Podcast transcript
James Dihardjo
Gabe, thanks for joining me at 7 o'clock in the morning. I apologize for getting you out of bed really early. But since you're smiling, why don't you kick off by telling us about Everything Bagel and how it differs from the rest of the agencies out there.
Gabriel Wolff
Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. So I started Everything Bagel after about 15 years of being brand side, both in my own business and for someone else's. And through that process, I've hired and fired probably a half dozen, if not more agencies. I don't think that agencies have bad people. I think the people who work at agencies are really smart, but I do think that the model's somewhat broken.
It's very difficult to align incentives and that has been a challenge for me brand side. And so that's why Everything Bagel came about was basically like, how do you get all the talent and all that cutting edge skill in one place that is still aligned with its client. And so what we do is we just take whatever tool is needed for each individual brand. And we slot that in without there being a scope change or something else that we're metering.
So we're not metering spend or anything like that. It's just like, how do we increase your revenue by using these host of different tools. So whether it's email and SMS or a combination of like paid and organic, changing things on the website, making landing pages, re-merchandising your store things like that, that just like need to get done in order to get things over the finish line.
James Dihardjo
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's what really kind of surprised me when we were talking the other time about how you're kind of looking beyond the classic metrics and the ad spend. I really like that. So just changing gears a little bit, I've seen a lot of posts from you and your team about TikTok in particular. And it's something that we talk a lot about with the agencies that we work with as well. Why don't you talk us through how you support clients with this channel? Give us the whole picture. What does it look like?
Gabriel Wolff
Yeah, so TikTok gets misinterpreted as a channel similar to Instagram. But it's not. So TikTok behaves way more like TV when you were growing up than a social network. Users are just flipping through channels, flipping through their feed, and watching two seconds, and then flipping through, and then they'll thumb stop on something that they actually want to watch. And so it's really a discovery channel. I like to use the analogy like when you're watching TV growing up and watching cartoons, you never got up, left the couch, left the living room to go drive to Walmart to buy the toy. You would always say like, hey, I saw this toy in a commercial or this movie's coming out. I want to go see it. And then you'd act a week later or two weeks later. TikTok's the exact same.
And so we look at TikTok really as a discovery channel. It's making up somewhere between 15 to 25% of budget allocations. It's hard to go further because it's really not bottom of funnel. As much as it's developing as a bottom of funnel with TikTok shops and a lot of the other initiatives we're putting out, it really is a discovery channel. And what we do is we basically measure our spend on TikTok We use tools like TripleWhale to meter the attribution. But we also see a huge boom in branded search on Google about a week or 2 after we onboard a client onto TikTok, just because people are now searching for that brand because they discovered that on TikTok.
James Dihardjo
Interesting. And, and what exactly, like all that makes sense, but what exactly do you do for your clients in terms of creating content?
Gabriel Wolff
We make TikToks. Yeah, we make TikToks. So we employ different creators to make TikToks like faced on camera. We do a ton of editing of short form video for TikTok specifically. Some of them in CapCut, some of it just in editing software. But the idea is to be posting anywhere from one to three times a day, every day, putting more and more content out there that users are interacting with, and not direct response selling. The whole point of it is just very content marketing, very value-Ad. We'll insert some direct response because we'll spark those assets as Ads. But those are typically hitting people in a flurry between different assets, as opposed to just a one-off impression.
James Dihardjo
Yeah, interesting. And you mentioned, like, the way you're talking about it is, it's very top of funnel, right? Like, if I'm understanding you correctly, but you did touch on, how they're building the ability to shop or make it a conversion location. Tell us more about that.
Gabriel Wolff
Yeah. So I think this initiative really took place back in like 2019, 2020 with Instagram shops and Metashops and YouTube shops and Google Merchant Center and all these things starting to integrate with social platforms. TikTok is very successful on platform checkout in China and in other markets. They really made a push this year at the top of the year. We were part of the data for TikTok shops. It’s really intuitive. It's really smart. The US market hasn't fully adopted it yet, but they're starting to, particularly with Gen Z.
But for now, it's still working out its cakes. They're definitely putting a lot of emphasis on it. I don't know if you experienced any of it during holiday, but they were stacking discounts. So if a vendor put a discount for Black Friday, TikTok will put something over the top to really get you to check out on TikTok, understanding that there's a friction point of somebody adding their credit card to TikTok as opposed to a website. So there are definitely, Oh, we found this up. There's definitely a huge push there. It'll become normal probably over the next two, three years here in the States. They're also pushing lives. So like live selling QVC style assets are going to become huge. But I think it's still early for TikTok shops.
James Dihardjo
Yeah. Okay. It's very interesting. Now, how about other social channels? I mean, maybe I'm not using the best language here, but how does that play into the strategy you implement for your client? You even mentioned SMS and all this, so clearly, it's wide, but what about social channels? How does that play into everything?
Gabriel Wolff
Yeah, I think every channel that your target demo could be participating in is something that we should be considering as a partner. It tends to be heavy, Meta, Google, TikTok, just because that's where the majority of consumers are spending their time. But the whole idea here is, and why it's called Everything Bagel, not to plug, but the whole idea here is you as a user, you as a consumer are not just digesting content in one place and making all your decisions about your buys from there.
So I interact with TikTok, I interact with Instagram a lot, I interact with YouTube a lot. If I'm only media buying on one of those platforms, I'm getting sniped by a competitor on the other platforms because the algorithms know that I'm in market for whatever it is I'm interacting with. So if I'm in the market for shoes or sneakers, I'll see something on TikTok. If that advertiser is not advertising on Meta and Google, like I'm probably getting intercepted for a competitor brand.
And so the whole concept here is be everywhere all the time by creating assets, both organically and through paid that get to those users who are on the brink of being in market, get them in market, meaning that they're showing intent, adding to cart on different sneaker websites, for example and then closing them either at point of purchase or right before it on Google or on Amazon. So that we are making sure that wherever that user wants to check out, we've constructed a good funnel for them and a good impression system so that we're getting that sale.
James Dihardjo
Get it. Okay. That makes sense. So, don't leave any gaps in the social, the social kind of landscape is really where you're getting it. Get it.
Gabriel Wolff
Someone's going to steal your girl. Like that's what's going to happen.
James Dihardjo
Okay. Now, just wanting to tie this back to something we're both close to. So using like Amazon brands as an example, how is the TikTok stuff you just talked about becoming more relevant for them? Like, what is the connection there? Like, how do they hang together?
Gabriel Wolff
Oh, I could go on for four hours. Amazon's really like the main point of purchase for most users on the internet. It's been that way for years. TikTok is a great discovery channel. So when you marry those two, you get a really powerful journey. We've experimented with things like deep link where you run an Ad on TikTok and the Amazon app on your phone would immediately open. So that item then gets into your search history on Amazon. It gets very sticky.
We've worked with attribution links. Recently, Instagram actually announced that they're doing a direct integration with Amazon. That completely bypasses all the concern about privacy with iOS 17 and up because they're two first-party platforms just communicating with each other. I'd anticipate TikTok doing something similar, unless that's an exclusive with Meta, but I doubt it. Just because being able to share the data between these platforms is super powerful. I mean, think of like what pixels were back in 2018 and 2019, like the data was really rich and it was really exact.
As a first party platform, they hold the right to all that data. So Amazon and TikTok, if they can communicate the way that Instagram and Amazon are going to start connecting in the next year, like, we're in a very different world. I'm curious to see what Shopify does to step up their effort. But honestly, the Amazon connection is too huge to ignore. And honestly, where I see a lot of purchase journeys is completing.
James Dihardjo
So yeah, interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting point you raise as well about the deep linking, I think is, that's how you put it, which is a good segue into more practical things, right? So going back to the brand perspective, with all these things, obviously, like you said, you could talk about this for four hours, how do brands get social media ready, so to speak? Like, you know, you obviously deal with this day to day, but if you were to sum it up, what does it look like?
Gabriel Wolff
Understand the lifestyle or the end vacation that your product is getting or your service is getting the end user and just make content about that. Because like, nobody really wants to thumbs up on something to learn about a new service or product. They're really interested to see if there's a relatability factor. And so making sure that the content you're putting forward is the right content for the audience before you try to sell anything. I think like It's pretty clear when a brand is trying to do direct response or direct sales through organic, it doesn't really work.
There's also another big factor. I'd call it like a level 2 though. Making sure that you have multiple different faces talking about your brand or creating content for your brand is everything. Not only does it give you social proof that multiple people have approved of or given credibility to your brand, but it also gives the opportunity to connect with different subsets of your market. So like female age 25 to 35 versus male age 35 to 45 for the same product.
If you have both of those creators making content for you, then not only can it live on your page, but it also can get to those different subsets within the same market. And that is something that you couldn't necessarily do with just like an image of your product. So that's really where we try to guide clients is organic really is your poster board for how life should be post purchase.
James Dihardjo
Yeah. Okay. So really, if a brand's thinking about getting into this, really what you're saying is they should be prepared to make, or at least be in the mindset to be able to make or churn out this sort of content, right? That paints that non salesy pitch, like, as you said, as you put it before.
Gabriel Wolff
Yeah, we call it content marketing. Other markers call it other stuff, but like, it all ties into the idea of brand formats and everything that's buzzy right now. If you're not creating an environment where a user understands what their life is going to be like after they purchase, then don't even bother trying to educate them about how they'll get there because they don't know what the end result is.
Nike sells Serena Williams, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan. They don't sell all the practice that has to go into becoming them through using your sneaker. It's just not exciting. But the user knows like, yeah, I'm going to wear this to practice. So it's just selling the end result through lifestyle marketing and content marketing.
James Dihardjo
Yeah. Okay. So then you touched on the organic side of these channels, like, what about the paid element? Like what about like TikTok, for example, talk to us about the paid side of that.
Gabriel Wolff
Yeah. So first thing on TikTok, you need to spark any and every Ad, please never make like an Ad, like you would an Instagram for any media buyer out there. Like it's not the same. You need to spark the asset. What I mean by that is you're basically taking the asset from your own page or from a creator's page and you're running Ad spend behind that ID. What happens is all the comments get aggregated, the views get aggregated.
So when somebody sees it organically or somebody sees it paid, it looks like there's a ton of interaction there because there is. So that's like key to anything on TikTok. When we're running paid, we run it across the board between Google, Amazon, TikTok, and Meta typically. The allocations vary by brand primarily based on the demographic. We have brands where like TikTok's higher, we have brands where Meta's higher, et cetera. But I won't get into that.
The main things that we need to do in 2023 going into 2024 You've probably heard other people talk about this. Targeting is pretty dead. Your creatives at this point should be sophisticated enough to narrow in on the right demographic. The algorithms sure as hell are. So we have brands that are solely for females age 45 to 65 plus. We don't, we've tested like not even targeting just female and just leaving it open gender wise. That algorithm is immediately finding that female demo and just giving it to them. So you don't need to like create crazy exclusions more so just exclude existing purchasers if that's a business imperative. But you don't need to do interest groups or interest stacks.
All those things are kind of dead now. Really, it's about creative testing and creative modification. And that opens up an entire other conversation because people are like, cool, I'm going to go make 50 of the same static asset with different switches to it. That's not really what's going to drive your delta. It's really like, do you understand the creative message that's working to drive purchases? And then once you figure that out, then you can start to create very different versions of that creative message. Not like, here's a picture of an iPhone with some text that worked. So let me make a hundred of them and try and test it. It's kind of like a futile effort. Sorry, I've touched five different topics just within paid, but typically what we're doing.
So what we're doing is purchase objective campaigns on Meta. We've been running a lot of PMAX on Google. It's a really good tool. It's gotten way more sophisticated over the past, call it like 18 months. We still are running non-branded search. We obviously are running branded search, but we try to keep that at less than 5% of total allocation just because it likes to peacock and it's not really doing anything new. It's just capturing people who have intent.
On TikTok, we do try to season the pixel first if it's a newer account. So we'll run like a view content or an add to cart at most in the first month or two. If the pixel is seasoned, then we'll go to purchase. Although honestly, we've seen attribution on view content and add to cart objectives greater than purchase, just because it can be a lower cost per impression. So we'll play that game a little bit on TikTok.
But overall, we're just looking at how these different campaigns on different platforms are interacting with each other. We'll oftentimes look at things on a one-day first click, especially during Black Friday to see if anything's immediately driving a sale. But overall, looking at more of a holistic attribution model.
James Dihardjo
Get it. Okay. So yeah, I guess the next practical thing I had in mind was tools and human resources, right? Like, we'll get into the agency first in house, but that about a basic level, what tools or people do you need to do all this? If a brand is thinking about doing it?
Gabriel Wolff
We have a lot of people and they're all really talented. So we have about 25 people on our team. That varies. We have art directors, we have designers, we have editors, we have animators, we have brand strategists, we have organic strategists, we have paid media buyers, paid media strategists. So it does take a little bit of an army. More so that army needs to be highly, highly collaborative.
So I'll say on our team, we need at least twice a week, just as in full team to talk about every single client, what's hot for them that week, what needs to get accomplished, as well as what needs to get accomplished over the next month or two. Then we do breakouts. So our creative team is mapping all the Ads that need to be made for each client based on the client's objectives, based on what's working and what's not. That happens once a week. Then they go out, they create them.
So tool-wise, this is a good segue, we live primarily in Asana and Slack. Every single ad starts as a brainstorming board in Asana where we're throwing in different inspiration and different scripts. We are also using Air. That's really helpful in terms of collaborating on finished assets. You're able to pinpoint different seconds and frames to just see like, what the comment is or what needs to be tweaked there for a video asset, you're able to see the version history. So you can see how the asset progressed over a week or two.
We also designate that for winners and losers. So if an Ad is live, it gets turned on as live and air. We're able to see that. Everyone on our team is able to see that. If it graduates to a winner, that becomes a Slack board that says, hey, asset XYZ just became a winner. If it gets turned off, same deal. So everybody can see everything and understand what it means for their department. And the client can see it and understand what's happening behind the scenes. So Asana, Slack, Air are the three main tools that we're using.
James Dihardjo
Get it. And an army of experts, clearly.
Gabriel Wolff
Yeah.
James Dihardjo
So next question, though agency versus in-house. How does a brand make that decision these two?
Gabriel Wolff
Yeah, I think it's really a gut call. There are pros and cons to both. So there's no right one answer. It's really determination that management would need to make. I have found that when hiring an agency, I still had to hire partial in-house to manage the agency. So that was like the main reason why I started this firm. But the pros to having everything in-house is control, it's communication, it's ease of communication and fluidity of communication. You know, the CEO makes an announcement, the media team knows instantly what that announcement is. There's no dissemination of that information.
You also have very tight control. Everything's two brain guidelines the first time. There's less variance, which has its pros. There's more variance if you hire an agency or a third party, but that has pros as well. It's not all negative. You get an outside perspective. You get different expertise. Also, agencies are working on multiple different clients and multiple different brands and multiple different industries.
They basically see more pitches than you would have your in-house team. So like, account structure comes up a lot with new clients, because they've been doing one thing one way. And it's like, we've actually seen it done four dozen other ways, this is actually the way that we've seen it be more consistent across different industries. So people will come to us with a traffic funnel instead of a purchase objective and trying to retarget that traffic. And it's like, yeah, we've seen that story before. It tends to peter out pretty quickly. Things like that.
The other part of having an agency is getting a lot of different creative ideas that you wouldn't necessarily get from an in-house team. Just because they're exposed to way, way more. And they already know what's working creatively for other clients or other competitors, because we're looking at this all day long. We're not in your HR meetings or the internal management meetings. So we have to absorb that externally. But once we do, we compare that with our knowledge base, which can be advantageous.
James Dihardjo
Get it. Okay, good perspective, man. Two final questions for you. So this is like outcomes themed. Like, you know, you've mentioned earlier, SMS, you've mentioned email and TikTok and whatever, like, at a high level, what is a complete strategy kind of include when we're talking about channels or communication methods or whatever?
Gabriel Wolff
Yeah, I'd say we'd start typically at a holistic high level, and then we flesh out which tools. So typically, if you're making pet food or you're doing something that's a specific diet or a specific product but you have like four of them and they're for different cohorts. We'd want to talk about how do we qualify the user for each of those products because it's diverse. That's one example.
Another is just, what does this funnel look like? Where are we trying to guide users? What's their user experience? And once we figure out what it currently is and what it needs to be to increase conversion rate, then we'll actually say, okay, so these are the tools that we're going to start to use and implement. So for example, if we're saying, all right, we're going to modify your website, we have to re-merchandise everything, we're going to address your pricing because you're doing 99 cent denominations, you're a luxury brand, we should actually just cut that to just be dollars. That kind of conversation.
And then we'll go ahead, we'll reformat the website, so that involves software developers. Then we'll also make landing pages for certain collections that we know we're going to spotlight because they're hero products. That involves our design team, that involves developers as well. Then we'll also say like, okay, so we're driving people to these products. These are the unique selling propositions of these products. This is what it does for the user. Okay. What's your organic strategy? How are we selling the vacation organically? What's the lifestyle? And then what paid assets are more direct response? Where are they going to go? What sizes do we need them in? Things like that.
So that's how we'll build like pre-click strategy. And then postcode strategy is like, okay, they've come to the website. What's our lead capture? What's our tolerance in terms of margin? Can we give away 20%? Can we give away 25%? Are we open to raising prices 10% so we can go even deeper? Things like that, so that we can get lead capture, fill a Klaviyo funnel, what that flow looks like. Is it an SMS on day two? Things like that. So it really is like, what's the actual business goal? What needs to change in the actual environment of the website? Then we go ahead and address that, and then we'll build pre-click and post-click strategies accordingly.
James Dihardjo
Get it. Okay. So it's not a recyclable list for people to take away by themselves. You've got to go case by case, right?
Gabriel Wolff
The tools are the same. But it's like, are you using a Phillips head or a flat, right? It's not the same exact every time.
James Dihardjo
Get it. Okay. Final question is, what are the outcomes like you personally, like to see? And I think I know the answer, but you know, examples would be sales, new to brand sales, repeat purchase, whatever. What for you is the main thing?
Gabriel Wolff
Typically, people come to us for acquisition problems. Retention problems can be mitigated through marketing, but they're better mitigated through product. So typically, we like to see drops in CAC, so drops in customer acquisition. We like to see improvements in efficiency, so global consolidated return on Ad spend or ROAS, or you can meter it by NER.
So we like to see things get more efficient, meaning more profit dollars, meaning our client partners are making more money. As well as obviously scale. We're incentivized to scale, but we do it in a way that's sustainable. I'd say 90% of our clients are actually bootstrapped. So they take home what the profit is. So if there's no profit, they're not paying themselves. So it's very important that we are doing things profitably as well as scalable.
James Dihardjo
Get it. Okay. Look, Gabe, very interesting. Some of it was well outside my capabilities in my brain, but they're very interesting nonetheless.
Gabriel Wolff
I'm sorry. Sorry if I took us through the woods too much. This is like.
James Dihardjo
No, no, no. It's good. It's good. Good to hear the insights of an agency madman, right? But yeah, look, very interesting. And, you know, hopefully, we can have another one of these chats as TikTok evolves and get your opinion again. But again, thanks. Thanks for making time.
Gabriel Wolff
Yeah. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it, James.
