, to be honest.

Molly Laufer (00:42:51):
And so looking at what a lot of people, what other people have done what other brands have done and where they’re having success you can start to see patterns, right? You can see patterns in, well, you know, this brand advertised on a show for six months and then suddenly stopped this brand only advertised on a show for two weeks and then suddenly stopped again, it’s, you know, everything’s worth testing yourself. But you can start to kind of see some patterns when you’re looking at what other like-minded companies are doing. And then secondly, you know, this isn’t really on sizing necessarily, but it’s kind of thinking about like, what’s the next step for you when you’ve already had success on a specific channel on a specific medium, and that might be, are there ways that we can continue to reach this consumer, but for a lower cost?

Molly Laufer (00:43:35):
So for example, let’s say you’ve had a lot of success, you know, at home light, we had a lot of success on linear TV especially on channels like news and sports, where we had, we had seen a lot of success. Well, after a while, you know, you’re going to just continue to invest in the day parts and the times of day where you see strong response, but you’re not ultimately going to reach more consumers necessarily by doing that. Can you reach those consumers the same number of times? Can you achieve the same frequency through a different channel approach? So for example, the same person that’s watching, you know, ESPN in the evening time after dinner may also be listening to that channel in their drive to work. This is a pre COVID example, but, you know, , the, the examples were still stands, right?

Molly Laufer (00:44:17):
Which is, well, I can reach that person while he or she is driving to work at a significantly lower cost on a different channel, like Sirius XM, like streaming radio. Well, now I’m getting the frequency that I need to drive, you know, conversion, but I’m doing it at a lower cost which effectively is going to drive down your CPA. It’s going to reduce your, it’s going to increase your row as, and then give you some kind of buffer in your budget to start testing new things. So, you know, it’s not just about like, should I test this new channel, but can I also by adding new offline channels, can I overall increase the efficiency of my current channel? And, and, you know, Gavin’s examples about MRI Neil center greatly do on the broadcast side. And you know, and a, and a number of other things when you’re looking across different channels, it’s all about trying to get that audience, the right number of touch points but potentially at a lower cost than whatever it was that you were doing before.

Anish Shah (00:45:07):
That makes sense. Also your, your point about just seeing what your competitors are doing and assuming that they have smart marketers behind them, particularly if they’re a bigger company with a bigger budget than you. I’ve seen that go wrong sometimes when I’ve realized after the fact that the people actually running the campaigns had no fucking clue what they were doing and were just basically like throwing money into a furnace because they didn’t know any better. And I was like, they were not the ones to copy. Okay. Before, or like have eventually talked to like the CMO at one of those companies and realized, wow, that person really had no method to like burning a million dollars. But yeah, that, that, that was where I, I, I definitely used to like, live and die by that as well. Like if the competitors were doing it, they have more money, let’s just do it at least try it. But unfortunately didn’t always work out that way.

Molly Laufer (00:45:57):
And sometimes you, your competitors, but just, you know, like like-minded companies just talking to them, like, I, I’m actually really surprised just by how I dont know, symbiotic the ecosystem is and, and how growth marketers tend to at least not with direct competitors, but with like-minded companies, it’s a small world. Peoples are generally pretty willing to share things that have worked well for them. If, you know, they don’t feel like you’re going to eat their lunch unintended Avital . And so, you know, what I find that, you know, just talking to other growth, marketers is a really good way to start to learn and, and start to get ideas for channels that maybe otherwise harder to, to size up.

Anish Shah (00:46:36):
Absolutely. I, I, I love that. And that’s actually how I’ve even kept on learning how growth works since I don’t touch a campaign and I haven’t touched years, how, how all this works. Cause I get to interview people all day and just like, what worked, what didn’t work. Tell me about your, your campaign. Tell me about your channels and then start to learn, learn patterns. And yeah. And to your point about people being transparent, I’ve learned that growth folks and anyone who’s entrepreneurial is incredibly transparent and does not care giving you all the information of everything that worked and did not work. So corporate E type of people, not so much, they’re always like trying to CYA, but yeah, just approaching 10 smart people who work at really cool companies is probably are companies that you might want to imitate with your ads is actually a great research method on how to go about doing this. Cause at least two or three are going to reply to you and tell you everything they know. Let’s go to the next one. What I think I, I think we, we, we dig, we dug into this one previously. We can go the next one. That was interesting. How do you know to keep adding another marketing channel on to your, into your mix or not? What’s kind of the, the methodology on whether let’s say you’re on podcast and you’re on TV to also add on billboards or to not what, what what’s kind of like the go or no go decision making kind of factors.

Avital Caspi (00:48:10):
For me, I think it’s always useful to have more channels. So I would always want to add more just to increase my diversity and make sure that, you know, I don’t put all my eggs in one basket. But it’s kind of related to the, the other question. So the, the, the answer will be like, first is my audience there? And I, I can leverage all these third party tools to understand if my audience is there. And then how scalable is this channel? So if it’s, you know, Howlin is my team, because it worth our time investing in channel, it’s not super scalable. So yeah, I feel like this, this would be the two factors that that will contribute to my, my decisions if, if I want to add more, more offline channels and, and yeah. What my competitors are doing and all that stuff is already said.

Anish Shah (00:48:59):
Interesting. So you might not hang out outside of a music festival. No. Trying to sell people stuff if it’s, if it’s not scalable.

Avital Caspi (00:49:07):
Yes, yes. At, at this point where, yeah, it depends on the size of the company and where we are right now. But if you’re, if we are full scale. Yes. So definitely I’m not I’m I, I will, I will prioritize advertising on TV than sitting outside of that Festival.

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:49:24):
I need to clarify around that point. One, the festival’s great. Two, we do that as a quick and dirty test and then apply math. So example you stand outside one festival, you know, how many hours it took, what the cost was and how many conversions you get, then you can say, all right, there’s X number of festivals every year in the US apply the number of conversions to the number of festivals. Is this worth our time from like a scale I think Avital is like right on, we, that’s why we do sizing beforehand is we will X out ideas, not just based off of like, is there a chance there’ll be ROI positive, but also do they meet a a scale threshold? We believe we meet that. And so the the festivals kind of passed that potential, like back at the envelope, that’s why we went and tested it.

Anish Shah (00:50:18):
Okay. And, and I’ve met the guy who ran kind of Ubers, like hit the streets and hand everyone a card thing to, so for even companies are like at, at massive scale things that don’t necessarily easily scale can to your point, make sense as long as the math backs out. Cause you said the math backed out. So why not? You know, and then there’s also good kind of branding where you’re getting whatever a hundred thousand people. I don’t know how many people go to outside Lance. It’s probably now where near a hundred thousand, but who are walking in and out and seeing your brand as well. So it, it, it makes sense to be a win-win

Molly Laufer (00:50:52):
One analysis that I think is really important to do. When you’re looking to add a new marketing channel, it’s not necessarily an indicator, but it’s sort of, what’s my, like how can I mitigate risks across other parts of my offline mixed or outside of my overall acquisition portfolio, if you’re, if you’re looking across both digital and offline. So if you’re going to invest say 5% of your budget in a given month on a new test, you know, put in like, what’s the worst case CPA you might drive, right? Like what if, and I’ll just kind of benchmark it. Like what if my current offline CPA is $50. And I really need to make sure that my overall offline CPA stays at $50. Well, if I’m going to do a, you know, 10% of my budget on a test where I could drive say a $250 CPA, you know, how much lower does the rest of my offline mix have to get, to be able to allow me to potentially take a test that, you know, kind of bombs to be honest or only part of the test works.

Molly Laufer (00:51:51):
And so looking at actually, what am I currently doing and are things that I can do to drive my CPA down across the rest of my offline portfolio or across, you know, all of my, all of my acquisition budget to say, all right, are there things that we actually need to cut in order to make room for this additional testing? And again, it’s going to vary based on the business the time of year, you know, Q1 could be a great time because you’re going to get better ad inventory. You know, it, it depends on sort of seasonality of your business and of the channel, but I think that’s also really important when you’re looking at taking, you know, somewhere between maybe five to 10% of your budget and throwing it against something new, which is if this goes to worst case scenario, what do I have to do to the rest of my budget? What do I have to do to the rest of my marketing mix to make sure I don’t, you know, I don’t, you know, blow whatever my targets are for the month. And then acting accordingly before you do that. Cause otherwise you could, you could sink your ship if you, if you don’t look at that part.

Anish Shah (00:52:43):
Makes a lot of sense, jump to the next one. Is local testing the best way to, to kind of step into a, a new offline marketing campaign or channel is that generally what you guys do when you’re doing something, a channel that’s brand new to your, your, your brand or is there kind of a different step number one?

Gavin Carr (00:53:11):
You know, I think it’s a good way for like, for, from like a broadcast perspective. So, you know, from linear television to terrestrial radio, I think it’s, it’s a great way to test it. But this also goes back to, you know, who, who is your audience, because you might find that, you know you know a young, a young family in San Francisco is your, is your target. And they’re heavy podcast listeners and you want to go into podcast instead, and you’re not going to test podcast on a local, on a local level. So it really, it, it, it does depend, I know we’ve been saying that a lot, but you know, from when it comes to more of like broadcast media yeah. I think local is a good way to test

Anish Shah (00:53:57):
Makes sense. And, and you, you have a good point that not all channels are able to be tested on a local level anyways. Right. so yeah. Any other thoughts on you know, is local testing the best way or was there, is there another kind of really interesting first step that you would, you would kind of go about even maybe before local testing or, yeah,

Molly Laufer (00:54:20):
I think local testing can also make a lot of sense if you’re a brand that’s you know, either have already done some offline testing or you have such a large digital budget. If you really want to look at kind of incremental impact that you’re making outside of just the direct signals like vanity URL, promo codes and spike model. And you’re worried because you’re spending, you know, six, seven figures a month in digital channels, you know, and, and you want to be able to measure that lift. That’s going to be a very, it’s going to cost a lot of money to, to, to, you know, lift that time. And so in some cases, local testing can be a, a much better way to invest a little bit less money, but to actually get a better read, if you feel like, well, we’d have to spend a lot to even see a lift. And, you know, that’s certainly not something that, you know, a risk that we’re willing to take. So in those cases, you’re a large national brand that maybe has done a lot of digital then sometimes in individual local markets can actually make a lot of sense out of the gate.

Anish Shah (00:55:17):
Cool.

Avital Caspi (00:55:19):
Yeah. And CPMs on TV and, and radio are more expensive in the, on the local side, which is fine. We can always adjust the CPS and, and make the projections for them when you go national. The only thing, sometimes the medium mix is a bit different and not necessarily representative. So for example, with TP, the mix would be on the local side would be more mobile test channels versus, you know, more linear cable when you go national. So I would, maybe it’s a good way, like Molly said to, to test and, and to get an indication without flowing all this money, but there is, there are limitations. So whoever choose this method needs to be aware.

Gavin Carr (00:56:01):
Yeah. Yeah. The, the cost pers are quite quite expensive. So you have to, you have to adjust for that when projecting out what a national campus,

Molly Laufer (00:56:09):
Four to seven X, the CPM that you’re going to pay at the local level.

Avital Caspi (00:56:13):
Yeah.

Anish Shah (00:56:15):
Interesting. But, but one of the reasons to do it, even though it’s a higher CPM, is to understand your, your incoming revenue per user. And then you can back it out on a national level when, you know, the CPMs are going to go lower.

Avital Caspi (00:56:25):
Yeah. But sometimes the media is not really similar. So even with, oh, doing this, you know with applying this, you know, CPM ratio, which is fine, it’s a great way. Sometimes, maybe the media is not the best representative to the, what you will see in the national scale

Anish Shah (00:56:42):
ING. There

Molly Laufer (00:56:43):
Isn’t a lot of local mm-hmm, , there’s not a lot of local cable inventory that it just doesn’t exist. You can’t, you can’t, if you’re, if you’re testing TV only, you cannot put together a local cable plan that would any way mimic what you would be doing at the national cable level. You’re going to have to rely a lot more on local broadcast. And just because it works on local broadcast. It’s again, it’s not going to translate like Atel said to the national, so there’s a lot of variables that have to be controlled. And again, you can, you can back out the performance of it. But it, it can come at a higher CPM cost or out of pocket cost or it can’t necessarily translate to the national level.

Anish Shah (00:57:19):
Interesting. Okay. What’s different. Is it the creative or is it like the type of shows that you’re going with or like the, the demographic of who’s watching that show or like what’s, what are the main differences between local versus national?

Molly Laufer (00:57:35):
Yeah. So like when you’re running local, some, if you could have, again, I’m going to throw kind of a, a broad number out there, but when you’re running a local TV campaign, you might have 50% of your media in broadcast. So broadcast being ABC, NBC, CBS kind of the broadcast channels. Whereas if you’re, you know, running a national, if you’re running a national TV program, you can very easily put, you know, 80, 90, even a hundred percent of your budget in, in the, in the cable side, HGTV, CNN, ESPN, things like that. But there just doesn’t exist a lot of local cable inventory. So you have to run broadcast media and broadcast is priced really differently. Because as you can imagine, it has tremendous reach, right? Like the reach of broadcast of NBC is far greater than, you know, obviously some of, even the biggest cable shows.

Molly Laufer (00:58:21):
So it’s just, you know, it’s, it’s not apples to apples like Avital said, you have to factor in the differences in those channels. There is a little bit of creative. Like for example, when you run in broadcast media, they, a lot of times the standards and processes as well. And I’ve run into this a number of times, whereas when you run your creative on cable TV the S and P process tends to be a little bit lower for what creative can get approved. And then if you want to really quickly buy a spot on NBC or CBS going through their standards and processes and the types of disclaimers and the types of sort of substantiation that you have to have in order to run a creative on broadcast, it might actually not pass pass muster on the broadcast side. That can be a real bummer. If you only have, say one creative and you really want to run it

Anish Shah (00:59:04):
Fascinating. Okay. Actually didn’t know that. Any other kind of like differences, Aita that you, you were thinking of between like local versus kind of national or

Avital Caspi (00:59:14):
No, just like Molly said, it’s it’s, the media is different. So the demographics necessarily is going to be different you know, broadcast stations versus cable stations with just very different from one another.

Anish Shah (00:59:26):
Cool. Makes sense. I’ll jump on the next one. Great. Can you guys, can you guys kind of run through a really, really successful campaign you’ve run and as a counter feel free to also include like a massive like crash and burn failure as well. Both very relevant for learning.

Yousuf Bhaijee (00:59:54):
Sure. I’m happy to start. And O on the successful side, and I think this question really comes down to, at least my answer comes down to creative here. So one campaign that we did that was really successful was and, you know, kudos goes to the creative director Libby Cooper on the brand marketing team. But it was one that was the theme was effectively hello, marijuana, goodbye X. So hello marijuana. Goodbye worries. Hello, marijuana, goodbye hangover. And the creative was really great. It spoke to the audience and it was kind of funny. And what was most successful is one, it was our first time on that medium like bus ads and billboards, and it generated a lot of buzz and probably the best thing that happened about it was we had a bus with an ad full bus ad that said, hello, marijuana, goodbye worries. That hit a meter made. And the pictures that were taken of that were amazing and then just turned into really great digital ads.

Anish Shah (01:01:04):
That’s awesome. I saw those pictures are hilarious.

Yousuf Bhaijee (01:01:07):
And then unsuccessful I’ll talk about is actually the street teams which is why we tested that. So street teams in different fashions, getting them to be out on the street or outside a festival, handing out cards, just actually the economics didn’t work nor did the scale. And so I had to push really hard for the organization to not do it because what they would see is one of our competitors, Cali chill, blanket, San Francisco, with these ambassadors handing out handing out cards. And, you know, I was like, look, we ran it ourselves. The economics do not work. The actual person who’s running it at Cali chill used to, to used to work at Eaze and is doing it regardless. And so, you know, we had to stay disciplined. We didn’t do it. And Cali chill went bankrupt actually.

Anish Shah (01:01:59):
yeah. Which is a great circle back to the conversation. Me and Molly were having earlier where sometimes you want to copy your competitors, but then sometimes you learn the real truth that they really didn’t know what they were doing, whatever. And you were like, oh, wow, well maybe that wasn’t a good idea. Aita or Molly, any examples of some really great campaigns, really ones that didn’t work out too well.

Avital Caspi (01:02:23):
Sure. So I think the most successful campaigns are the ones that have a good balance and, and do well. The, the combination between basically achieving growth goals and brand awareness goals, which is, I cannot stress enough. How hard is it? It is to achieve both in one campaign. So one thing that went well for us actually@weekswhenistillwasworkingatweeks.com we did, we had, you know, our annual super bowl campaign, which is always a great celebration and it’s never, you know, never meant to meet growth goals. It’s always about, you know, getting the reach and it’s a super bowl, but the thing that you need to do after the super bowl, and this is what we did is basically leverage the creative leverage. The fact that you, you, you managed to get to so many eyeballs and then build the Dr. A very good Dr. Campaign based on that, on all of your channels. So 360 campaign that you the same creative, but, you know, the message is really different is, is very much Dr. And making sure that you are working on frequency and all your channels. So it’s TV, if it’s YouTube, it’s social, if it’s F so everything is working together. So this, something that was very, very successful for us and worked for months after the super welcome debate.

Anish Shah (01:03:44):
That’s awesome.

Molly Laufer (01:03:45):
Yeah. I think one of the most successful campaigns I’ve run was when I was at nature box, really stepping into podcast advertising when it was in its early sort of podcast, advertising was very much in its kind of nascent stage. And so sort of the advice that I would give is don’t be afraid to step into an emerging channel, even if you haven’t seen competitors, do it, even if a lot of people aren’t doing it yet, because that’s the time where you can test things typically at lower cost. In the case of podcast advertising, we work directly with podcast hosts. I’m talking about, you know, guys and gals in their basement you know, not going through networks or going through agencies and, and really being willing to kind of work and learn alongside of a new publisher. I think this advice honestly translates to digital channels as well.

Molly Laufer (01:04:31):
I think it translates to anything in marketing. But for us, I think the reason why it was so successful is because we were willing to take a risk, also willing to kind of just try new things and, and work with the hosts and, and figure it out. As we went low out of pocket costs initially in terms of one of my most unsuccessful offline campaigns was when I did a local radio, I did a local campaign where I only ran on one channel which was radio. Again, it’s not to blanket say like, oh, you can never do just one local channel and it won’t work. But I think the lesson that I took from that was we really relied on only one medium and just, it was impossible for us to get the frequency that we would need to be able to drive efficiency and just really drive any response.

Molly Laufer (01:05:16):
And my takeaway there was really, you can, again, it gets back to the point I made earlier, if you can reach the same person multiple times using different cost per touches then you might be able to drive more of a response. And so that was, that was a big takeaway for me that, you know, it’s always like, don’t you, if you invest too little or, or you don’t actually ever have the ability to drive a response, then, then that was a waste of money. Trial, try not to make that one again.

Anish Shah (01:05:42):
Makes a lot of sense. So two things, we are seven minutes over time. So thank you guys for, for sticking on board. And we’re going to wrap up and then number two, it’s Molly’s birthday right now. So thank you for spending our, your birthday with us talking about offline marketing attribution and, and all of the above. So happy birthday. I don’t know if you clap for birthday, is that what, thanks.

Molly Laufer (01:06:09):
This is the most people I was going to see on my birthday. So honestly, this is a, this is a real treat intended.

Anish Shah (01:06:16):
Alright, thanks a lot. To all of our panelists, we learned a ton. If you have any follow up questions, feel free to email us. My email is anish@bringruckusaisshbringruckus.com. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for joining.