The Exchanges

Q There's a number of threads I'm gonna pull on there over the course of our chat, but you mentioned Uber, and you told me that you had a crazy story about how you actually landed Uber as a customer. Could you share that?

A I had been running Thrive for a couple years, and it was a very excellent regional agency in Canada with really cool local clients. In 2013, I got invited to go down to the TED conference, which was in Long Beach, California, and my friend Andrew Wilkinson asked me to join him at a dinner that night. I didn't know anybody from the TED community at the time, so we had dinner, and then afterwards, As it goes, you know, at conferences, there's an after party. And so essentially I hop into a taxi. Everybody else kind of sped off in their cars or, you know, however which way they were getting there. And as we're talking to the driver saying, hey, we're going to, you know, this place, you know, can you take us? There's a knock on the window and the person outside says, hey, I think I'm heading to the same destination. Do you mind if I hop in this car with you? And so we're like, of course, And I turned to him, and I'm kind of like, I'm Jonathan, you know, I run a 10 person agency out of Vancouver, and he says, Hey, I'm Garrett Camp. Uh, I started a company called Uber. And so, ironically, I meet the founder of Uber, the company that is in the process of disrupting the entire taxi industry worldwide in the back of a taxi cab. And what happened next basically changed my career forever. We end up at this party at the time I was kind of spamming or Uber's referral program. So kind of a l…

AI assessment note: “ironically, I meet the founder of Uber... in the back of a taxi cab.”

Q within this realm. But before we get there, do you think there's still an opportunity for startups to emerge where they get to scale almost exclusively through performance marketing? And this question actually came from Twitter. Someone tweeted this randomly the other day, and I was like, oh, that's a great question for Jonathan. And by the way, her name is Liz Georgie asked this question. So there you go.

A I'll put it this way. Every unicorn from like the, you know, 20 tens era that that scale did performance marketing, but not everyone during that time who did performance marketing scaled. So I want to remove the bias here that just because all the successful organizations did this didn't mean that it was like a magical channel for everyone. We had Plenty of projects that we worked on that flatlined, you know, during that period. And so the sense that there was a period of time where this was easy or, you know, it worked on any project is, is not correct in, in my opinion. With that said, we see, you know, companies that are spending millions of dollars a month on performance marketing channels like Google and Meta still, despite all the ups and downs that they have faced, and they do so profitably. And I think there's some really great examples Of companies that have scaled, you know, in relatively recent times, almost exclusively through paid, like Grammarly is a really good example of this. They have been good at solving for this problem that exists around like understanding the cost per acquisition versus lifetime value, like how sticky customers are predicting how much revenue can come from a customer and backing out into therefore how much we can pay, you know, per per click and per lead and so on and so forth. Athletic Greens is another good example. So Athletic Greens is…

AI assessment note: “there's some really great examples Of companies that have scaled... almost exclusively through paid”

Q Is there a specific example that comes to mind as here is like something we did that just dramatically changed the impact of a change to a creative? Or if you can't think of one, are there just like specific tactics that you can suggest for people to improve the way they approach creatives?

A Yeah. So I think from a, a testing point of view, let's say I was running ads on meta, you know, beneath the campaign level, when I create a campaign, I would have the structure that my testing might take, uh, would be that I would have an audience, uh, a single audience at the ad set level. And then I would have two nearly identical creatives within that ad set. The only thing being different across those two creative assets Is a single variable. So it might be the copy. It might be an image or whatnot that allows us to isolate a lot of variables and really test into one singular change across two creative assets. There's a lot of nuance to this. So sometimes like the ad serving algorithms, even when we set up a test, uh, structurally in that way, we'll serve one ad, you know, a different number of impressions than the other ad, in which case we then have to say, What is a leveling factor that allows us to look at these two ads equally, even though one received dramatically more impressions than the other? This becomes where it becomes subjective in terms of how you want to determine success. But a good example is looking at like the click through rate, which is essentially a ratio or a metric like impressions until conversion, which is a, um, you know, leveling, uh, metric that allows us to determine Even though in a scenario where two ads facing the same audience within the …

AI assessment note: “I would have a single audience at the ad set level... two nearly identical creatives”

Q Just broadly, would you say TikTok advertising today is underrated, overrated, or just right?

A If you are e-com based, if you're wholesale retail based, you know, anything like direct to consumer, you have to investigate TikTok and, and try and figure out whether there's a way of promoting your products there, basically. It's, it's a massive, highly engaged audience. With somewhat specific demographics. It's It's a very exciting opportunity. Other brands need to pay attention to this and figure out what their entry point is going to be. And just because the innovation hasn't happened for B to B SaaS yet on TikTok doesn't mean it won't. TikTok wants that to happen. And so the question becomes how, and so someone will unlock that and they'll make, you know, a billion dollars because of it. But I wouldn't recommend that channel to everybody yet. And like, At Thrive, for instance, we don't have a huge amount of people coming to us yet saying, hey, I'm spending 750,000 dollars a month on TikTok. Can you help me? Type thing. The other problem with TikTok is that it's extraordinarily creative asset dependent and heavy. And so, like, you are launching net new assets several times per week. It is hard for creative teams and brands to produce that much content. It takes a machine and that's expensive. And so that all factors into the cost of not only just the ad dollars, but the, you know, creative resourcing and investment that's required to power that. So it can be done in a mor…

AI assessment note: “I wouldn't recommend that channel to everybody yet.”

Q When you're looking to hire someone full time to drive the paid growth channel and or work with an agency, what do you recommend people look for specifically, especially things maybe they're not likely to think about when they're hiring someone that people often miss?

A So there's a couple of competencies that I think are very important. I found that, so I was like a nerd as a child. If you can't tell, I don't know, super nerdy geeky kid. I would like take apart, I would take apart my parents' computers. I try and rebuild them. I, you know, was fooling around with bulletin boards, you know, before websites existed, stuff like that. And then I became a web developer. And as I transitioned into a, you know, a performance marketing role, I realized that being technical, And having technical aptitudes was extraordinarily helpful in terms of being on the front line of what we were doing and solving problems. So if you're making your first hire, you probably want them to be, to have the ingenuity and capability to solve a lot of the problems that you're going to run into within the context of tracking, attribution, data visualization, and then campaign management. So number one, do they have a technical background? That can be multidisciplinary. At Thrive, you know, we have someone who is a, a nuclear physicist that left, you know, that discipline and became a performance marketer. We have people who have left mathematics and become performance marketers, people who left finance, full stack engineering, like all kinds of stuff. Those are technical fields where people tend to be good at math and good at problem solving, and so that's like a strong pi…

AI assessment note: “So number one, do they have a technical background?”

Q What's something you've changed in the way that you all operate? That's been relatively minor in terms of how hard it was to change, but that had a tremendous impact on your ability to execute as a team or a company.

A The tools that we use in performance marketing change Constantly. So the channels themselves change and therefore what problems exist and what, you know, SaaS companies or different types of platforms offer as solutions to problems change. And so I don't think it's one thing necessarily. This might be a bit of a roundabout answer here, but I mentioned that change itself earlier is something that humans seem to not love. Whereas in our industry, and I don't think we're alone here, but there's a culture of change. And so A welcoming of change, aptitude around change, implementing, you know, having a playful mindset with new technology and tools, rather than being upset about the fact that, you know, AI exists, or third-party cookies are being deprecated, or iOS 14 removed IDFA, um, and trying to be creative around those types of solutions has been, like, a constant for us. So it's not, I'm kind of sidestepping the question a little bit, but it is the, the cultural willingness to Adapt that I think has been a strong suit for us as a company.

AI assessment note: “I'm kind of sidestepping the question a little bit, but it is the”