Hello, and welcome back to the e commerce impact podcast this week. This guest is someone I've been wanting to have on the podcast for ages. He's one of my favorite people in media buying. He has awesome Twitter content and he has so much experience to share with us. So this episode today is all about Barry Hott and his approach to creative, his approach to ugly ads as he's branded them.

And also we dive deep into media buying as well. Barry has managed 600 million dollars worth of ad spend. So suffice to say he's pretty experienced. He's been in the Facebook ad game actually for 15 years since, remember when, ads were in the right hand column. So he's been in the game as long as the game has existed really, and Barry now works with some of the big names in DTC and, , startups in the U S and he has a ton of insight to share. Barry, welcome along to the podcast. I'm so excited to dive into this chat with you. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Yeah, no worries. So we talked about. Prior to jumping on.

Now we talked about how I would love to dive in with you and talk all about your creative process and how you approach coming up with creative for the brands that you work with, let's dive into that. Where, how do you start when you first start working with a new brand? How do you go from zero to having great creative ideas for the, for the ad account from zero, , I ask a lot of questions, , you know, it depends on how much I know about the area and the category already, sometimes I'm like, oh, this is, you know, this is my bread and butter, , so yeah, I'll just dig in.

And try and think through like what I already know from my past experience. Have I done something on this before, or is there anything like it? , which it's always fun, more fun for me when it's something I haven't encountered before a new or a new category. I love helping build or develop a new category.

, and then, you know, it's research, , if it's an existing brand, I'm going to dig into their reviews. If it's a, , or I'm going to dig into the comments on their ads. If it's a new brand, I'm going to look at their competitors. I'm going to look at other brands in their space, other brands in their like vibe, right?

Cause like a lot of brands like in totally different categories, different verticals, whatever have will like, want to, they'll be like, I want to be like athletic greens. And I'm like, Oh no, you shouldn't, but okay. And then, , you know, I'll go and do the research and recon and try and find what is being said, how it's being said more importantly, what language is being used. 

, and I'll try and find the things that. You know, I'll try and put myself in the shoes of the customer of that product and try and figure out what are the pain points? What are the, the things that I care about? What are the things that are going to get me to pay attention?  And then I'll hit chat GBT.

, and actually I probably would even start with chat GBT honestly, or any, whatever chat tool, just to say like, here's this brand, , here's their website. , you know, tell me where, where you would start and sometimes it'll come up, it'll come up with stuff I never would have thought of. It almost always comes up with like a couple problems, like relevant problems for that thing or, or just something I wouldn't have thought of quickly.

So, you know, I, I almost always am leaning on that. And do you have like special prompts you use, or you're just basically like describing the brand to the, to chat to your BT, giving it the info it needs. And then asking stuff out. That's a great question. I probably should have like a database of prompts.

Like I know, I know. Shout out to Alex from add create my, my business partner and Dara, Dara Denny, like both of them have recently posted stuff about like really good prompts and sometimes I'll maybe. Use those, but honestly, I just kind of talk to it. Like I would talk to another, you know, talk to an expert talk to someone else and refine where needed.

And I've gotten pretty good myself at being able to refine or refining and editing back to chat GPT or whatever AI. Is become a really powerful tool for me. So they're going to get it wrong and they're not able to understand what I'm looking for and being able and then being able to level up my clarity on it to them.

You know, it's kind of like you're talking to in a lot of ways. I find it's like you're trying to like almost tell it. You know, a kindergartner or fifth grader, whatever, explain this thing to them, or it's almost like explaining like an alien explaining like, why would anyone buy this or need this or want this sometimes?

 It's so I, and then often I honestly find, I get a lot of value and I get a lot of good ideas from me. Just trying to give it to chat GPT rather than giving me something good process of simplifying it down to its essentials. Yeah. It's actually helping you to get there with the ideas. Yeah. Okay, cool.

And so that process gives you a bunch of potential marketing angles. Is that kind of the starting point? And then the angles then turn into creative ideas. Yeah. I don't know if I would frame them as angles. I suppose, I guess I w I guess that's right. Maybe I'm thinking of in terms of concepts, maybe I'm thinking in terms of really problems.

I love problems. I love using problems too. You know, get into my consumer's brain and then build off of that and move on to another problem and another problem. If it's a product that solves a problem, I mean, like. You know, I'm working on rotten gummy worms, like, do gummy worms solve a problem? You know, no, not really.

So we have to either, like, create a problem that's like, oh, you're, you know, here, I'll show you. Like, sorry to put it, it's like, here's Trolli and their, their, sorry, their gummy worms are, you know, this many calories and this much sugar. And then here's Rotten, and we can be like, oh, well, like, we have less calories and less sugar.

Whatever, you know, like, is that a problem? Or, really, the problem is maybe you're eating too much sugar. But, like It's not really necessarily a problem for gummy worms. Yeah. For other brands where you can find problems, that's where I like to live. And those are a lot of the best kinds of brands that come to me and want my help.

And I like working on, but yeah, just, just trying to like figure out what, what the audience wants to see and consume. The other thing I do that I love doing, and I recommend everyone do more is I will go and pursue the organic content for that realm.  So if it's like, you know, like a women's supplement for, for whatever, like I'm going to go and either create a new Instagram account or a new tick tock account and pursue that content, not just to pursue it and find what I find, but I want to pursue it.

And then I want to see what the system starts feeding me after I start engaging with it and watching stuff. Both Instagram and Tik TOK are great at that. And that's a better way for me to find what the people in my demographic are consuming. And that's what I want. And by the way, if it's an older demographic, I'd recommend you do it on Facebook more because they're probably more on Facebook TOK  or on Instagram.

But just trying to, just trying to come up with the, not what are other advertisers seeing and doing, but what are the content creators in that category doing? And of course, I'll also, you know, huge shout out to Foreplay. I definitely use Foreplay both to save stuff I see in ad libraries and I use their discovery feature and I love it and I strongly recommend it.

So how are you using the discovery feature? I, I use foreplay as well, but probably not as much as you. So for our listeners, like how does that work? Yeah, it's it's, it's kind of like, you know, ad library, but just, it's the stuff that's already been saved. So you can, you know, I'm searching for the same brands that I might look in ad library, but like I was just, I was just doing research on a, on a brand and I couldn't you know, their ad library only had their, what's currently live.

And I was like, no, I need to see what they were doing 6 months ago. I want to understand what they turned off and why. And that's really, really important because you can learn a lot about like. And it's such an incredibly valuable, valuable tool to be able to look at what was a brand advertising before and what are they advertising now.

And a lot of people might think, Oh, okay. So that thing they were doing before probably failed. But in reality, what I've found is often they just moved on or they turned it off for some other reason rather than actual performance. So you know, there are certain brands of certain scale. Or they believed it fatigued, who knows?

But the, you know, I just, I do a lot of recon there. You can also search for other words. Like you don't have to search for brands. You can search for like concepts. You can search for things and has like an AI search. So it's not just brands. It's. Other things that you can search for like three reasons why or before and after.

I think so. I think that stuff works. But also like, you know, if you're looking for like gummies or if you're looking for like you know, cucumbers, like, I don't know. I think you can search for that stuff. Both in like words and I think in visuals as well. Yeah, yeah. That's cool. Yeah. That's a great point about foreplay.

Like the more we all keep using it, it's like a hive mind of like, that's becoming a bigger and bigger database of ads that we can then find and discover. Yeah, I do on the fact that someone else has saved it. I do not like that someone else has saved it. That actually is concerning to me. Why someone else saved it is often because like, Oh, this is really pretty.

Let's I can make, I want to make this for my brand. And like, I hate that. Like, I fundamentally know the reason why I save ads and the reason why someone else saves ads are not the same. And I also know I save intentionally and not, not to mess anyone up. For myself, I bookmark a lot of really bad ass, like things that I know were bad in an account that I'm working in so that I can just like, have it to show in the future for examples of stuff as well.

So, yeah, so you're almost looking for like, what's everyone else doing so that I can be different? I don't want to put it in those terms, but maybe it's, it's more like, I want to understand what everyone else is doing. Because I just want to, I just want to look at that and empathize with that. I want to understand what they're, what they're thinking of and why.

And I just, I think about it a little differently. I do again, I don't, I want to clarify about my point about organic stuff before I'm not going to go look at what Athletic Greens is posting organically. That's the last thing I could possibly care about looking for what an Athletic Greens consumer is.

Posting about and what of in that category, what in that world is getting tons and tons of views that is a sign of content styles that I can emulate and replicate and live in that space. So that's what I like to do. It's like inhabiting their world, that customer's world. You make it your Roman empire for a little while.

I really do try to live in it. It's super easy for me when it's like something I care about already. Or I have like an Instagram account already for, but it's so easy to just spin it up and you'll, it'll quickly start, you know, immediately start skewing more content to you. Yeah. That's really interesting.

Cool. Okay. And so your hat tells a story here. So how are you making ads that stand out? Is it by making them ugly?  Yeah. I mean, thank you. I don't want to make ads that stand out. Like make, I mean, a big part of like make ugly ads is literally like. The opposite of standing out. It's like, it's like, how do I, how do I active actually blend into the other content surrounding surrounding.

I don't want to make an ad that sticks out as this is an ad. I want to make content that people want to consume and then it sells. And, you know, the reason why I'd like to say make ugly ads is because it, it's just a reminder that if you're a marketer, you've probably been trained by other marketers who were trained by other marketers.

And most of that learning and training and all that was, you know, based in stuff that was print media. TV out of home, like all of those are things where it does benefit to be more polished. Maybe not out of home. I'd have to think about that more. But like print media, if you're going to have an ad in a magazine or a newspaper where the other photos and content in there is polished, is premium, is high end, it would be weird And it wouldn't look good if your brand was not in premium polished content.

Same on the TV. If you're watching TV, the commercials are shot on the highest quality, most expensive cameras. If you, you know, you know, 20, 30 years ago, just put up a TV commercial on a VHS camera. Like maybe that would get attention, you know, or just like a camcorder, a home camcorder maybe that would get attention.

I'm sure there are some brands and, and people that had success with that. But you know, it, it would maybe be a good way to get attention, but it wouldn't necessarily be the best or right way to like blend in with the content there that people are already watching. So it's now the opposite. Now, we all have at least one device on us at all times that can film high quality, high definition video, and we all use those devices also to consume content that, by the way, often isn't high definition.

I'll get to that in a second. But the point is. Because everyone can, can, can create content so easily. The barrier to entry is so easy versus before, right? If you, you know, 20 years ago, you had to be on a record on a VHS or, you know, digital disc or whatever, like there was so much you, you know, and you wouldn't be just, you wouldn't have a camera with you all the time.

You, and if you did, you wouldn't be ready to shoot all the time. And now we're just constantly shooting anything we want for any reason, because it doesn't cost us anything. So there's no barrier to entry. And then people are catching more things. And sharing more things and consuming more things than ever before.

So the bar of  content has lowered, right? People, the world, people's tolerance is lowered, but ads advertisers, the industry of advertising still believes and wants and like craves to make the prettiest and that just doesn't belong everywhere and it certainly doesn't belong in most. Instances on social media.

It's just not what people want to see. And it's not, and it's, it's not even that it's not what people want to see. It's that people see so many ads in a given day that their brains subconsciously know what an ad looks like and they skip it. So as soon as it looks or feels like it or sniffs as an ad, or even now sniffs is just inauthentic.

You're toast. You are subconsciously skipped. You are forgotten. You do not matter. So that's why I try and make and do things that look and feel more like authentic content rather than authentic ads. Right. So in a way, my question of like, how do you stand out actually is the wrong question. It's how do you, how do you blend in, in order to stop the scroll?

So the goal is to stop the scroll, right. And to get people to consume the content. And actually you're saying it's. By being totally native to the platform and looking like the kind of content that people are enjoying on the platform that is entertaining them, that is teaching them something that is making them  interesting.

Yeah. And there's a lot of ways to look at the term native to the platform. Cause like there are ways you can put polished content and frame it differently on there. Like, I, I know for Rotten, like we got featured on like the local news in Los Angeles. And like, we were able to like frame that in a way that made it feel like it was viral content being shared on social, because that's a thing that happens natively too, right?

But if, you know, if we went to a studio and shot something that was like on the same cameras and talking to camera, like it wouldn't. feel like that and it would be inauthentic. This was an authentic clip and it, and it worked. So the, it's not just like when I say native, it doesn't mean just like, okay, UGC selfie.

No, you don't have to just selfie video. There's a lot of things you can do and a lot of different ways you can do it. You know, just be thoughtful about it, be inspired by real content. That people consume, lots of people consume, do not be inspired by stuff that is being forced down people's throats.

So don't be inspired by other ads and don't be inspired by stuff that people aren't watching. If you see, if you're, if you go and see a Tik TOK and it has like a thousand views or 2000 views and you're like, Oh yeah, I think that's a good idea. We should go recreate that for our brand. Like that's a, that's a bad idea.

That's a fundamentally bad idea. Like, don't do that. Find something that has a million views. And break down a piece of it. Don't, you don't have to follow the trend exactly, but like, try and understand a piece of it. What was the camera angle? What was the lighting? What was the, the, how quickly did they get to the, the, the talking point?

What was the first word they used? Any element. Of that is something you should be trying to replicate rather than, Oh, what was that cute quirky thing? I saw with, you know, 2000 views.  So there's just, it takes this extra step and thought. And like, when I'm talking about it, I'm like, this is what everyone does, right?

This is, but it's, I don't think it is what everyone does. And it's just so normal to me, but Yeah, that's really interesting. So how do you think, like you talked about authenticity and like you talked about the kind of like UGC selfie video, and I think brands are catching up that this is important to use, you know, real people in the ads and UGC has been talked about for a number of years now.

And we've, we've seen that as standard now for e com to use UGC videos, but now. You know, people are becoming wise to that, or they see it as an authentic or they realize that it's fake. So what is it is fake? It is an inauthentic. Yeah. Yeah. So do you see like in this coming year like a move away from that style or is it just more about doing it better?

It's not doing it better. It's always been about doing it better. The bar is always going to be raised. It is we are not going back. It's It's just getting harder and harder. So, you know, before I even started saying make ugly ads, fundamentally ugly ads were working. I know that. Like I used to see mistake ads.

Right. Like we'd have a typo or you'd have you know, you'd run an ad beyond it's, you'd actually accidentally run an ad beyond its end date or, you know, there's so many things, or you run ads targeted that are targeted for men accidentally to men and women. And you'd be like, Oh, this actually worked like so many of the mistakes that I've made in, in, in media buying, or that I've seen in media buying.

Have helped me develop these perspectives. Now, it used to be easy enough. You could just have a cute person, just, you know, selfie ing with the product and you know, that was it. You don't need anything else. That's, that's, that's gone. Because of TikTok, because TikTok's algorithm forced Facebook or Meta's hand to change their algorithm.

So now we all live in a world and Twitter's algorithm for that matter, but it doesn't matter. We're all now as consumers of content. Forced to, I'm not forced. We like it. We now are consuming content from people we don't know. More than ever before for people. We don't know people. We don't care about people.

We've never seen before and we're just being fed it because the system thinks it's going to be relevant to us based on the people that's been relevant to and people that have watched it before and fundamentally, the game has completely changed. So it's already changed. Bad, crappy UGC is and has been not working.

It's just not been working. Maybe it still works in some places if you're lucky, you know, there's always randomness. Anything I'll say doesn't work somewhere. Somehow it will work. But you know, the, what I see more and more of is it's, it's better content is what wins. It's always been the case by the way, since the history of advertising, it's always been the case.

It's not just a question of. How many impressions did you have? It's the quality of the impressions. How well did you use them? How much did you make someone stop and care? So that, that game is just always going to be getting more difficult, more and more difficult. And people are going to be with, you know, I'm very eager to see what the next year or two hold with, you know, more AI generated creative, and I'm eager to see what, what lengths people go through as, as to, to To be authentic in a world that's increasingly less authentic.

And I'm also eager to see if people's tolerance for I generated stuff where that goes, and I'm eager to see, is that novel or, you know, how long will that last and how, how much AI generated content will we consume or will AI generated content quickly become something that we. Just like, you know I was saying about ads before, maybe we, we just subconsciously learned to skip.

 But maybe maybe I'll start using AI versions of my, like you know, swapped versions of my face rather than show me. In my ads, maybe I can put a more attractive person there just by covering my face. Maybe I can try, I can, I can change, I can do these things now. Like, that's not even like, I don't know why I don't play with that more.

I can change my voice using CapCut for free. I can just change my voice to anything else I want. Or not anything else, but to all these other voices. And, and things like that, by the way, can make your ads more or less relevant to different people. I don't have, I haven't, I don't really test for this, but I guarantee you if you have someone with a southern accent in America versus a Boston accent versus I don't know, I don't even know another good accent to use, whatever Minnesota, Minnesota.

Yeah, exactly. Any of those, it's going to resonate to different people. Yeah, it's fundamentally going to make it's it's subconsciously somehow going to make differences to let people. It's not to say the Boston accent only works with Boston people and the Southern accent. It's not first of all, those people, people travel everywhere and people move everywhere.

So it's irrelevant, but it's just a question of also like, what is my perception of someone with a Southern Texas accent or a Boston? Like, I mean, brands have always used accents. You know, to convey different things, like in the UK, the accents are very nuanced and there's a lot of them. And they might use a, you know, a Northern accent to sound more genuine, sound more connected, that use a posh accent to sound more elevated.

Right. So suddenly we have the tools where we can switch that on. And like, it's another data point to play with, I guess. Right. Which is exciting. I love a good Liverpudlian accent. I really do.  Shout out to Phil Keel, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is great. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I love Phil's voice. I do really love Phil's voice.

Moving on from creative and talking about media, buying account strategy. I'd love to just know firstly, your approach to creative testing, like even nitty gritty, like the Allison has loved, like the tactics and the actual nitty gritty of how you set up.  testing. What are you doing right now? And in most accounts you're running to test creative, how are you kind of graduating it into the main account?

Et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I want to say there's, there's,  um, so much I can go into here. So you can just ask me whatever follow up questions. So I usually like to have. I like ongoing campaigns. One thing about me that I don't think I've talked about enough publicly that is a big thing that I think I do differently than a lot of others is like, my goal is to create, when I create a campaign on Facebook,  I'm building that with the premise of me using that for years. 

I do not want to be creating a new campaign in a month. I do not want to be creating one in a week or two months. Like, so it's not like that because I want to be just rigid. I just don't want to, it's just like, I want to be able to easily track other changes over time. And there's very little I need to be doing in terms of new campaigns and Facebook for like most things.

I just don't need it. So. That's not to say I'm saying like, Oh, only have one campaign. You know, people are like, Oh, Barry's just saying, no, I don't care how many you have, but don't use more than you need to. And it's also okay if you need to have a new one over time and switch from one to another to test something or do something different.

That's fine. Like my favorite accounts are ones where it's just like, I can go in there, look in the same campaign. And see all the different ad sets in there over time that are different things in concepts that we did. And I can, I literally just have one campaign that's all tucked in. And I love that. So usually I'd have like a scaling campaign, maybe with one ad set.

Maybe that's ASC depends on the the client and whatever's going on. Especially if there's just one main product, I love to focus on one main product or like one gateway drug to bring in new consumers, if you're, if you're nuts. com, which, you know, I've worked with before you're something like that, where you have thousands of skews, like, yeah, you could advertise every product and maybe, you know, go do that with your dynamic product ads or something.

Yeah. You could also choose like, okay, what are our 10 core products? Sure.  You should have and work on and try and find a, a best possible entry point, in my opinion, for customers to find your brand. Even if it's about multiple products I think that's a little unconventional and it takes a lot more work to find that rather than just like spray and pray tons of different products.

But I think fundamentally, if you're trying to bring in net new customers, it's one of the best things you can do. And I usually work on stuff where it is one. Main product anyway. Yeah. So, sorry. And how do you, if you have a brand that has a lot, how did, what's the criteria for you picking that product? Oh, it's, it's sometimes about a bundle sometimes about like, okay.

You know, what is the, what is the existing LTV? What is the projected LTV? What can we, what can we give this person or give them discounted or get them into buy now that then we'll get them back to buy more because, and that only works. If you sell a good product, if you sell a crap product, you cannot do that.

Right. So if you're selling a high quality product, you can get away with, you know, loot, you know, doing a loss leader type type thing. But. You know, it's about looking at the data. It's not just looking at the top selling thing. It's like trying to pinpoint what is the thing that new customers are buying the most, and also maybe like, what would they buy more of if they were messaged it more, right?

If they were educated at more. So it's, it's, that's a complicated, we could talk a whole hour about that one. But if you want to know more about the, I didn't even talk to talk about the creative testing set up. Yeah. Okay. So. Aside from a scaling campaign or scaling campaigns, whatever, I'm gonna do one testing campaign and every ad set is going to be targeting the same thing.

I'm not switching attribution settings. Shout out to anyone who's using click only attribution. I,  I'm not changing attribution settings. I'm not changing targeting, I'm not changing exclusions. But I am setting specific exclusions for my creative testing, and typically I'm excluding. Recent visitors and recent engagers.

You can define that however you want and however you feel is appropriate for that. Usually I would say. Seven days, maybe some accounts, 30 days. It depends on the size and scale and what I'm trying to accomplish. So this is in your test, creative testing ad set only. And then your other, your evergreen campaigns, you don't have those same exclusions.

I'm always excluding customers everywhere unless there's some, no, there's no instance around that. I'm always excluding customers everywhere. If I have something that does make sense to advertise again to my existing customers, I'll do that separately. Because whenever you advertise to you, you allow.

Not even if you intentionally allow, sorry, not if you intentionally advertise to your existing customers. If you unintentionally allow the system to target your existing customers, it can, and it will, and it will spend money on them and it will inflate and improve your performance.  Excuse me, the perception of performance and the data that you see, but it won't actually drive more incremental dollars.

I've seen that great. I agree. Yeah, it's the scariest thing that, that I see in every audit I do basically. And it's the thing that I think. Is most marketers fundamentally get wrong and why people think I'm crazy sometimes is because they see like great performance on something. And I'm like, I would never consider that to be great performance.

If you're seeing primarily one day view attributed conversions. I just audited an account that had four times more one day view conversions than it did one day click conversions. So like, that's a disaster in my opinion. I mean, not even, I shouldn't even, I don't even have to preface in my opinion.

That's a straight up disaster. So when I do the creative testing, I want to exclude always customers. I'm always excluding customers. But with the creative testing specifically, I want to be excluding at least recent visitors because my goal with creative testing is to make and test and reward ads that are better at bringing in cold users.

I fundamentally do not need ads that are specifically good at cheating and getting my warm users. I don't, I have almost no need for that whatsoever. Yeah, that's a different type of ad. It's going to work differently. So yeah, I see what you mean. My general, like I'd much rather put, get all the data that helps with that and have, and be also making ads that just are better at getting new people in rather than.

Ads that get a better CPA look better and feel better because they're just probably up being, they're just going after my warmest audiences and they're just relevant to my warmest audiences because by the way, your warmest audiences are most likely to convert. Your warmest audiences are going to have a higher conversion rate.

Your warmest audiences are going to have lower CPAs and just. By targeting something that has more branding in it, that has more of your logos and more selling in it is typically going to be more relevant to your warmest users. And it's just going to change how Facebook allocates. Spend to those ads and those ads.

So yeah, I'm excluding recent visitors. Cause I want to force that even though that is, there is some stupidity to that. There is some downsides that your, your CPA overall for that campaign is going to be worse than something else that doesn't have to be less conversion data going through it as the other argument, I guess, as well.

Yep, exactly. And. So there, and there's always, there's always going to be overlap. There's nothing you can do about that. There's always going to be overlap between that campaign and any other campaign that you're running. Unless you're setting up mutual exclusions across the board, which I absolutely do not recommend.

There is no way to really do that well. And it's the controlling it more is going to cause you more problems than not, than just allowing for the overlap. So. You know, each, each ad set I set up in there is consistent. So there's no other variables in that. I'm typically doing four to six ads in an ad set.

That ad set is one concept. So it'll be one, typically one concept. That concept can be an ad concept or that concept can be, let me take my six best ads and just throw the, like six packs, recent ads and throw them in with a new line of copy. Maybe that's a test. That's a concept, right? Or, you know, maybe I'll, whatever it is, there's tons of things that I can do.

That would be a concept and I'll do four to six versions of it in there. And sometimes I'll do dynamic tech. Sometimes it won't. The other thing I also sometimes do is dynamic creative depending on. You know, doing a dynamic creative ad set depending on how much data I'm getting conversion volume, I'm getting and how much I'm spending.

I might use that if I do that, you know, I'll usually stick to the typical like three, two, two, I think is Charlie and others like to preach. Charlie,  so just for the listeners who are LA little bit less experienced, so we are talking about dynamic creative testing. You would do that for when you had a lot of data 'cause it needs more data.

Yeah. Yeah. So all of this depends on conversion volume, right? Yeah. If you know it's not about spend, some of it you, some you could argue there's some points that we made about spend, but just for the most part, it's about how many conversions both you're giving to the system or the system's getting to be able to make good decisions.

And also you're able to make. Good decisions off of if you are making decisions about an ad set after it's only gotten 10 conversions, probably not enough. And you probably don't want to be making those decisions. You want the system to be making those decisions. So yeah Ali, you said the three, two, two, do you want to explain what that is?

Yeah. So three, you know, in the, in the creative dynamic, creative ad set or ads, you can do up to 10 Assets 10 images or videos. You can do five lines of copy, five headlines, five descriptions. You can do a couple call to action buttons. Like there's a bunch you can do in there, but every single variable of those.

Right. Anytime you change, you add one more variant of that. It is a multiplier times every other thing. So you're actually creating all of those versions. So fi you're getting 10 times, five times, five times, five times, whatever, which is creating. Hundreds or thousands of actual. So if you do that and you don't have a lot of conversion volume, system's not going to be able to do much with that.

It's going to do its best to try and predict based on things like attention. But it's not going to be able to get that right. And it's going to have to, it's going to want to try to spread that around in different things. So the three, two, two is meant to just consolidate that to just like three visuals, two texts and two headlines.

And in doing so, you know, it simplifies what you're doing and gives, puts more data into fewer options. But the same thing goes by the way. And like what I was saying about doing four to six ads, like I'm saying do four to six creative variants. And then usually I would use the same copy across all of them.

And that can be one line of main text, or it could be a couple. It depends on how much data I'm getting. But as long as you're trying to be thoughtful of like. Try and empathize with this machine learning system. Like if you, if you only give it five conversions, like how, how well of a decision could it make?

Like if I said to you, here's, here's the data for a thousand, a thousand different variants of ads. And one five of them got one conversion each. Are you just going to go all in on, on those five and forget all the other ones? You know, so yes, it can do those calculations way quicker and more of them than any of us humans can, you know, it, it has to do something based on the data and signals that it gets.

So yeah, it's just about trying to keep that consolidated and be mindful of those limitations and make sure that that data is also like good. That's why I recommend using click only. Data and not view data because you don't want the machine learning how to deliver better one day view conversions.

You want it driving better click conversions for a lot of reasons. Yeah, I mean, that's it. Like I make sure like to name things very clearly. Name, name conventions are super helpful. I like to always make sure like a test is like sequentially numbered or named. Or even if it's not sequentially, at least it's a unique identifier.

Because the last thing I want to do. I just hate is when we're trying to, like, I'm trying to talk to the creative or talk to a media buyer, talk to anyone about an ad or about a concept. And we just sort of have to, like, we're all using different names for it or using like copying and pasting like an 80 character string.

Give me five characters that specifically identify what this is. Uniquely and unambiguously. 001, you know,  009, 025, like easy, right? That just saves everyone time and energy. We can always find it. And then, yeah, same thing with ad sets, making sure that it just calls out that they're all the same so that if I do make a change in something, it's called out.

And yeah, just making sure everything's like the thing I tell my employees that I don't know how much I've ever said this in like a. Podcast or anything like I always tell people to act like a future historian Or act like a future lawyer you need to be doing stuff today to make your life in three months easier Your own life, right?

But also anyone else's if a different media buyer is taking over if someone else is looking over your work And they want to understand did what happened three months ago And if it takes them two hours to figure that out and it could have taken 15 seconds to do something that explains what like Or if it, or if it would be misleading in three months round, they couldn't decide what changed or what, how this is working better or different.

That's, that's yeah, not, it's not good. Like I've just been through so many problems that are solved.  You know, just labeling better. Yeah. When we, our memories are never as good as we think, as we think they are. And also we should be able to share work between ourselves. Yeah. Right. And that's, it's not scalable if, if it's, if it's only in your brain and it can't, someone else can't.

Glean that unambiguously. Then it's not scalable. Yeah. So before we wrap up, I have one final question for you. Tools. What are you, what tools are you using and loving at the moment? What's in your tool set? I have my Apple pencil. Love that.  I have, what are, what are my tools? Oh man. 

Man, I have like so many like small ones, like shout out to copy clip the little clipboard to like, I literally could probably make an entire shift my entire persona to just be talking about like little hacks. I like copy clip is like life saving because I can like, put something on my clipboard, and then go copy something else and then still have the last like 40 things I had on my clipboard, which is So useful when you're copying, you know, assets over, or you're, you know, copying something from a conversation to something else.

And now you have all of them. See, so like, that's a tool I use every day, every day. And it's probably not something you were expecting me to say. I obviously use foreplay. I use creative OS shadow to creative OS. I have a pack in there. I make some money if you go and buy my pack. So go buy my pack of ugly, ugly ad templates.

It's really useful. They're figment templates that you can easily manipulate to like swap in. And use these existing kind of ugly template designs that I've used. I actually hate that I've given this away. I mean, I like that. I make some money from it, but I really hate fundamentally that I've made it easier for people to replicate what I do.

And those are now You can now send those to Canva as well. So it's even easier to use. Oh, that's awesome. Is that something that Figma does now you can send to Canva? Oh no. Maybe? No, but I don't think so. But Creative OS has it now, so you can have them in, in, Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Cause Figma is, it took me a little while to get it.

I'm not a designer. Yeah. Can be a bit tricky. Yeah. I'll also shout out Replo. Although I hate, I hate to shout it out, but like I'm doing a lot of like landing page building stuff myself right now. My. I do wait. I was thinking about this. I get way my hands way too dirty on stuff. I should just like be hiring someone else to do this stuff.

But I really like what I want to be in the weeds and playing with it and learning how to make buttons click and do certain things that way I can better understand how to do other cool things. In the future. So quicker. Yeah. Yeah. We love RipFlow as well. We've had them on the podcast. Oh, really? Nice. Yeah.

Yeah. Awesome. Do you want more tools? I don't know. I could probably come list. Go for it. Yeah. Oh God. No, no. I said that. I, what else do I use? I mean, I'm a huge Slack user. Obviously that's not unique. But one thing we do that I do want to recommend to everyone is like.  Use as many channels as you possibly can.

Like all, like if you have a new, new something you wanna have a conversation about, like don't, and you don't have a channel for it, make a channel for it. I don't care who you are. Interesting. Yeah. The ceo.  I'm in this temp too. Yeah. A lot of people aren't, A lot of people are a team. I hate channels. I want less channels, but fewer channels.

Me equals more annoying notifications for stuff you don't care about. More channels means you can ignore it. You can use a search. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can search, but more channels also means that you can find, sorry, you can mute conversations that you're not part of. You can turn off, you can leave channels.

 And also like, Oh, Descript is the other tool. I use Descript a lot. And CapCut a decent amount, but Descript has become quite powerful. I was loving it when it was just like transcribing videos and being able to just edit them as text just for simple reasons. And now it's like. I mean, I I'm editing full, full videos in there and I'm making better performing videos than like professional editors.

I'm not saying they're better videos than professional editors, just to be clear, better performing videos, which are two very different things I've learned. I've been in, I've been investing in, in getting better at that. And I recommend a lot of people use it more. Yeah, I, I often, for people getting started, I recommend CapCut, but maybe I'll start recommending Descript, because I love it myself, for like editing the podcast.

CapCut's so much easier. CapCut's so much easier and better and is fundamentally what most people are doing and using.  Yeah. But there's something, there's something to me about CapCut that I find, you know, I like I like that I can add in clips of other things very easily, which is something I haven't done successfully on CapCut yet.

Like Descript gives you like stock images and, and photos and, and sorry, stock videos and sounds and things. So I find it pretty useful. Yeah, that's cool. Awesome. And where can people follow and find you and find your stuff and yeah, what's the best link to, to send people to? That's a good question.

Just Google Barry. I have a Google able name, just Google Barry Hart. I'll regret that when someone starts to like steal that somehow, but yeah, just, just Google me, Barry hot. I don't care. You're pretty active on Twitter and LinkedIn. So either one of those, right? I'm on LinkedIn. I have a little bit of stuff on TOK.

Find me there. I have like my website has links to all my resources. You could go to B H O T T B hot comment just has all my like links. You can subscribe to my newsletter that I don't send a lot of stuff to. So there's low risk in joining it. You can buy the creative OS. You can check out my account audit template, and there's going to be other stuff in there soon.

So I'm working on some more stuff. Awesome. Definitely check that out. All right, Barry. It's been awesome chatting to you. Thanks for coming along. Jesse. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Jesse. Appreciate it.