Vidcon 2019: Influencers Are Better With Paid

Hi everyone, thank you so much for being here this afternoon. My name is Carrie Dino. I am the media director at Mekanism. Mekanism is a full-service advertising agency out of New York City, and this is my colleague.

Hi, I'm Brendan Gahan. I run Epic Signal, which is a subsidiary of Mekanism. We are the social media arm, do a ton of influencer work, which is topic for today.

Yeah, so today we're going to talk to you about something that we're really passionate about at Mek and Epic, and that's how all of your marketing initiatives work better when they all ladder up to a single strategy. And because we're at VidCon, in particular, we're going to be talking to you about how to better integrate your influencer marketing with your paid media marketing. So Brendan and I, over the past couple of years, have been working on a 5-step process to help and make this more streamlined and simple. And with that, I'll kick it over to Brendan to start us off.

Thanks. All right, so we know influencers matter. We're all here at VidCon. We've heard it a million times. We've got tens of thousands of people here. We see digital influencers be kind of the next gen of celebrities. I think it's 8 of the top 10 most recognizable celebrities amongst teens are digital influencers. You know, they're on the COVID of Cereal, Red Bull, etc. We know it's a big deal in having a big cultural impact. Ninja, I think April of last year became the most talked about athlete on social platforms. So, you know, esports athletes are bigger than traditional athletes at this point. Broadly and culturally, we know they're having a big impact, but a lot of that hasn't necessarily translated to this space. Within influencer marketing, and this is the 10th year of VidCon, the conversation hasn't necessarily moved forward or progressed a ton in terms of how we define success on a campaign-by-campaign basis. We're still kind of stuck in these vanity metrics of like, "Oh, well, this got a lot of views," or "It got a lot of engagement.", but they're not really concrete, and they're not elevated and on par with other media channels. So even Facebook is saying that you shouldn't be looking at engagement as a benchmark for success. This report that came out about 6 months ago, I think, they stated that engagement actually says more about the user than the content that you're creating. So engagement's not a great benchmark for success, and we're still using terms like authentic, and I think this is way overused, and I think we should ban it. It's just not actionable, and at this point it's been so overused and so overhyped it's lost all meaning. So really what does matter within the space when you're doing a brand campaign? I think it's really driving measurable business results, and that is obviously sales, lift in awareness, Brand lift. These are the benchmarks for success that other media platforms are being measured against, and we should hold ourselves within this space against those as well. So what's the solve? What we're gonna be talking about today is how to integrate your creative with your media to drive success at scale. And obviously weave into that the creative process, 'cause when all these channels are are working together and they're integrated, you're able to drive way more effective campaigns and they're way more efficient than if you operate in a silo. Which leads me to Carrie's point.

So it seems like a pretty simple idea that everything should ladder up to one strategy and that we should all be working together really seamlessly. But this is one of the major problems with influencer marketing as part of your full marketing mix. It's that you still have a lot of influencer-only agencies or influencer teams planning your influencer media without being integrated into your core creative or media teams. And this poses a problem for a lot of reasons. If you think about the role that influencer or even social marketing plays in your overall media mix, you've got more traditional channels like digital, TV, out-of-home that are really amazing at driving awareness. And are really high-reach vehicles. And then you've got other tactics like search and shopper marketing that are really great for driving DR. But influencer and social marketing sits at this incredible sweet spot where they're actually able to drive influence at scale— and I'll come back to this a little bit later— and they can connect with people throughout the entire consumer journey and throughout their entire day when people aren't exposed to these other more traditional channels. And this is also really important to think about when you're looking at your budgeting. You know, I think a lot of times there's a tendency for us to jump to an influencer budget based on the amount of content that we need or the number of influencers we want to have. But really, when you're thinking about it holistically, you should be planning it the same way you would plan any other media channel. So what we do is we use media mix modeling tools. We use this tool called CommsPoint that's owned by Nielsen, but there's tons of other tools out there. There's tons of them out there. And basically what it tells you is how to best invest in the different channels in order to drive your business results. And this is really important because it helps you to justify your influencer budget to your brands and your clients based on actual goals. So now that we've talked to you a little bit about the challenges, I'll kick it over to Brendan to talk through the beginning of our process.

All right. So how do you pull this off? We basically broke it down to 5 simple phases, and we'll go through these in depth. But first and foremost, you want to nail down the big idea. And I think one of the common pitfalls within this space is there's a tendency to be, I mean, for lack of a better term, some starfuckery. Like, you're like, that's the big influencer, I want to work with them, before you've nailed down kind of your objective and your goals. So you want to nail down what's the big idea we want to communicate, and what are the objectives and the consumers we want to reach. And then from there, go into the influencer identification process, establish very clear criteria based on who you wanna reach, kind of the brand, the tone, etc. And then go out and have conversations with the influencers before onboarding them. We'll go into that in a bit more detail. And then collaborate with them closely on the content creation process. I think this is really key and oftentimes a step that's overlooked. I mean, with media, you're able to see scale your investment in that content, so you should take the time to do it properly. And then of course, transitioning to phase 4, scale that up with media. You can sustain it over a long period of time, get a lot more out of that content than if you relied solely on owned channels. And then measure, optimize, and iterate based on your KPIs. So diving in a little bit deeper, the big idea. What do we mean by that? You wanna build upon an insight, a big brand insight that can be an umbrella by which all your executions can live under and have that overlap with where the consumer lives. So for example, we'll be referencing a campaign we did with Method. Method wanted to, well actually for those of you who aren't familiar with Method, they're a soap and cleaning company, but they use all natural ingredients, they've got great design,. And what they noticed is most consumers, they just go to the cleaning aisle and just pick up whatever they're used to. And we really wanted to jar and break up that routine, get people to think about what they're buying. And Method's point of differentiation and the insight is it's good. It's not a bunch of chemicals, really harsh chemicals. There's a lot of natural ingredients. So it's good in that sense. It's good in the sense that it's great smells. It's beautiful design., and it's fun and enjoyable. And so everything that we wanted to do, we wanted it to project that there's good inside idea, and everything fell out from under that. Now from a targeting standpoint, we were really going after obviously parents. There was a lot of dog owners and pet owners, and then savvy millennials who care about the environment and so on. So everything kind of fell under those, and when we were establishing the influencer criteria, we took that into account. And so in identifying the influencers, it's really important that once again, before you start throwing out names, develop a very clear filter by which everyone's got to pass. And it's got to take into account a lot of the demographic and hard data, but also a lot of the soft metrics like are they a brand fit. And so we'll compile this in conjunction with the brand. From a demographic standpoint, who do we want to go after? What platforms is our audience on? In the case of Method, it was primarily Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram. What's the desired outcome we want from these influencers? Are they brand-friendly? Are they creating content that's representative of the brand? Do they have the production capabilities that we feel confident in their ability to actually be brand ambassadors. So there was that kind of more the data-driven element, and we would leverage a lot of the analytics tools. There's a ton out there, but then we would make sure to vet everything from just a person standpoint. We would have the staff looking at the content, watching it, making sure we felt really comfortable with them, and then do something that I think a lot of a lot of people in this space are overlooking, which is we would go out, and once we had our list and we built out nice little one-pagers like this that we shared with the brand, we'd have them redline whoever they didn't feel was a great fit, and then we would go out and have conversations with the approved influencers. So we would talk to them and see, is this a brand you know? Is it a brand you're excited about? Does the project itself get you excited? Are they being proactive with ideas?. And then of course a lot of logistical components. Are they available from a time standpoint, budget standpoint? And it was great because you've got this pre-approved group of influencers and you can take all the information they've given you. You can take into account how passionate they are about the project as well as their availability and budget and make the best judgment call. And I think taking into account those intangible components, like how excited they are, is really key. Right now there's so many influencer marketing platforms where you can just post a brief and have people opt in and you never have a conversation with them. You're missing out on a lot of opportunities to get people, identify people who are actually genuinely caring about the brand. So at this stage we've got the big idea, we've identified our influencers, now we wanna go out and create content. We don't just let them go off and do it and hand them the brief. We work with them very, very closely on this process. And we really like to break it out ideally into two stages. One is we onboard the influencers in some sort of an influencer summit where we take the opportunity to educate them and entertain them and really immerse them in the brand. What's great about that is they get face time with the CEO, the brand team, us as an agency, and we provide a lot of insight and background into the brand, the origins of the brand, as well as the product and the rationale behind the campaign that we want to execute and have go live. And so they get all this in-depth background and we as the advertisers also get the opportunity to get their feedback and input. I mean, they know this demographic better than anyone., and those insights are incredibly valuable, so we take that into account as well. So we've educated them, but we don't wanna bore them to death, so we like to do something entertaining as much as possible. If we are working with a brand that has celebrities, it's great to have them come out. At the very least, we like to create some sort of exclusive experience so that they really get that candy with the medicine. They're not just bombarded with information, but they walk away with something that they're excited about that they can share with their audiences. From there, we go into the content creation process, and we can do this any number of ways. Oftentimes we get involved in the production. Oftentimes we're letting the influencers create their own content. This is a piece from the Method campaign that we've been referencing. But if the influencers themselves are going off and creating that content, we're incredibly involved in that approval process from the ideas to the content creation, feedback on edits, and so on. And so we'll do stuff like let them go off and create their own content independently. We will oftentimes act as the production arm to help bring to life their ideas. We've got a lot of great resources, production capabilities in-house. We can empower them to bring to life their awesome ideas in a way that they wouldn't be able to necessarily do on their own. We like to be the gasoline on their fire of ideas. So we'll do that, and then we'll integrate them oftentimes into other elements of the campaign beyond just digital. Print, TV, out-of-home, we've had influencers make TV and Super Bowl appearances and cameos, and just gets them more invested. It also allows more data points for us and more opportunities to distribute that content and get some learnings. And we've also done even in-depth long web series and so on. And we put a lot of pride in that production process. And we approach it, I think, a bit differently than most agencies out there. We are incredibly involved. We put a lot into the production. In part because we're then going to go out and promote it at scale. There's a big opportunity with paid to get the significant scale and reach and viewership far beyond just relying on the owned media channels. If we just relied on the owned media channels, it would be a blip on the radar. It'd be done in maybe a week or so. But by scaling with media, we're able to get a lot more out of it. Investing in these influencers is time-consuming. Expensive, and by promoting with paid, we're able to extend the lifecycle of the campaign significantly, which leads to scaling.

So we've got the big idea, we've got the influencer selection, we've got the content collaboration, and now scaling with media. So scaling with media is a— or scale with influencers is a problem that clients and brands come to us with a lot. And overall, the reason is we all know that organic reach sucks, and it's only been going down year over year, especially on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. And the industry recognizes this, and they're coming out with tools to help combat this issue. YouTube this year announced FameBit, which allows you to retarget your influencer content across their full suite of properties to help achieve scale that way. Facebook and Instagram rolled out a partnership platform to help brands and creators better work together in order to amplify content with paid support across Instagram and Facebook. We've seen some really amazing results with this. And you know, when Brendan was talking about influencer selection, you'll notice that he didn't once mention follower counts as part of our criteria, because we've seen from internal case studies and from industry white papers that organic reach is such a small fraction of the available audience that you're trying to hit. And, you know, look at— take a look at this example. So you're paying a celebrity influencer with 5 million aggregated followers, but in reality, you're reaching such a small portion of that with your organic reach. You're really— like, realistically, you're only reaching less than 7% of somebody's followers. And that's why it's so important to at least put some incremental paid support behind your influencer content. And it doesn't have to be all of your influencer content. It can just be your best influencer content that you feel like really speaks to your brand, that prominently features your brand and makes sense to push out from your own channel. And it's not just scale that's an issue that can be helped with paid media support. Think about an organic post. For the first day, especially on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, it's right there at the top of your feed. So on your own handles, you're probably getting most of your likes or comments or engagements within the first day. And then it drastically declines after that and becomes way more inefficient. But with paid support, it only becomes more efficient over time. As the systems learn to test and optimize and become more efficient with their bidding strategies. So really, together, the organic content amplified by paid can really scale your media and ultimately extend the life of your campaign far beyond what you could do with organic alone. But, you know, it's not just about reach. Putting paid support behind your influencer content actually allows you to deliver against your business goals. Brendan and I have touched on this a few times, but we're going to get into this a little bit more. Finally, by putting actual paid support behind your influencer content, you're able to get enough scale against that content that you can measure it the same way you would measure any other media channel. This is true for any objective that you have, whether it's being working with influencers to drive awareness of a new product against a core demo, trying to drive consideration and purchase intent, trying to convert people to e-commerce or to drive website traffic, if you're trying to build loyalty amongst a passionate fan base or advocacy through CPG content, all of this can be measurable if you put the scalability of paid media behind it.

And we've got some really great case studies that prove this. Yeah. In integrating, amplifying the influencer content with paid media, we seen some awesome results. Recently we reduced a client's cost per acquisition by 50% by integrating the two. And if we had just relied on the influencer's own channels, we would have only generated about 10% of the sales. So when we did the campaign, only about 10% came through the influencer's organic channels, and then about 90% of the sales came in through the paid promotion. It's great because when you rely on organic channels, you can't control the message, you can't follow up, but with paid, we're able to bring the consumer from upper to lower funnel and retarget them, cater that message, control the timing, and optimize accordingly. It just becomes incredibly efficient. We've seen 13-minute average watch times on some campaigns that we've developed with influencers. I mean, this is, I think, really important to call out 'cause we're in this era where so many brands are having trouble even generating an impression or a view because people are scrolling through their feeds so fast. I mean, you've seen this decline even in the ad formats from the 60 to 30 to 15 to 6 because consumers don't give a shit about most ads. But if you incorporate an influencer and then amplify that content, it can scale and people will pay attention. You know, once again, if we'd relied on the influencers' own channels, we still would've had a lot of views, you know, maybe, you know, several hundred thousand. But in this case, we were able to get, you know, hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of views at a 13-minute average watch time. Increase in brand recall. Just recently we did a TikTok campaign where we did an activation with influencers that generated tens of millions of views. But then we did a hashtag challenge in conjunction with that. And the results were insane. I mean, it's probably going to hit half a billion views by this time next week or something. Because we invested, I mean, not an insane amount into media, in promotion with the hashtag challenge. And it just scaled it up dramatically. And then bringing it full circle, the Method— I'll let you take this one.

Sure. So for Method, we worked with about 14 influencers that we'd identified across different interest categories. I think we had 76 different pieces of influencer content, and we picked the top 20 to 30 pieces of content that we felt like really spoke to the brand, and we put part of our paid social budget behind that content. And because we were able to get enough scale against our influencer content, we were actually able to measure with our brand studies the lift. And influencers were the most successful channel in driving brand lift or awareness for Method as a brand. And it helped us to justify for this year putting even more money into influencers. And I don't think that's something that we could have done had we not integrated it into our overall measurement approach. This is actually surprisingly easy to do. It really is just a matter of having enough impressions. So for Method or for any brand that's trying to drive upper funnel tactics like awareness or consideration, Facebook and YouTube have really great brand studies that you can unlock as added value for part of a pretty minimal spend. And it lets you see how your influencer content performs against real objectives versus your other social content. It really lets you optimize to things other than just engagements or video views. Or you can do what we did for Method and actually integrate it into a larger brand study by working with partners like Nielsen, Kantar Millward Brown, ResearchNow. There's tons of partners, Holland Partners. And basically what these cross-channel studies do is they look at a control group who hasn't seen your ads and an exposed group that has, and it compares the change in their perception of the brand based on a survey. So we were able to see how influencers performed compared to our other media channels, which was really great. And then even for lower funnel tactics, we're really fortunate that Facebook, Instagram, the major 4 players actually have a really simple tool in their interface you can use to put a conversion pixel on your website so you can track traffic referrals, you can track the number of visits somebody makes, actual sales, and even lifetime value of a customer, which is really important in the long term. So we've talked to you through our 5-step process, talked about some of the challenges and ways to overcome them. So just to recap that quickly for you.

Yeah, so, you know, why integrate? You know, what are the benefits of it? You know, you're able to really drive actual business results. You're able to elevate the conversation beyond those, vanity metrics of engagements or, God forbid, authenticity, and have a real conversation about the efficacy of these programs. You're also able to really invest in the content. I mean, you're creating content that's going to be representative of the brand. You should do it right, I think. So not to mention the fact that oftentimes in working with influencers, it's an incredibly costly and time-intensive process. And so you've invested all this time, effort, and money, like get everything you can out of that. And so by investing with paid media, you can scale it up and not just have it live or die based on the algorithm and the organic reach of the influencer. And then lastly, you can optimize and measure what works. For example, with Method, we pushed out 20 pieces of content. We were able to lean into what works, and that provided a lot of great learnings. And when you do that, you can have that translate to the next campaign, just get better and better. Where when you're relying solely upon organic channels, it is great and it is effective, but you don't know necessarily what whims of the algorithm you are kind of at the mercy of. And so with paid channels, it's just you're able to optimize and generate a lot more learnings and improve the results of the campaign over time. So just to kind of recap that 5-phase process that we see, it's identify the big idea first and foremost. Don't lean into the influencers first. What's the message you want to get across and where? And then from there, develop that influencer criteria, go out, have conversations with them, see who's genuinely enthusiastic and wants to be involved, and then of course works within your budget. And then from there, work really closely with them on the content creation process. It's OK to get involved in production. Oftentimes you have the capabilities to empower them to create something that they want to go out and create, or they've got a lot of great ideas. It doesn't need to be this one-sided exchange. Change, but I think if you're going to make this investment, it's really important that you're creating something that is representative of the brand and that you're proud of, and then scale that up with media. Don't rely solely on the organic channels because you can get so much more out of it with paid promotion, and then you can get those learnings through measurement and optimization. So with that, we're all done, and thank you so much. I think we've got a few minutes for— questions and answers. Thanks. I don't know what the format is for questions. I think there's mics on either side if people want to go.

We can hear you if you want to go. Oh yeah. So I have— so the question was, is there resistance from the influencers for putting paid support behind their work? I have not found that personally. I have found that actually they're very eager to do that because all it does is expose them to more people beyond their own followers. So in many instances, when you're putting additional funds behind their content, they're actually able to grow their own followers and their own channels as a result of that.

Because they're reaching people they never would have reached before. So no. Yeah, yeah. I would just say the only kind of caveat being make sure to negotiate that up front. Because definitely once or twice left it off explicitly in the contract. And then you're like down the line, you want to add it in. At that point, they've got leverage, which is fine. They sign up for one thing, and you add something else. But if you want to be whitelisting their content to promote it, just make sure to plan that out in advance.

Yeah. Yeah. I was just wondering for brands that are just starting out in influencer marketing, how much percentage of a marketing spend do you think should be applied to influencer marketing?

So the question is for brands that are just starting out in influencer marketing, what percentage of a budget would we recommend putting towards it? So that's kind of a tricky question. It really depends on the size. It really depends on what the business goal is. And I think influencers do have a role to play no matter what your business goal is. But we'd really need to— it would really depend on the category. I would say to base it on your social media budget and put a fraction of your social media budget behind influencer content. So if your primary creative agency or your in-house agency is producing content for the OWN channel, think about how can you use your influencer content and how much of it do you want to use to actually amplify it. I say like as a general rule of thumb, you should never ever put less than a few thousand dollars behind a single post. I don't think it gives the platforms the right opportunity to test and optimize. So I would say to start with that. Look at your social budget overall. Think about your goals. And then make sure you're putting enough money behind the content you are running to actually get the right results.

[Speaker:BRENDAN Gahan] Yeah, and I think you can actually even kind of stretch it by— with this tactic, you can kind of integrate the production budget, creative development budget as part of it. So you can stretch it so much more. So it kind of might not even be— I mean, depending on how scrappy you you want to be, it could kind of all be one budget. Because it's like the influencers could be your production arm, and then you could support that with media. And so it's kind of woven throughout. So that's not necessarily an answer, but it could work. It's a good way to stretch the whole budget overall.

Yeah. Any other questions? Yeah. [INAUDIBLE] Great. So the question is, do we usually give influencers money to promote their posts from their own accounts, or do we push out the influencer content from the brand accounts?

Yeah, we've done both. I feel like at least— and you might have some different numbers, I don't necessarily remember everything off the top of my head— but I feel like with the cost per acquisition stuff, the stuff when we were white label, like when we were promoting the influencer assets specifically from their accounts, I think it drove a better conversion, but also it's gonna depend so much on the creative, the audience, the product, and so I would just test both. I mean, that's like the beauty of it. It's like you can just test it and very quickly get the answer and lean into whatever the data is telling you.

Just to build on that a little bit, so I think influencer content, when it's done well, is developed for the influencer's followers to speak to a very passionate and specific audience. So oftentimes the content is really best coming from their channels, and what we'll do is we'll give them money to promote it out of their channels to their own followers so that they're actually reaching everybody and to lookalike audiences. And then we'll specifically select very particular content that we feel like matches the look and feel of the brand channel, and we'll also upload that into our channel and put promoted support behind that. And usually we do that as dark posts, especially on Facebook and Instagram, so that you're not having your organic feed disrupted with the influencer content. And then dark posts are a really amazing way to just test and learn against a whole bunch of different targeting tactics.

So both can be effective. Any other questions? Oh, yeah.

Yep. Oh, wait. We got one up there. Oh, sorry. Sorry.

We'll let you go first since you're standing. I manage different influencers and content creators in Argentina. Have found a difference between putting advertising or putting money in promoting a post on Instagram on their own account, and we create another account so as not to focus on putting too much effort in using that particular— let's say I have a 1.5 million account, and that same person also is doing a play or is doing other things like writing a book. So instead of putting a lot of efforts or a lot of advertising her own account, we create another account of her products. So that other account has only 100,000. If you put the same ad in both places and you spend $1,000 in both places, it reaches different audiences and it spends the money in a different pace. I don't know why, because if I put in the same money and I'm targeting at the same filters, I get different results because it's supposed to go to people that is not following her.

So, so that's interesting, and I've actually run into this problem before. So I think what you're saying is you're taking the same asset and you're promoting it to the same audience from two different accounts, correct?

Yes, because I don't want to be putting too many ads in her own account where he, she creates a lot of videos on humor and all that, so I want instead of putting like every day a different post, I want to use another account so it's not making any harm on the real account, but I want to promote that product from another account that we control.

The reason you're seeing different results is because you're actually bidding against yourself.

I did that different times and different moments. It's not that I do it at the same time, but when I do it on the other account, I never get a lot of the big results. I get it only in the big account. Even if I, if I want to spend $1,000 or $2,000, whatever it is, if I put it in there in the account, in the $1.5 million account, it gets spent a lot faster, and some of them goes directly, even goes to the same followers, and if you put it on the other one, maybe you never spend all the money. It depends on the filter. So even spend more than $500 instead of spending the $2,000.

That's interesting. I'm not really, you know, I'm not really sure why that would be happening. It might have something to do with like the algorithm prioritizing larger accounts over smaller accounts. I really don't know.

That's a good question. Okay.

I don't have an answer to that. The question is, how long average would you recommend, or do you deal with where you own the likeness of one of your influencers, or you have a non-compete where they can't promote a similar product in the same time span?

That's a good question. One thing we like to do, I mean, I think a lot of things are going to dictate that, like obviously your budget and your goals and stuff. But we work with a lot of big CPG brands, and I think we try and wherever possible look at influencers through the lens of almost like an endorsement deal. We want to work with them on an ongoing basis because we want their fans to view it as more than just like they're plugging something and then they're gonna go and get a check somewhere else. I mean, you look at Nike and Jordan, the two are so synonymous. If Jordan went out and he was playing basketball with Nikes one day and then Adidas another, it wouldn't carry the same weight. And so we try and apply that philosophy to influencers wherever possible. And so, I mean, we've done stuff where it's like 2-year-long contracts, but they're getting paid to do activations that entire time. On a monthly basis or whatever it is. And so wherever possible, we try and do like, we would rather work with fewer influencers on an ongoing basis than a ton of influencers in a one and done. And then you've got leverage. I mean, however long they're doing activations and you're paying them, like it makes sense that they would sign over non-compete. But yeah, if you're just doing a one-off, it's a case-by-case negotiation. You don't have a lot of leverage, to be honest.

Yeah. Yeah. Hi. So I work for a plumbing company, ironically. And I'm looking for a way to reestablish some sort of connection with my target group, like a real human-to-human connection as opposed to a brand-based push my product at you. And so I've been in contact with you.

Hulu, for example, lots of people have talked to me about doing a commercial with that.

Sort of like anime, like fun-based, you know, superhero type concept. But if you had to pick, see my industry, like, ah, would you invest more in like doing a YouTube type of ad content or Hulu, which is also a rather large investment?

He said it's a plumbing company?

So we do American Christian Kids, COVID+, we're putting— we're located in Massachusetts.

We have a new stainless steel line, it's in Melrose. But yeah, so I just would like to really invest my money the right way, but also show how much we value our consumers.

We really do, it's not just a smoking gun. So I would say it depends on what your budget is and what you're trying to do. I think the I think that social media, and you might have a different take on this, but from a paid perspective, I think social media is a really great way to dip your toe in the water of advertising. And if you're not 100% sure who your audience is, I would assume it's older millennials and older audience that owns homes, either for the first time or for a long time. They're probably more family-oriented. It'd be really great for you to start testing out on a platform like YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram. You can test a lot of different creative messages and a lot of different target audiences for a really cost-efficient amount of money. Facebook has a tool called A/B testing, which will help you identify really quickly, like within 3 days I think, best creatives between 2 different creatives and between different audiences. Hulu, I love working with Hulu. I think they're amazing. Streaming is only getting bigger, but Hulu also, there's a certain income that people have in order to afford all these additive streaming services, and the investment is a lot more. So if it was me working with a local company, I'd probably dip my toe in the water in the social platforms that you're paying on actual engagements and views before I made a bigger investment in content creation with a partner like Hulu. That leads to a second question I have for you, Jennifer, or I'd be asking.

So I do have two separate Instagram accounts, which I had built relatively quickly. I'm super excited. I had some different posts. I hit some great hits.

Comments are mad crude. You're saying you have two different accounts and the content's performing well on Instagram but not on Facebook? Facebook, the news feed has become a little more cluttered with news recommendations and stuff like that. I don't really know why some things perform differently than others, but that's also something that you can address through paid media. You can set up your campaigns to auto-optimize between the platforms. It sounds like for you, you're looking for leads. Traditionally, I've actually seen Facebook work really well for leads if you use their lead generation form. You also use that on Instagram, but it'll auto-optimize between those two platforms, so your budget will work just as well for you either way. So I would recommend that. Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you for the question. So I think we've got time for two more questions, so go ahead.

Hey, I was wondering if you had best practices for briefing in influencers for paid media. You kind of briefly touched on this, saying you might wait to see which one might be most suited for it. But if you're really planning to test this out and kind of dip your toe in the water of it, they are different content, so is there a way to best brief in an influencer?

Like in terms of in the vetting process, or you've signed them and you're like, hey, here's what we want to do together, and you're trying to map out the creative?

Yeah, I work at Lululemon and we're kind of testing this out as well, doing some whitelisting. And yeah, the kind of content that you can get back, you don't really know what you're going to get. So I'm wondering, should you actually be doing two briefs, like one's for your own channel and one's for paid media?

Oh, I see what you're saying. We've done that actually quite a bit. Because I think one thing we didn't necessarily talk about so much is oftentimes when it is going into the influencer Creator's channel, they've got typically a format that they follow and you can't deviate too far from that. So you need to go in with that understanding. And so oftentimes we will do just that. We'll have content that's going to live on the brand channel and that will go in and really produce that, blow it out of the water. And there'll be more collaborators from the sense of a writer and talent. And then when it's their channel, we understand the format and structure that we're working within. And we'll say, hey, here's what we need to communicate and get across. You tell us how you want to bring that to life and work through it. But you definitely, when it's going on their channel, you really have to be cognizant of that format and go in being comfortable with it. Because it can't, that's their livelihood. They can't, if they've been doing whatever, Motivation Mondays every Monday, and you're like, let's do Lululemon Mondays, they're not gonna, that's a terrible example, but you know what I mean. They're not gonna ditch the format. So you need to, yeah, be fully aware of that. Oftentimes we do totally bifurcate that process.

One other thing I would say is important is depending on what your goal is, think about what kind of content is gonna perform best for that goal. So static images or carousels, those often work best if you're trying to get another action, like if you're trying to get them to click to a landing page or to visit a store location. Static assets work best for that, whereas video content and animated GIFs tend to work better for things like awareness consideration upper funnel tactics. So usually we'll work with Brendan's team thinking about what assets we need for paid media based on our goals. And that information, there's some really good resources on Google and Facebook that talk about which kind of ad units to use for different tactics. So we always use that also. Great. Yeah, thanks. Thank you.

Also love Lululemon. I think we're actually out of time. So yeah, get the flashing red light. Thanks so much, guys.

Appreciate it. Thanks, everyone.

Enjoy the rest of your time.