Jordan shares his journey from running an agency to working with major brands in the tattoo industry and beyond. We dive deep into his career trajectory, the challenges he faced, and the successes he achieved along the way. Jordan also discusses the balance between data-driven marketing and creativity, the impact of AI on the industry, and his leadership philosophy.
Whether you’re a marketing professional or just curious about the field, this conversation is packed with valuable insights and actionable advice. Don’t miss out!
Key Takeaway
- Jordan Baines transitioned from a background in philosophy and business to marketing, finding it a more dynamic and impactful field.
- His first marketing role was in sales, which provided him with deep insights into analytics and business outcomes.
- At Adobe, Jordan learned about optimization and the importance of connecting metrics to real business value.
- Building Digital Matter with his partner showcased the importance of complementary skill sets and mutual self-interest in business success.
- Effective leadership involves reducing stakes for the team, fostering intellectual curiosity, and ensuring conditions for success.
- Understanding customer behavior and seasonality can significantly enhance marketing strategies, as seen with Urban Stems' Valentine's Day campaign.
- Post-acquisition, Jordan's focus shifted from hyper-growth to contribution margin, emphasizing the need for cultural and process changes.
- The importance of testing for causal inference and incrementality to understand the true impact of marketing spend.
- Jordan highlighted the necessity of balancing data-driven marketing with creativity and the value of visual design in advertising.
- AI and machine learning are poised to revolutionize marketing, but they should be used ethically and creatively, enhancing rather than replacing human input.
View Written Interview
Okay. Welcome everybody to an exciting episode. I have my friend here, Jordan Baines, who has a very interesting background from an entrepreneurship background, running an agency to doing really fun, technical, sophisticated data analysis and building cool data tech To then go brand side and building and be part of one of the largest brands in the, we'll call it the tattoo world or temporary tattoo world. And is now kind of moving on to his next exciting adventure. And so I'm excited to talk with Jordan today because he's got a plethora of knowledge and experience and we're gonna talk about a lot of really fun things. So Jordan, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me, Samir.
I'd love for you to kind of maybe kick off and tell us a little bit about your background and how you first became interested in marketing.
It was not my original choice. I was a double major in philosophy and business and I took that first marketing class and promptly quit my business major because it seemed like kind of a waste of time. And it wasn't until a couple of years later getting that master's in philosophy that I realized that marketers are selling us reality and meaning and culture in real-time in a way that I was going to write a bunch of stuff in a book that no one would ever read if I kept on the path I was on. So I went and got that Purdue MBA.
Realized I might be good at marketing and not philosophy at all. Philosophy isn't just hard. It was hard for me. So yeah, I got, the MBA, and then social happened and suddenly there's this whole new way of interacting and relating to people that looks like a bigger and more comprehensive change than the internet alone because it integrates physical and digital in a new and interesting way. And that's kind of where we go. I got into this because it was new and I'm still here cause it. Can't stop the interesting, you know.
I love it. And you said it before we hit record, you got to love what you do, right? And I think you've looked for fun opportunities to be a part of something fun.
Yeah. If you don't love what you do, this is going to be boring in a hurry. Or at the very least, it'll be kind of repetitive. I've watched a lot of folks burn out on just doing the same media buying or the same PPC stuff over and over again. And you want to tell them, hey, listen, you can't grind that many hours at this. Otherwise, you're going to be miserable. But can't stop everyone.
So true, so true. So what was your first job in the marketing field and then kind of how did that shape your career trajectory?
So I didn't get my first marketing start as a marketer. I got started as a sales guy at an enterprise social media management company right out of my MBA. I'd done some consulting for a finance accounting and treasury community online before that. But my first real marketing job was in sales. And I spent a lot of time with my prospects, learning about their analytics challenges and trying to connect early social metrics to actual business outcomes and that sort of thing.
Adobe bought us and I got to learn the inside of the Adobe marketing or marketing cloud. It used to be called that. You know, as part of the Adobe social team, and then honestly, I just met with the team, getting trained up on all of the tools, and then I got to learn a lot of stuff from a guy named Dr. Sid Shaw about how curves work in terms of optimization and output and Yeah, that has stuck with me kind of everywhere I've gone. Adobe's a great company if you can get in. I wish it would have been a better fit or in a better-fitting role for me.
It's really interesting. So do you feel like when you gained that experience with their, obviously their tool, for those of you who don't know their tools are far more advanced and very expensive? And so when you gained that experience, maybe over like the free tools, let's call them, like a Google Analytics or something like that out there, you feel like that gave you a leg up, just kind of, you know, either in your career, what you were up to next, and, you know, just being able to, you know, I don't know, slice and dice data or ways to look at it or anything like that.
So I'll hasten to say the tools back then were very different from the tools now. The company I was at, what we were selling originally was these page tab applications for Facebook pages because the timeline didn't exist on Facebook at that point. Twitter was like a brand-new thing. It didn't have an ad product. This is one of the very first things that you could do from a social marketing perspective.
I'm going to suggest that one of the things that used to be called Omniture Adobe Analytics and contemporary GA4 and a lot of the analytics packages out there, have in common is they measure click streams. And there is a, I'm going to use a word, epistemological problem with that in terms of what they're measuring and how they're attributing value because it corresponds to a path rather than a reason why people do things or an actual motivator within an individual who makes a decision. So I will suggest there's a lot that you can do with freeware or cheapware or honestly, I built an agency, at least all of the optimization side of that agency, and an Excel spreadsheet in a couple of hours, creating an algorithm there. There's a lot you can do with those really expensive tools. I'm not gonna suggest that you shouldn't try good tools, but I think you should have a real Conversation with yourself about build versus buy whether or not you can maintain the tools that you create in-house and whether or not your team can pick them up too.
Yeah, I think that's a great point, right? I mean, because some can be very, very costly. And just because you think they've got all the bells and whistles you need or you know, it's easy to get the demo and go, wow, I can see how we can use all this data. But then yeah, how does that data then turn into money, right to more profit or revenue or whatever it is, because if you don't have someone to dedicate to that or spend time in there.
Right?
And yeah, just like you said, I mean, then then you're better off just with some Excel sheet and some basic pivot tables and you'll get you get far with that.
You can even just intricate pivot tables and you're still gonna do all right. I mean, I don't necessarily encourage people to always believe that they can build in-house. And part of it is there's maybe a conceptual understanding of what you're trying to do. It's really hard to communicate to somebody else in a way that they're gonna understand the tool that you build for them. Sometimes you wanna have a team of experts who are sitting behind the scenes and are committed to that specific problem. The point solution argument is a good one. There's a reason why so many of them persist.
Yep, no, it makes sense. So then you went and you co-founded Digital Matter. And so I'm curious, maybe what motivated you to find that?
I mean, rent? I mean, I drove for Lyft this first couple of months while I was waiting for the original net 30 and net 90 term contract payments to come in. As it was, the company I'd been at had imploded. I had a couple of clients who came with me out of that because I was running the services division within that part of the org. It was a SaaS company that was doing optimization. But I don't know, DM is kind of an interesting thing.
The name for digital matter comes from my business partner side of the company. She had previously used the name. I was building a practice associated with my name. When we merged, digital matter was what stuck because it was a better description of what we were doing than anything else. When we initially merged, it was because we had complementary skill sets me from an analytics and optimization standpoint, her from just pure relationships and who she knew and what she.
Get done and kind of building out a broader understanding of what we needed to offer. Like it was, it was, yeah, it was, it was a good place for us to be, but we both did it for mutual self-interest because it was the right thing for both of us to do. Yeah. You and I were talking shortly before we started recording this and there's, there's only so much I can go into it. I mean, it's, it's agency life, right? It's challenging. You don't always win or you get like a tough client or two of your clients.
Die, which was awful in both cases. Yeah. But I mean, how to get too far into it? Eventually, when we didn't necessarily have the same set of interests, you know, my partner bought me out. And at this point, I'd be honest with you, those stories are hers to tell. It's yeah, it's her company, her history.
Yeah. Sure, well you did a lot of interesting stuff though, right? You built some cool tools, you built some tech in-house, you ran a team. I'm curious just for yourself, what were some of the biggest maybe challenges and successes you faced in that venture?
I've got one for you. and I like this because I've used, the core insight from it in a couple of other places since then. So we had a client called Urban Stems. If you're familiar or if you're from the New York area, you probably have heard of them. They're this high-end florist, and this is back in like 2017 or 2018 and the previous year Urban Stems had some problems with, not getting fulfillment on time for some of the bigger holidays. The flowers have to get there by the day, you know what I mean? And that part of that was growing pains, it happens. So we, Digital Matter, were hired on to kind of help them.
Very important, yep.
Have a much better year, we'll call it. So my partner and I talked about relationships between her and the senior execs at Urban Stem and put together this great partnership with Vogue. So there was that year Vogue X Urban Stem's as part of the Valentine's offering. And then those of us who were on the data side noticed a pattern in purchaser behavior where there was a very clear, we'll call it a gender split, but basically, if you were
We'll call it feminine in the broader sense. You were buying earlier and you're buying for more people. Sisters, daughters, mothers, that sort of thing for Valentine's and we'll call them Cicero men were showing up maybe 10 days in advance of the holiday. And historically, we'd also seen that their messaging was a little bit different. So we could have this Vogue-oriented, big collaboration for, you know, that customer's going to be showing up early. And then for the end, it was us doing a multivariate test between messages around quality and status and luxury, and there's still time to have the best possible flower show up. And that, there was one for a long time, Facebook had a case study up that was the Vogue X Urban Stems case study. That was a cool thing. The results were fantastic.
It cemented them and it made things a lot easier for their leadership team. The core insight part of that. Seasonality, obviously a thing is floral, right? Seasonality mixed with segmentation is where that got to be interesting because it gave us an understanding of what the ebbs and flows were for the multiple different customers that we were talking to. It takes your seasonality and it increases the overall efficiency and incremental value that you can generate from.
That was a fun learning experience. Also, I like it when we win.
Yeah, I'm with you. I love that. We had a client book. It's the same, you know, probably one of their biggest competitors, right? And, and, yeah. And I remember we had one year where Valentine's Day was on a Sunday and they deliver every day, but Sunday. And so it was the same thing. We had to go after, you know, certain ideal customer profiles and encourage them to order early, get it on Saturday, hide it, whatever.
Yeah. Hi, everyone. Yep.
Right and and and it was a tough one right it was a tough one to come back because everyone wanted to deliver it on the day on that day and so it was a very it was interesting one and unfortunately it hurt conversion rates there's no way you know way no other way to split it but yeah it's one of those things like you're talking about where you look at the data you understand the ideal customer profile you can break out some of the messaging around those different personas and buying behaviors right and you're correct and some of those things don't have to be the biggest aha moments, right? Like we've got, we have another flower client right now where conversions are just much lower on the weekends for whatever reason. And so we realized, hey if we reduce budgets a little bit on the weekends and readjust during the weekdays, we'll have a higher ROI. And we do, and it's great, right? And it's a very delicate balance because you don't want to just flip things off and flip them on.
But yeah, it's exactly like you're saying. When you kind of look at the data correctly, you can optimize and like you said, it's always fun to win.
Books is a good brand. We also ended up working with Flower Box just in terms of just having a clean sweep of the luxury part of the market. Great people there too, especially at Flower Box. Loved working with them.
That's important too, I think, right? I mean, I, you know, you're talking about your, your, your previous business partner was, was deep into the relationships. I mean, I think that's another part of it too, right? You're talking about enjoying what you, what you, enjoying what you're doing, but then also enjoying the people that you're, you know, doing it with, I guess. I mean, and, and, I mean, you've held leadership positions, obviously at, at now, you know, marketing agency startups now even almost more corporate. Stances if you will. I'm curious just what's your leadership style and how has that potentially evolved?
I mean, my caveat here is early-stage companies, we're all just trying to figure out how to keep the company afloat while also trying to figure out how to stay alive. So that's a lot less intentional. Like an agency, I'm a major proponent of leadership kind of, I guess other fulcrum positions. So people who are primary points of contact or people who are figureheads or even people who are the point of contact on the client side, going out of their way to kind of reduce the stakes.
Around actions and decisions to get people to offer their best work and ideas, right? I think there's a lot that I would have done differently for my time at DM. And I got a chance to put a lot of those differences into practice at Inkbox, right? So, from a paradigm perspective, I view management and leadership as like a service role. You know, you have a team whose primary task is to excel in their scope. If their scope is aligned with the business goals, the value chain, then their success drives the enterprise forward. I have my knowledge, experience, skills, working hours sometimes, and a voice to help ensure my team's success, provide enrichment, or ask questions to inspire intellectual curiosity. Ultimately, I also believe in championing their wins and their capabilities to my clients or investors to a parent company or whatever, whenever possible. Yeah, it kind of comes down to the same thing. Your role as a manager or a leader is to ensure that the conditions for the possibility of your team's success are met personally and professionally. I'm stealing from a philosophy professor the condition for the possibility. I think that's like Seth Tichenor back at Linfield, or was at Linfield, he's out in Astoria now. But like, yeah, your job is to make sure that your team can be successful. Everything else that you're doing between setting directions or revising scopes or even trying to promote people into different roles, it's about helping them realize that success and ultimately making sure that your business aligned with personal success for your individuals is all, you're driving it forward. It's a lot of dithering, I'm sorry.
Yeah. No, I love that. No, it's, it's, it's awesome because too often egos get in the way and, and other, other things, right? And, and it just, it doesn't enable that. It doesn't foster that, that culture of what you're talking about where, where everyone wins, you know, the, the business succeeds, the individuals succeed when you don't foster those rules when you don't foster that type of culture. I mean, it's just.
You'll lose your best people, right? You won't go in the right direction. You won't, those amazing ideas that people have won't get bubbled up, right? I mean, there's so many problems with that. And so I appreciate how you're wording it and how you're presenting it because all too often I don't see people doing that, right? And unfortunately, yeah, it's unfortunate, but if someone can, yeah.
Can position themselves that way and lift other people around them. It only makes your life easier too at the same time.
Like, so I've spent years either building marketing teams, accomplice, there was a services division, obviously digital matter, we had media buyers and analysts and whatever else. At Inkbox, I had my performance team and then the broader e-commerce team after I was promoted. Setting up a good team is, I don't wanna say straightforward, but like it's clear that a lot of it has to do with finding..
The right people and treating them well. If you hire for intellectual curiosity and generosity, you get people who think interesting things and offer those ideas. If you foster an environment where people are encouraged to make mistakes or look for mistakes that they've made or trade mistakes and lessons with other people, you get faster learning, faster exchange of information between people and you level up everyone in the organization faster. If you lower the stakes for what people are doing and fight against the sense of false urgency.
Wherever it's coming from. You need to have this done by now, or yeah, it drives me nuts because you've seen this, right? No one works faster or produces better results than brilliant and curious people who are excited about what they're working on. And they, especially when they feel safe, right? If they feel appreciated for their efforts, they're going to keep driving on. Like I, I don't care for like the, the, the
Boiler room bowl, the pressure, right? The artificially inflated stretch goals or any of this, it's clear that they're just results of either someone seeing too many 80s films or they took Taylorist management philosophy a little bit too literally, right? It drives me nuts because, and I think we were talking about this before, there are,
A lot of jobs in our industry just burn people out by their very nature. And there's no benefit to bringing them out of the amount of misery that any of us have or are willing to endure just to achieve success and wealth. No. Like, I don't know. You tell your team, learn and encourage each other be supportive be honest with yourself and each other, and grow.
Yep, yep, no, absolutely right, no, yeah.
As a person let me know how I can help you do that and grow as a professional. Let me know how I can do that and help each other grow in the same way. It's great for employee retention and output if you're looking for a business case, but it's just a much more enjoyable way to work and live.
Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And I think that stems through every position, no matter what level in the company as well, because right. It's, it's unfortunate, you know, of course, the bigger the company is, the departments get moored and everything else. And it's just hard, right? It just does become intrinsically more difficult, but When you, you know, it's, it's, you know, we have some, some clients where, where we're running the marketing efforts. We're still interacting with their customer service team because maybe we're doing the updates to the website and what have you, right? We'll find out some stuff from the customer service team, like pure gold for the marketing side of things, right? Or big problems or questions that, that, that, that customers have of theirs or like, we've got to go update the FAQ section to handle these five top five objections or whatever it is. Right. And, and if we were, too siloed or didn't foster those types of opportunities or discussions to even be made. Those things wouldn't have happened or those adjustments wouldn't have been made. And then it only increased our conversion rate and benefited everybody. It made the customer service load lighter, which decreased costs. It just benefits all across the board. But then too often maybe you have a company, why would the marketing talk to customer service? It doesn't even make sense.
right?
No, right? And so it's a very interesting one. And I, again, like, I just feel like it doesn't matter what position, you know, it is not that customer service is lower or anything like that, right? I'm not saying that, but it just, just as a little example, I feel like it's super important to, again, kind of foster those opportunities and conversations to happen.
I mean, you're talking about the place where the voice of the customer comes from most of the time unless you are actively paying for very expensive qualitative research. Right? Yeah.
Yep. Yep. Yeah. No, absolutely. And, far too often brands don't, don't know that stuff, right? Like they don't, they, they just, they don't. I mean, we, just brought on a recent client who runs an e-bike company out and like a waterfall, like these six waterfalls, right? And, and, and you rent the e-bike and you, you go and you go on this like a guided tour of these beautiful waterfalls up in, in Oregon. Okay. Now he understands his ideal customer better than anybody I've talked to in years because he has boots on the ground interacting with them every single day, right? But that's so rare in the e-comm space, right? And so you've got to try to find a way to get that. And as you said, usually we're too small to get enough of that data or to run the surveys or to do all of the things, right? And so, yeah, you've got to find a way to get those details from your team or whoever it is and yeah, and give them the, I guess the soapbox or whatever it is, right? To even like, yeah, be able to make those things known.
And so I'm maybe transitioning from digital matter to inkbox, or maybe some of the major differences and adjustments you had to make.
So can I say the folks at Inkbox when I started were some of the nicest, most genuine, and sweetest people I've ever worked with? Like I spent months worrying if I was the jerk. And I'm not trying to cast shade on anyone else that I've worked with previously, but the culture at Inkbox was special. And I hadn't worked in-house before, so one of the things that I had access to was actual marginal cost data. So just.
A lot of that kind of adjusted my thinking and helped me contextualize one of the lessons that I got from my back-business professor, Matthew Linnell at Purdue. How do you know you're winning in terms of competitive strategy? It's when you're taking home more of the profit than your competitors. And in our case, it was that and also having more fun than anyone else in the market. So the question for me became, when do you spend to have the most impact on that contribution margin? Right.
When do we spend to have that maximal incremental lift? Where do we spend channels, geographies, et cetera? A lot of the questions that I was asking and being asked were related to how to find the right path forward for inkbox’s that transitioned into being part of BIC as the skin-created division. But instead of having to sell solutions to a client, I had to either make the call or develop the case for adjusting the forecast and aligning procurement to finance the next level up on the leadership team, like selling a solution to somebody, and then they have to go and sell it to the organization. Being the person inside the organization who had to go sell it, changed my perspective a little bit in a way that made me, I think, a lot more sensitive to that part of the process that I had been It makes me very glad that I was not in front of the house so much at Digital Matter. My job was to come to fix problems. I think having a much softer interface there, or at least having someone who has a better understanding of what it means to navigate an enterprise organization in that level of responsibility, yeah, it's something I had to learn. And it's part of the reason why I went to Inkbox in the first place. I wanted to know more about that transitional space post-acquisition than I had experienced as a junior employee. During the Adobe acquisition a long time ago.
Sure. Yeah. It's interesting because I know before we hit record, we were talking about the search volume going down for that specific industry and that comes with its own set of issues. And you just kind of mentioned allocating budgets and where you spend them. And of course, now being acquired, you're beholden to stakeholders or different teams now. And so I'm curious as you navigated that, what were some areas where you feel like maybe were either challenges that you were able to overcome or maybe even some possible situations that happened where you saw like big wins or something like that others can maybe learn from.
I mean, the big thing was a paradigm shift. Before its acquisition, Inkebox had been a hyper-growth company. It was trying to expand revenue as much as possible. And that was the primary thing. Revenue, when you're talking about an acquisition, is one of the ways of being able to value the company. There's usually a multiplier put on recurring revenue, that sort of thing. After the acquisition, the emphasis from an analytics standpoint, just a BI standpoint, became contribution margin. What is the output that each of these different revenue channels is generating for us? What is that versus the kind of investment that's going into it? So the investments are things like the cost of goods sold, but in my case, in many cases, it was, you know, what is the advertising cost per acquisition for each of the customers that we've got, or what does it cost to bring somebody back? Transitioning how we spent money, how we evaluated money, and then making the trade-offs for what does it cost from a revenue perspective in terms of the money that we're not making at the top line to be able to increase our bottom line contribution margin. Because during the hypergrowth period, there had been a ton of spend to just push up that revenue, there had been negative contribution moments. For some days were negative contributions. So we got a huge lift in terms of year over year in Q4 of 22.
That part of it was just observing seasonality and moving things into what became one of the biggest Black Fridays that we'd seen, one of the last real big Black Fridays. But having an early access Black Friday and then pulling a lot of the money out of the post-delivery window part of December for anything other than Amazon where we didn't necessarily have a big pickup. That radically increased our profitability through Q4.
On my resume, I brag about that quarter because it was huge. It was great for us. It made everyone look like we were really smart. It just made life extremely difficult in 2023 Q4 right after all of a sudden student loan repayments start back up. And it's like all of our primary customers have another car payment that they have to do every month. But yeah, the paradigm shift is the big thing. Changing what your target is and thinking about how your business is aligned toward that.
It's not a number change. It's a cultural change. It's a process change. It's change management for every single individual in the organization because you change what you're aiming at. That was kind of the big one, like what we had to transition post-acquisition. And moving to, when I say incrementality, there are a couple of different ways of talking about it. Moving toward regularly testing for causal inference incrementality, so discrete.
Here is a test for some time to figure out how different the actual revenue generation from my spend is for this tactic and channel versus what's being reported on that tactic and channel to calibrate the reporting that we're getting. That was one of the other big things, figuring out how much of our revenue we were getting and whether our contribution margin was being contributed by our ad dollars as opposed to being contributed by baseline demand.
Just building up the model for doing that took a while and building up enough historical precedent from the tests that we were running. I mean, from bringing on the incrementality partner that we went with, so this is House Analytics here in San Francisco, to having a that accounted for 96 % of spend, it took six months.
So we didn't change the way we did forecasting to figure out how much we could cut out of our budget until April of this year. It took time. And that's after we'd already been cutting budget.
Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting. I mean, it
It's so critical, I feel like, right? You have to pay attention to the right data, you have to pay attention to the right numbers, and I like what you're talking about, even in the incrementality. I'm curious, especially with retention, because retention's crucial, right? For every D, for most D to C brands for success, especially ones with lower average order values, which I assume Inkbox is gonna have a lower average order value. I assume if someone's gonna spend $500 on tattoos, they're gonna go.
Get a real tattoo. So, right. And so I'm curious, you know, what strategies did you implement at Inkbox to nurture customer loyalty and try to encourage those repeat purchases?
I'll be honest with you, retention was not one of Inkbox's strong suits. And I'm not saying that the retention rate was lower or whatever else. It's up until late March of this year, there was a deal on-site where if you bought more tattoos, you gradually increased your discount. There was nothing that we could offer from a loyalty, couponing, and discounting perspective.
That was better than what you get from a tiered promo. It kind of drowned a lot of our activities. It kind of drowned our ability to show our customers that they were more important to us than just somebody who randomly showed up because they searched. So we discontinued that tiered promo on site back in March. The other thing is back in January,
I had the opportunity to recruit and hire an amazing person to head up loyalty and retention. I had a lot of really interesting plans for what she could do. I handed off some contacts when I left and I've kept my name on the email list because I have absolute faith that she's going to do something interesting that shows Inkbox customers just how much Inkbox staff loves them and how much they appreciate.
The fact that they get to send emails to them regularly, the fact that they get to SMS them, the fact that they get to have an ongoing relationship. So I can tell you some tactics or things that are out there, some vendors that are out there doing interesting stuff, but unfortunately Inkbox, that was not one of the things that we were particularly strong at during my time there.
Sure. Yeah. And, it's interesting because maybe there's a case just, just not focus on it, right? There are those instances, right? I mean, we had a client $1,600 electric skateboard. You only buy that once now much higher price point. So it helps certainly with, with at least sort of customer lifetime value, even though it's a one-time purchase is that you know, as you kind of looked at that data, Yeah, is that something that you know you feel like hey sometimes this is not an area certain brands should focus on because hey it's just maybe it's gonna cost maybe it's just gonna cost us way too much money to even try to retain a customer to come back and it just makes more sense to try to get our tax as low as humanly possible for new customer acquisition and just that's that and who will come back will come back.
I mean, there's something to be said for that. With Inkbox, I mean, the retention revenue, a lot of it was done via automation. We didn't spend a ton in terms of ads on existing customers, in part because the organic social part of that was so good. The influencer and creator team who's creating organic content under Lara, they're just, The stuff that they were able to come up with, Britt and Cindy and all of them, it was so good that we didn't need to buy ads. So instead of spending money on that, everything went to SMS and email. Everything went to the automated journeys to be able to trigger things, to be able to send stuff out. But again, the incentives weren't necessarily there. So the only way that we were treating our customers like they were special, unique, different, interesting versus, you know, again, somebody who just randomly followed us on the internet.
You know, it was what we'd sent them. It was what we curated. It was here's, here's an advanced look at a thing that we're going to do. And there wasn't a lot of that. This year there was much more of an impetus on here is this member of the team and here is their favorite artist. And I want to show you something special to me. I hope you enjoy it. I think that's part of how you use brand and that kind of relationship that you form as it's parasocial, right?
With the brands. That's I think where you go with it. But again, that's going to be the current team's success. It's going to be what they're running with and it's what they're going to be able to demonstrate works. So I don't want to steal their thunder. I'm excited to see what they get out of it.
Yeah, I love it. Maybe go in kind of more 20,000-foot view. I'm curious, what are some of the biggest mistakes you see DTC brands making and how can these companies try to optimize their marketing efforts for more of that long-term growth that you've been playing such a vital role in?
I mean, the big one is the CAC value of death. So your viewers or listeners may not have heard of this. So you start building your brand and then you start buying performance media and kind of the CAC goes down with the performance media that you're buying and the customers go up and then the incremental cost per new customer starts going up a little bit and you move more of your money into performance media because that's what reduced your CAC in the first place.
And then it goes up a little bit faster than CAC and all of a sudden you're not able to find an inexpensive customer anywhere. And the top of the funnel is not very wide and you haven't done a good job of building up what your baseline is because you've invested everything in these harvesting channels rather than the selling channels. Creative Business Co has a great, great write-up on that. I, every couple of months have to find this thing. I'm looking for the graphic because I never saved it to my machine.
Yeah, because I want to send it to somebody. But yeah, the rundown for how and why that happens is particularly good. But yeah, you see that a lot. There's also kind of this illusion of immeasurability. And I think part of that is just leftover from bad analytics or brand agencies who didn't want to explain what they were doing. Causal inference gives us a lot of ability to design and measure our messaging, our channels, our tactics, et cetera.
So when someone says brand can't be measured, I'm going to tell you right now, that aspects of brand in the context of your company are measurable. And what you should be measuring, yeah, you need to do brand. You need to be measuring what you're doing with the brand. And you need to keep an open mind about what those results mean, right? When I talk about having spent months and months and months building up an incrementality model to figure out what the real contribution was of my marketing spend, to the real value. Part of it was, yeah, I need to make my spending more efficient. The other half is figuring out what my baseline revenue was. What are we gonna make if we don't spend money? Because if you make really good investments in community and brand, that number goes up. There's a guy who, one of the founders of Chubby's, Preston Rutherfoishe is all over LinkedIn right now telling this exact story. The way he did it was kind of extreme. He'd shut off all of his spending every quarter, but like, If you can build an incrementality model, you can see what that baseline revenue is and you can see whether or not your brand investments are helping to raise it. Those are the two big things. That's what you have to measure and that's what you have to avoid.
Yeah, no. It's super true. We've done that in many instances. I mean, it's easier when you're at a smaller level when you're at a much higher level, if you've got investors, whatever, much, much, much harder. And so we understand that would not encourage you to just flip your ads off. But on the other hand, it does tell you a lot, right? It does. And, you know, and, you know, we've done it to prove points to some of our clients, right, who didn't trust the data. And we're like, All right, well, there's
Man. I'm sorry.
If you don't trust our data, there's only one other way for us to show you. And this is what we, we, we never recommend this, but in this instance, it's the only thing we can do here. Right. And then they're like, wow. Okay. And so then it, it does reframe the conversation for us to focus on the things that are, are important and especially, and unfortunately, I see it too often with brands looking too short-sightedly, I feel like, right. Where they're just talking about
This week.
This year and they're not talking about five years from now and 10 years from now and what that looks like because to get there, you have to build up that brand equity. You have to build up all those aspects. I mean, it's so, so, so important. And I've seen, unfortunately, you know, due to no fault of ours, we've seen clients just die by Metta's hand, right? And it was because it's just, that they built the entire brand on Facebook and Instagram ads and then a little algorithm change happens and they never cast a wider net.
And never focus on any real brand building or even the list is important, but the list has to continuously grow as other aspects of that. And so, yeah, it's unfortunate that, yeah, when the brands don't pay attention to it. And it's funny because I feel like we love to talk about the brands that are doing such an amazing job of it and they even like to talk about it, right? And then they kind of act naive to all the work that those brands did.
To get there.
It's crazy.
I don't know. It's an interesting run, right? But I appreciate that you brought it up because it is, you know, and maybe on that angle, I'm curious how important is creativity in your approach, maybe kind of to the more data-driven marketing side of things, and then how do you kind of balance those two?
I was going to say I've made some elegant at least from a functionality perspective. Most of them are not the most aesthetically lovely things, but I tend to appreciate kind of a beautiful workflow more than I do a well-laid-out document. I have the beholder, right? I genuinely do not want to downplay the work that visual designers do.
Test design also, requires creativity, as is identifying what you want to test and why it's important to the success of your business. Interpreting analytics, honestly, and communicating them, requires both the ability to ascribe meaning to results, which is creativity or philosophy in action, and the ability to communicate nuanced insights, aliquorically.
To make them accessible, right? No part of this doesn't work without a bit of ingenuity and innovation. That's my way of putting that. If it's more specific, do you need the art? Yeah, you need the art first. You can't sell anything. If it's good art, it's gonna cost a lot less to advertise it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Making the right investment, I feel like at the stage you're at, right? And utilizing that, I mean, it makes sense. I mean, Inkbox, you know, were they investing a lot in creative in-house or investing, you know, with third parties? You know, it's a brand that is very visual. It has to be, right? Because you're showcasing the tattoos and then you've got a plethora of different customers, I'm sure, right? And so that must have been a very interesting one to tackle to then analyze, I guess, the data behind, yeah, like which creative efforts are performing the best focused on which customer segments focused on what message are we trying to present, seasonality, et cetera.
So there was a meeting every Thursday between the performance and creative and analytics teams where Rochelle and Kelly from analytics, sorry, from performance would say, here are the ads, here are the messages, here are the hooks, here's the style, here's the timing, here's what's generating the following results. And the social team would come in.
Here's what we're seeing, here's what's going viral, here are the trends that we're getting, here's what's going on. And then you'd have kind of the analytics part of it that would be filling in a bit more background data and helping to facilitate both of those teams measure what they're getting. That communication is, I think, a critical component of how we know to go get the things that we want, right? Because there's a huge amount of UGC, just people posting tattoos, right? The UGC that works, we'd get submissions and things that would end up being, here's the post, here's the story, we'd reshare it through our platform and then we'd put it into the emails as well. That was a valuable thing. That was true customer UGC. We'd have creators that we would hire specifically either through gifting or through, hey, we've worked with you before, the content you've posted is great and it did well for us, we'd like you to do another piece of content, and here's the theme that we've got for you. We had micro and mid-tier influencers.
And then last year, obviously, Travis Barker, that collection, that collaboration, so macro influencers coming up. And on top of all of that, there was an in-house creative team. They went off, they did shoots for merchandising, seasonal stuff for the e-commerce platforms, and the site to make sure that we had all of this branded material that set the tone for the thematic things that we were doing over the year. So yeah, all of it. We did all of it. Every single thing we could.
I mean, there are two great brand campaigns I could point to that had agency involvement from Mechanism and from VML Y &R, which I think is just VML again. But from a day-to-day perspective, almost all of the work that we were concentrating on in-house was getting it from your customer or getting it from our in-house team. God, it was a mill. It was just a nonstop mill of content though.
Yeah, yeah, which is important, right? I mean, it's it is right. You have to have the constant creative refreshes. You have to be, yeah, pumping out new stuff all the time. But then it's great kind of what you're talking about with the cross-collaboration between teams and what's working and what's not right. I think it's really important because then the social teams going to see different aspects of the ad team is going to see and and add teams were focused on performance. Social teams are more focused on reach and engagement, right? So you're going to see different things, right? And and and.
Yeah. And, and it makes, it makes perfect sense. I'm curious as AI continues to advance, right? This is a hot topic. We're always talking about here now. How do you envision its role in automating maybe marketing tasks and optimizing campaign performance?
I mean, there's a part of me that loves how AI can type up a business case from your bullets into a proposal, and then another AI can take that proposal and reduce it into bullets so people can decide on it. It's a fantastic amount of work that we do that doesn't need to be done and I hope AI reduces all of that. I'm looking forward to the day that AI is more like a paintbrush for digital artists rather than a threat, right? Something that they can use to create impossible things.
Amazing, incredible, well in my case ads, but you get the idea. I'm looking forward to the realization that we need actors and photographers to generate reference materials that we could then create incredible, incredible art based on once you feed it into the machine and say do this with it. I'm looking forward to senior execs starting to realize that if they make all of the decisions based on a single criterion,
Or maybe one or two, like just profit maximization at the cost of growth or customer experience or whatever, it makes them particularly susceptible to being replaced by AI, right? Like it, I think back during COVID, we had that mini-crash, right? And everything dropped and then everything came back from a stock perspective, right? And that's because all of the machine learning algorithms were
Selling all at once during a dip because they didn't have any context or any understanding of what was going on. There was no broader holistic view. The models can't necessarily account for things that you don't put into them. And I think we're going to have a lot of similar hiccups in marketing AI because AI isn't intelligence. It's not even close. That said, I do enjoy writing in a Waymo. So I don't know. I'm conflicted.
Yeah, but like you said, right? It's yeah, I mean, I, my wife is a designer and so she does design work all day and she, it's her favorite thing to draw, you know, on the iPad and, and all those kinds of things. And she was the last one to want to use AI and she's like, there's no way I can make a logo better than me or anything else. Right. But then once she got good at it, she saw it as these streams of inspiration.
Right where she was able to come up with these new ideas that she didn't even think of. And then she got that inspiration from new things that made her more creative, where it didn't limit her to then still go do the thing, right? But it enabled her to come up with more creative ideas, with new ideas. And so yeah, I'm with you, I think.
Yeah
When we're able to capitalize on that even more so because the input is better, the output is stronger. There is some intelligence behind it. You could feed it with more data or whatever it is, writing more examples, whatever. Yeah, I think it does become really interesting.
Yeah, I think the difficult part there is making sure that everyone contributes material to a model, and I'm going to use the tattoo repository, because all of those are artist-generated at Inkbox, right? You take all of those or all of those where the artists permit, and then you use those as the inspiration for generating new tattoo ideas or new tattoo images because your customer searches for them. The proportion of each of those images, the inspirations, should be how the commission is getting paid out, something like that, right? Until it's fair to people who are creating things X in the Helo, I don't necessarily think that it is a technology that should be commercialized. And it's part of the reason why I'm watching the VC-funded massive commercialization of AI and I'm thinking, wow, is this going to be a legal problem that's gonna be An operational problem for everyone in the next several years because anything we generate makes us liable.
Yep. No, it's yeah. Super valid. I'm curious as to what resources or learning platforms would you recommend for listeners looking to enhance their skill sets.
You know, so I trash on Google and Meta a lot, but like the the badging programs that they've got are good. Because, OK, a lot of it's biased like here's how you should spend money on Facebook. But like some of it's like here's how you should approach thinking about what your customers looking for and creating content that they're going to be interested in. Here's how you should think about setting up a B test to figure out whether or not a particular message is a closer fit.
From a message-to-market perspective, right? There's a surprisingly comprehensive syllabus there in terms of analytics and ads and even some of the offsite e-commerce stuff. In the broader sense, like if you already kind of know your basics or you've done marketing in the past and you're just trying to figure out, hey,
what's going on in the broader world or what's coming up next. I think Pinterest trends are so underrated from like a here's what's going on in terms of like what's cool or what's going to be cool. The Salesforce shopping index, if you haven't been, is wonderful. Like when you're trying to figure out what's going on from a macro perspective or how industries are performing or how geographies are performing, think with Google. Their publications are fantastic, just fantastic. A lot of it's academic.
Yeah
Some of it will be guides. I routinely recommend the Modern Media Measurement Guide that came out this January. If you're looking to get up to speed on what contemporary analytics does, how to use it, how it works, how it fits together, how you build an overall broader practice, and kind of which pieces of it you start with. Those, I think, are probably where I'd start if you're just trying to get a here is an expert view. But yeah.
I think stuff like this is fantastic, mostly because you can have people talk about what they're doing, what they're working on, provide anecdotes, provide a very specific understanding of how the concept matches the idea, and have it be consumable in a way that... I'm a text learner, I read. I'm a math nut, which surprises the hell out of me every day. But you have me watch a video, you have me listen to a podcast, it's in one ear or the other.
You
That is the exact opposite of my girlfriend. She watches a thing on YouTube that she's gonna remember for the rest of her life. I think this is a wonderful tool that you're providing candidly. And part of the reason why I'm like, yes, of course, I'll show up for that. If there's anything that I can offer that your viewers or your listeners, depending on how they're consuming this, we're able to pick up and run with, yeah.
That's the goal. Stuff like this is fantastic. That's why we do it.
Yep, no, I'm totally with you. That's a whole reason I started it right is just to is to give back is to, you know, selfishly maybe highlight, you know, some of our clients and our team members and whatnot. Right. But on the other hand, yeah, I mean, it's it's it's it's fun for if anybody can get a little nugget or anything like that. I mean, I get nuggets in every single episode. I've gained some nuggets now. So, right. So if I know if I'm getting takeaways, others are getting takeaways. Right. And so
Yeah, that's why I enjoy doing it honestly. And so yeah, I mean, on that note, I'm curious maybe what are some of the biggest trends that you see shaping the future of marketing in the next five to 10 years?
Oof.
That's tough. I mean, I joke about AI, but it's going to be as sweeping and gigantic of a transition for everything in work the way social was. It's a fundamental change in the way we mediate our experience of computing and reality and workflow. I've got a test for that. Is this thing faster, easier, cheaper, or better?
Then the allternative that it's replacing. Social was all four of those, right? Versus having to reach out and maintain relationships with people. That's probably a dark view of it, but AI and machine learning with this LLM layer on top of it can be that 100%. But.
You know, I just kind of balanced back toward that that brand versus performance conversation. The brand now is coming back. Brandspend is coming back at this time. It's coming back with actual measurement and accountability as a starting point. And I think over the next three to five years, as much as the, you know, composability in commerce versus platform play versus point solutions versus whatever else, as much as that's going to be fought.
About Indeedacy and e-commerce over and over again, it ebbs and flows. Brand has been on the outs for a long time and I think it's on the way back in mostly because performance has been outed. As someone who built his career on performance, there is an epistemological problem with anything where you're measuring the effect on a clickstream. It's saying that the highway is the reason why you drove and it doesn't work. It doesn't make sense. You can use it.
If you calibrate it to figure out what the intentionality behind those journeys might have been. But yeah, now we need to have a new central focus for how we do marketing. And it's as it turns out, the old central focus for how we used to do marketing.
It's true, it's true. I mean, and it's, you know, I encourage my team, right, is we're always gonna need a strategy. We're always gonna need big ideas, for creative ideas, for, right, I mean, the media buying side is changing quickly, right, and we're seeing that change very, very fast. But the need for, you know, for good strategy, I don't know how else to put it, right, is not going to go away. And so I think those are where we can all still step in and have a big impact and AI can spit out the best ideas in the entire world, but without us to field it and test it and run it and do it right, you know, it doesn't matter. So yeah, I love it. Well, Jordan, I appreciate it. Last question, Book recommendations now you've already plugged you know that you love to read I can't imagine what your library looks like from philosophy to math to marketing I can't imagine but yeah anything interesting lately or anything that you feel like I've impacted Yeah your career or anything like that
So I mean, there's, if you're writing, the Kiler, yeah, there's a Strunk and White, Kiler and Keller, the classic things that people read. There was a book that was given to me early in my career, and I can't remember the author's name, Love is the Killer App. And I think every single one of the businesses that are quoted in that book has failed since then, but it is a fantastic primer on why, your life is better when you've got a good culture within your company and the things that you can do to start getting into the practice of contributing to a culture. Yeah, I think is one of the things that I kind of wish everyone would read. The shopshop class is Soulcraft. Another friend of mine gave me that a long time ago. It's someone who's reading Zen and the orders for motorcycle maintenance and then figuring out that their life at work is directly related to that understanding.
What their happiness is, how they find meaning in life, and how that can be related to work. Those are, I think, a good blend of philosophy and business. I mean, if you haven't read your 1950s Drucker stuff, go back and read that, because you should read all of it. It's a terrible thing to tell somebody. Drucker's great, by the way. I do occasionally quote Drucker, and it drives people nuts.
This looks good. I've not heard of Love is the Killer. How to become a love cat. A nice, smart person who succeeds in business and life. Who doesn't want that?
It was the early 2000s. Like, I'm 40 now. I had employees telling me that I was a peak elder millennial cringe. That book is peak elder millennial cringe. But if you can get past that, you can be locating have not used that word or that description of a person. But the core concepts of like, you know, give your team things that make their lives better respect what's going on treat them like people or try to be sensitive when things aren't going great for them, and help them be people first and work second. Like a lot of that goes a long way. It's different from how to win friends and influence people. It's not getting the yes, mostly because you can tell who read those things recently and you can tell why you don't want to talk to them anymore. This is a bit different. Very different emphasis.
I love it. I love it. Well, Jordan, I appreciate the insights, the knowledge, and everything you've shared today. If anybody wants to connect with you, is there a good place for them to connect with you online?
Probably LinkedIn, candidly. The good news is I'm just Jordan Mainz. It's all on the handle. It's pretty easy to get to.
Awesome. Well, I appreciate the time.
Alright, thank you so much, have a great week.
You too.
