Consumers now prefer raw, relatable ads over polished ones, and attention spans are shrinking. Liquid Death and Gymshark hit massive valuations by breaking the mold. The strategy: work with creators for their production skills, pair them with strategists and data analysts, use AI to scale creative, test multiple ad sets on Meta, and rely on paid media over organic reach.
There's a massive amount of change happening in the marketing and advertising industry today, and most brands are at a loss of what to do. We're at an inflection point where the consumer is acting very differently than he or she has in the past. However, there's a small number of brands that are doing extremely well. Two of these examples are Liquid Death, which has increased its valuation from $0 to $700 million in just 5 to 6 years. Another one is Gymshark, that has increased its valuation from zero to a billion in just about 10 years. Now, these brands, the funny thing is, are selling products that are very similar to their competitors. There's really not a lot of difference. I'm gonna get into what they're doing differently in this video. I'm also gonna talk about the trends that are affecting the manner in which people are, are changing and how marketers need to adapt to them. And I'm also gonna give you a 6-point strategy that if you execute well over the next 12 to 24 months, you're gonna be very successful. So right about now you're probably asking, why should you trust me? Well, I don't have a crystal ball, I can guarantee you that. But what I can tell you is I saw internet and advertising going together like a glove. I was one of the first people ever to advertise on the internet back in 1994. I ran a campaign for Sean Connery for Gramercy Pictures, and we gave away a Suzuki Trooper and 6 African safari trips. This was before browsers even existed. I then jumped into social media when Friendster and MySpace were still a thing and thriving. Ran some of the first ads on Facebook in January 2009 for Showtime. Since that time, my company has run thousands of campaigns for over 200 leading brands across social media. And lastly, I saw influencer marketing happening long before anybody else. We got into influencer marketing in 2012 at a time when it was Kim Kardashian and a handful of other people were making money in this business. So I have a pretty decent track record, I'd say, in this business. And right now I see something happening that is completely different than what I've seen before. Consumers are not gravitating towards highly polished, highly produced ads. What consumers are gravitating toward more is lo-fi ads, ads that are more relatable, ads that look and feel like themselves, or people that are very similar to their friends and family and people that they associate with. You can see that in this chart. If you take a look at lo-fi ads versus hi-fi ads, lo-fi ads outperform hi-fi ads every time by 50% on engagement, 40% on reach, and 62% on video views. The major change is the content creator economy is booming. Influencer marketing has increased to $16.4 billion. The challenge though is that with higher demand, prices have gone up significantly. So what used to work in the past with influencer marketing isn't working as well anymore because Prices have come up, reach has come down because the algorithm is shrinking. And the third thing is, is that the customer, as I mentioned earlier, is paying attention a lot less. Video views are shrinking. Now, what do you do differently? That's the question. Where do you go with all of this? Consumers don't want to pay attention to highly polished ads. And the content and creator economy is booming, but there's some nuances in it that you really need to capitalize on so you don't lose a lot of money. And you do things appropriately or in a different way. The good news is I'm gonna tell you exactly what to do in this 6-point plan. Step number 1, jump all over the creator economy. The consumer has shown that they don't want highly produced, highly scripted ads, so these content creators are the best method in order to connect with your customers. When you choose your content creator, choose them for their content creation skills and not necessarily for their followers on social media. Another key point when you're actually going down this road is realize that these content creators are amazing at generating high video views and CTRs and connecting with an audience, but they're not experts at advertising and marketing. And in this environment where the video views have shrank to 6, 15, maybe 30 seconds, you need actually to drive intent and awareness and sales for your brand in a very short period of time. And the content creators aren't necessarily the ones by themselves that are going to do that for you. Which leads me to step 2: work with creative strategists that are skilled at the art and science of advertising and can provide really tight creative briefs for the content creators and can walk them through the process so you know that your content is not only engaging, not only gets long video views, high CTRs, but most importantly is driving sales of your product. Creative strategists and data analysts are gonna be able to get into the psyche and desires of the consumer, and they're gonna be able to move your product forward much more than just a content creator by him or herself. Step 3, work with a group that is highly skilled at artificial intelligence for marketing. It's a total game changer. It allows you to create creativity at scale with efficiency. There are a number of next-level AI tactics that you can deploy, such as tapping into the API of ChatGPT to be able to customize different prompts specifically for your needs, and you're going to be able to get much better results. Step 4, go big with niches. So for example, if you're creating an ad for a protein bar, you're going to want to customize ads specifically for many different groups. ChatGPT and AI is going to allow you to do this, as well as the content creators. So for example, instead of just creating a handful of ads, create a number of ads, dozens of potential ads for bikers, for runners, for yogis, for Pilates specialists, for corporate executives. More than ever, it's really important that we tap into what the consumer is thinking about right now in order to connect with them in a way that's going to allow them to spend time on our ad and consider our products. You're going to want people to see to see your message and see that it's connected to them, it's speaking their language, and that way they're going to test out your product. Keep in mind that the average consumer will scroll the Statue of Liberty 300 feet every single day in the newsfeed. So you're going to be really— need to be really, really relevant in order to capture their attention. Step 5: Rely upon paid media rather than influencer marketing to actually reach your audience. The influencers Audience is extremely valuable, but it's very expensive to reach those customers specifically with organic reach. So paid media is going to be your core driver to generate new customers and warm up existing prospects. And finally, step 6, when advertising on Meta, we suggest going against their best practices that relies almost exclusively on the algorithm to find your target audience. We know that's good for Facebook's business and maximizes the value of their inventory, but you're going to want to tap the algorithm but at the same time maintain control. The way you do this is you set up many different ad sets for many of your target audiences. This way you're gonna be able to see which titles, which copy, which creative, which target audiences are working best. Double down on the winners and delete the losers. And essentially crawl, walk, run as you invest your dollars. That's it. Those are 6 steps to your success. Them well, you'll be extremely successful over the next 12 to 24 months. If you think you need some help in this process, click on the link below. We'd be happy to help you. We've been doing this for 15 years, have worked with over 250 leading brands. We have an amazing network of content creators and a group of highly talented creative strategists, designers, developers, talent managers, data geeks, and a lot more to help you. And if you like this video, simply click on my name below Subscribe to my channel. More videos like this to come. Thank you so much.
