Chase Dimond  (00:00):

I'm always gonna tell you that creative is your moat. And the number one thing you have is your visual asset. It's your thing that differentiates you from everybody. So you have to invest in that the most,

Rabah Rahil (00:15):

All right. Folks, you know what time it is? It's ad spend time. We are back and we are back in studio. So I am matching, I don't know if I'll be able to, you're looking that wonderful cohost, uh, wits, but I will be able to match his audio quality. And you are looking, speaking of quality, we have the algorithm whisperer with us, chase, chase. How are you chase of pencil AI ish, but we're, we're, we're gonna drop the AI just pencil, right? It's like kinda Facebook stuff. Yeah. Um, but we've been bantering back and forth on Twitter and it's just finally great to, uh, get you on live and you're coming from, uh, the nice studio setup in, um, the wife's closet, which is absolutely fabulous if you guys are watching this on the YouTubes. Yeah. Um, but before we jump in chase, kind of tell us kind of a little bit about your background and give us kind of a real skinny pitch on pencil. And then we're gonna toss it to Ash to give a little bit of update in terms of the eCommerce, what he's seeing across his accounts. And then I wanna talk after people understand about kind of what pencil does. We can talk about the, the human inputs into a creative Ash has incredible creative testing system and just kind of banter back and forth from that.

Chase Dimond  (01:25):

Yeah, that's great. That's great. Yeah, really appreciate it. If you guys can see I'm standing right underneath the attic. Um, we, um, I, I, uh, I come from a filmmaking background originally, um, but needed to make some money. And so someone was like, Hey, you wanna run our Facebook ads? I was like, I will do whatever I have to do to pay my rent. Um, and so moved from there to working for an e-commerce company, um, then worked in an agency then rent performance and growth, um, for the marketplace at house where we spent a lot of money marketed, 9 million products, um, which was a very interesting kind of set of challenges to work with. Um, and then from there, um, was advising a few companies and I really loved what pencil is doing. And I mean, Ash, you know, about this really acutely getting someone to make 25 creatives for you that you need to test when you're spending a million dollars, you know, over the course of a day and a half, like no designer really wants to do that.

Chase Dimond  (02:18):

They wanna make, you know, landing pages and other beautiful things. Um, and so I felt it very acutely what pencil was doing and building. And so I jumped over there. Um, but I jumped over there to run customer success cuz we talked to performance people so much. Um, and so yeah, since then I've moved into, uh, running marketing and growth. So what marketing means is just all the branding and um, and kind of demand gen and then growth is all the platform stuff where we work on engagement, trying to get our customers the value as much as possible. Um, so look at both sides of things. So essentially focusing on the, you know, the DDC, um, customer and then focusing on how to make it a great B2B platform.

Rabah Rahil (02:56):

Amazing.

Chase Dimond  (02:57):

And then the skinny on pencil is we exist. Pencil exists to help DDC brands scale their, uh, creative testing through creative automation.

Rabah Rahil (03:06):

Oh incredible. Yeah. Where's the name come from?

Chase Dimond  (03:09):

So, uh, the it's a play on words. Essentially. What we always say is the pencil was the most, um, important thing for creativity in the, uh, 20th century. And we think AI is gonna be the most important thing for creativity in the 21st century.

Rabah Rahil (03:24):

Yeah. That's not horrible.

Chase Dimond  (03:26):

Yeah. That'd be worse. Not, not me. That's that's, that's our CEO, that's our CEO. That's not me.

Rabah Rahil (03:30):

All right. And you guys are, uh, west coast ISN. Yeah. You're based

Chase Dimond  (03:35):

Uh, well we are because I run all the us, us ops, but uh, we're actually Singapore originally based. So our two co-founders are in Singapore, so I, I work across many time zones, um, Strat out Singapore, great place. Um, but yeah, they're over there. We have some people in Europe, people here, so we're kind of global team working together all the time,

Rabah Rahil (03:55):

But that digressing too much. Yeah. How do you deal with the time zones? I've done some Southeast Asia stuff. It's impossible. It's really challenging.

Chase Dimond  (04:04):

Uh, first of all, my team is super flexible. Um, but I don't kids don't allow you to sleep. So it's actually been a blessing this time, legit. Um, so like, uh, I'll be up with the newborn. He's two months old and um, I'll be slacking while I'm putting him to sleep with the team over there. But it's, it's a challenge. I think the big one, um, in terms of just helping people understand is I'm really obsessed with pre-read. So I send people a lot of stuff beforehand so that we can do as much stuff offline as possible before we jump online. And then we try to have short, quick burst meetings, but it's because we spent all the time beforehand and I'll hang up a meeting. If someone hasn't read, I'll be like, well, you didn't read it so you don't value my time. I don't value your as fuck off.

Rabah Rahil (04:44):

Ooh. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. That you're look at this people you're getting management tips, creative tips. What don't we do here, Ash? What don't we do? <laugh>

Chase Dimond  (04:55):

It took a long time. So

Rabah Rahil (04:57):

Yeah. No I'm I, so I've recently, uh, moved from IC to an executive and there's just a lot of, um, a lot of things that you have to get through and uh, I hate meetings, but there's just a certain amount of like synchronicity that you need to have. Like all my direct reports, we have one on ones. Yeah. Yada, but they actually do the same thing. Well, they'll fill out. Um, I ask them three questions, basically biggest win for the week, biggest opportunity and uh, what you're looking forward to most. And then at the end of the meeting, I'll always ask 'em if I'm blocking them from anything and that's kind of how we do it. And you can tell, um, I, I don't hang up on people cuz they're in person. So I don't know. <laugh> that's like get the hell outta the office kind of thing.

Rabah Rahil (05:36):

So I, I don't have the balls for that yet, but uh, I do like the, uh, we we're very like super liberal in a lot of the ways like 10 to three schedule in the office, Monday through Thursday, Fridays is a flex day. But um, there are some strict things like if it doesn't exist, it's, if it's not on my calendar or if it's not in notion it doesn't exist. And then, um, they all fill out their kind of little one-on-one things before they come to the meeting. And quite frankly, like you said, chase, I mean, it makes the meeting just insanely more productive where you're just not grab assing. And like, it's like, Hey, let's, let's use this time to cause at the end of the day, everybody hates meetings or if you're a builder, in my opinion, if you're like a builder or a productive person, you hate meetings. But again, there's some times in life where there's just a certain aspect of like, you know, the necessary evils that can help synchronize stuff, but okay. Off my executive soap box, pitching it over to my incredibly good looking. I'll see you next week, by the way, classic. Uh, you got us the appointments, right? Classic car show or where we going? The Manhattan car

Ash Melwani (06:33):

Club. Car club. Yep.

Rabah Rahil (06:34):

Classic car club. Ash. Ashley's gonna show you a good

Ash Melwani (06:36):

Time town.

Rabah Rahil (06:37):

Come on. Yeah, it's gonna be incredible if you're in New York, uh, hit us up. We have some invites still, um, for the June 22nd, actually this will probably drop next week, so you won't be able to come, but you'll be able to have some FOMO. So anyways, without further ado, Ash, tell me how the ad accounts are doing what's in your, in your neck of the woods.

Ash Melwani (06:54):

Yeah. So things have been a little bit rough lately. Um, we were like doing pretty well, like March, April, beginning of may, up until that week of like Memorial day where I think it was very seasonal on what brands were doing, you know, promotions, this and that. I know we talked about it the last couple times, but uh, the week after things kind of like stabilized and then again now I think with father's day coming up, um, the, the market is just absolutely horrific. Um, consumer confidence is like it's lowest point, uh, since the peak of the pandemic. Um, so not a lot of good things that are happening in the world right now. Um, so I, I, it's tough to like also not take it personally cuz you're like, well, what am I doing wrong? Where is it? Like, like you have to remember like there's, there's a buyer on the other side, right?

Ash Melwani (07:48):

There's a, there's a user on the other side of the screen. And you have to remember that, you know, there's, there's so much going on, right? Like nobody is just like, nobody's ready to pull out their wallet for anything. The fact that like gas prices are unbelievably high, this and that like your portfolio is anyways, let's not talk about it. But basically what we're, what we've been trying to do is, you know, just continuously test, that's it like there's, that's the only thing we can possibly do. What I've, what I've really noticed in our ad accounts is that conversion rate has dropped, but also what's even crazier is that AOV has dropped. So what I am seeing is that people are spending, but they're, they're spending less. Right. So whereas people may be buying like two to three bottles of like, you know, collagen protein.

Ash Melwani (08:36):

They're probably just buying one. Right. So I feel like, yeah, they're, they're kind of spending their money a little bit more cautiously. Right? Yeah. Um, and I don't know if that's, it's a indication of lower AOV. Um, not much is changing on the website, right? Like we're using the same landing pages kind of changing up the, the design and everything, but the AOV factors haven't changed as much. So I think what we're gonna try and do is just continuously just try to test creative. We have to pull back budgets. Um, it's unfortunate, but we gotta pull back. And I think that's one of the biggest things where, you know, talking to you, chase and, and trying to understand like, alright, what, what are certain things that are trending on the, that creative outlook? Right. I know, I know for us, we honestly switched over completely to like static, um, assets.

Ash Melwani (09:25):

Yeah. Um, we were, we are still using like some of our TikTok ads on Facebook too. And another thing that I just recently started seeing to work are gifts and or videos of our static images, um, with a little bit of motion. Yeah. So not full on like production value, TikTok style, but literally like, um, we'll take, what we'll do is like our graphic designers will send over the PSDs to the video editor. And what he'll do is just animate like a couple things just so that one, you're also taking up that video inventory on Facebook and not just the, the static and photo, um, inventory. Um, but I mean, that's just kind of, what's working right now. So I'm just curious that as we go down this road of like also the other aspect is like U GC content, right? Like there's just this plethora of U GC creators all of a sudden. And it's like, okay, now people, I don't know if that just becomes like, like how you had, how we used to have banner fatigue. Like is there U GC fatigue? You know, so I guess chase, like, I'm gonna open up to you in, in the sense, like you guys have access to like so much data. What are you guys seeing? And are these trends, you know, constantly changing? Is there something that's consistently working or yeah. I mean, you tell us what's, what's going on in that landscape.

Chase Dimond  (10:48):

What we found when people have economic headwinds, they go back to simpler things. So statics become like kind of stock and trade. And the reason is this, they need less help to actually make the content. So people will use static ads because they can go into, Canvan throw it together themselves. There's not kind of this, this infrastructure that they need to put it together. So we see kind of the acceleration of static ads. This happened by the way, at the beginning of the pandemic, we saw like video just fall through the floor. And then for about four to five months, people were doing that. The, the kind of the caveat here with statics is there is an upward bound of what statics will do, cuz they fatigue a lot faster than a video does. Mm-hmm <affirmative> like I find, I found consistently static doesn't scale, but it will, you can consistently iterate on it and find like that winning combination and just change little variables and get wins. I dunno if that's something you're seeing Ash.

Ash Melwani (11:43):

Yeah. A hundred percent. I think all of last year we were using like influencer videos that lasted us months. Like I'm talking almost seven figures worth the spend on just one video. And again, it was influencer related and, and so there's that caveat too. But even now, like I'll have maybe around low six figures on certain graphics. Like I, I have this, this ad today that I was running and I, and it has like one point 1100 comments, a ton of shares. Like it's like, if you look at it, this is a rockstar ad. Everybody's talking about like, oh, I just bought this. All our customers are commenting on it. It's a sick, sick ad. Right. I'm running it today. I have a hundred dollars C on it. And like the CTR is super low because it's just been running for, I mean, and again, I don't know if, if six figures is that threshold like 150,000 on just that one ad it's probably a lot, but like Facebook isn't gonna deliver to new people because it's, it's run its course. Right. So that's why you have to like take the same element and, and replicate it on another one. But there's something about just like having these like social proof that you have to give up. And it's like, as a marketer, it's heartbreaking cuz it's like, you spent so much money on getting all this proof and unfortunately things just die out. So yeah. I, I totally agree with you there.

Rabah Rahil (13:04):

I have a couple questions for you. One for Ash. Do you ever put those into kind of like a champion campaign and just put like bid caps or cost caps on them? Cause when I was running my agency, when, when I, I, I just couldn't like goodnight suite prints. Those I had to like, dude, this is if, let them play, if you know what I mean, put a cost cap on it. And like, if you can hit the economics, let them play. Cuz I, there was a couple ads too that were just absolute evergreens where it's like, I just couldn't do it. I, I couldn't like I would reuse the creative and kind of to your point use these other angles. But I had a couple bangs too, where in not like 11 thou or in 11,000 1100, 1500 kind of comments. And there were awesome too. Cuz there was like comments, but then objections. But then the people would come back against those object. Like it was just perfect. Just like absolute.

Ash Melwani (13:46):

It should always convert. I don't know why it doesn always convert.

Rabah Rahil (13:49):

Well, my thesis is because ultimately Facebook's a click machine and so what would happen is they're gonna serve it to people and people are gonna engage click blah, blah, blah. But they're not gonna, so it's still gonna get spend because Facebook's like, oh, people love this in the algorithm feed, but they're not converting for you. So that's why putting the cost caps on that. So, um, no, maybe

Ash Melwani (14:07):

You're right. Yeah.

Rabah Rahil (14:08):

A hundred percent throw that.

Ash Melwani (14:10):

Yeah. Even now in the ad set, I have four other five other ads that don't have as much engagement, like couple hundred comments. This one gets 90% of the spend, but it always ye high is CPA, right? Yeah. So I honestly, my whole mentality, like I was using cost caps towards the end of last year when we were kind of scaling back with those ads that had a ton of engagement and they, they did perform well, which absolutely right. I should bring that back. I've just like changed my whole mentality on media buying where it's like, I need to make the whole media buying process easier and like not messing with caps every day, bids every day, this and that. But I mean you you're right. I mean, I don't wanna say goodbye to these, uh, rock stars, so maybe I have to get back to it. So

Chase Dimond  (14:49):

I give you, I'll give you a counter, uh, which is, uh, if he dies, he dies. Um, if you guys know that reference. Um, and so, oh of course Rocky. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. That's literally our family motto. Um, so <laugh> um, our, our strategy here is, is two twofold. So on the media buying side Cox caps, I'm gonna give you one though, Ash. I'm sure you've done it before. Essentially put your cost cap at that efficient number that you're looking for. So let's just call it 50, since you were saying a hundred and, and, and like your eyes were bulging, um, let's call it 50, put your spend. If's supposed to be a thousand a day. Put your spend at 3000, essentially the algorithm is looking for liquidity. Right. And so same thing always. Right? So you're just trying to give it liquidity always.

Chase Dimond  (15:31):

And so you need to almost over lever the spends because it's trying to find efficient people while still having that liquidity. So the big one for all people to remember is don't fight the algorithm unless you are like, the cost cap is fighting the algorithm. So you need to do something to essentially over like overreach on that. And it will still find it for you because they can, they will have a big problem on their hands if they deliver inefficient customers on cost caps. So they always have to find it. So it's, um, that's kind of a hack that has never not worked. Um, yeah, maybe it's like plus minus 5% on either side, but it kind of consistently on huge spends works on small spends works and um, everyone should be doing it, especially kind of given that everyone's unit economic issues right now.

Ash Melwani (16:17):

Yeah, no, I, I, we used to do it and it, it did work very well. Um, like you said, it's just not scalable. Right? I think it's like one of those things where like, you're just, you're just looking for fishing conversions with your rockstar winners. And then in the meantime, you're, you're still finding your new winner. So I, I mean, it's a, it's a win-win honestly,

Rabah Rahil (16:34):

People are still gonna see Mick Jagger on tour. Right. And this guy's like bones and stuff. And like, he's not the rockstar, but Hey, that's like the that's the bit cap cost cap campaign. Let him run, let the people buy the tickets when they wanna buy the tickets and then let you let your new Justin Bieber or whatever, or shout out, he just got his Facebook paralyzed, but terrible stuff there. But you get what I'm saying? The new rock stars is kind of new generation comes up, but I like it. Um, chase, what do you see across ad units in terms of like carousel or are people doing any DPA stuff or anything like that is copy or headline a big deal. Cause you guys do pretty much the whole ad, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> you do the headline to copy the description? Um, what are you seeing in those sense? Are those, cause some people have some different views. I think I, and you guys correct me if I'm wrong or you can tell me what your hierarchy is, but definitely like the asset is probably the biggest hierarchy or that's the top of the hierarchy then I'd probably go headline, copy description. CTA. Are you guys kind of aligned in that hierarchy of importance or do you have, do you see it differently?

Chase Dimond  (17:35):

Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm always gonna tell you that creative is your moat and the number one thing you have is your visual asset. It's your thing that differentiates you from everybody. So you have to invest in that the most, your copy is great. It's another selling point, but like I would call it like 25% of the pie at like the upward bound of that. Right. Um, and if people are focused

Rabah Rahil (17:55):

On you like first two sentences

Chase Dimond  (17:56):

As well, and if you, if people are focused on that, like you're kind of fucked anyway. Um, like the creative should get them across the line. So, um, I've also found we did a huge analysis end of last year, where if you're writing more than two to three lines of copy and they're reading it, not an incremental customer, same thing. If they're watching more than 20 seconds, not really an incremental customer, because like they're going essentially like the drop off of first purchasers is like, if they're not sold in 20 seconds, they're not really sold. Um, so they're gonna be retargeting or they're gonna take two to 3, 4, 5 touches to get there. But that person who gets the thing in 10 seconds, like when you see a billboard and you go to someone's website, they generally have a quicker time to purchase. So you know that you're gonna get, they're gonna cost you less to acquire. You're gonna be able to get them in, um, and get, you know, first dollar payback, much faster

Rabah Rahil (18:51):

Mind blowing. So we have a new, uh, update coming out on the, uh, creative dashboard called the creative cockpit. It's gonna be awesome. We're actually throwing a cool, uh, event in Austin, top gun creative. Uh, I'll get guys more deeds there, but the too long didn't read is I'm actually fascinated by this chase cuz I wanna see the creatives and then, um, look at my new customer CPA against that kind of stuff. Cuz that's really, I never thought about that. Cuz Ash is a, he is an absolute king of the new customer CPA. I mean that's pretty much what he, he, he, not that he throws Mer to the wind, but um, that's pretty much your you're buying metric, right? That that's that's if you wanna put more that's gas on the fire or not. Yeah. You're north star. Um, that's a fascinating, fascinating point. I've never thought about that.

Chase Dimond  (19:34):

I think the big call that I would have there is essentially think about your, like your methodology when you're running through your ads. So like a marketer looks at it differently. How many times do you look at something for a minute? And if you do look at it for a minute, are you actually convinced, like just take away all of the science that we put into it and think about it just as a consumer. If I'm looking at a video for a minute, like I'm not buying that thing, I need to be convinced again, they're gonna have to hit me with retargeting or an email or something, but if I get something and I'm like, oh, that's the thing. And this, this happens probably on a weekly basis and it happens in 10 seconds and I go to the website, it's the website's job to convert me. It's the, it's the ads job to get me interested in the brand and the offering. And so that's not gonna happen if that doesn't happen in less than 15 seconds. It's a bad ad.

Rabah Rahil (20:19):

Yeah. I agree. That's interesting. Do you see any of those commonalities across different AOVs? Cause I think I would generally agree with you, but I do think there is something to be set, product education when you're charging me a bunch more money. So if I'm buying, you know, a thousand, $1,500, 2000 pair of sneakers or something like that, I gotta be sold. I can't like it. Can't just be this beautiful girl. I can't just be the aesthetic I need to be kind of taken down. And maybe that's your point of the retargeting where maybe I don't cuz I I'm always a believer too where I think the purchase already happens a lot of times. It's more so you have to give them the story to then tell themselves to actually do the action. If that makes any sense at all.

Chase Dimond  (20:58):

Yeah. I mean I can go back even to, to house one of our, our biggest, um, our biggest drivers was when we were running, um, ads for, um, couches and um, stuff for your bathroom. So we'd have amazing margins on them, but it would take like four times, five times for people to go for it. But it was a $2,500 purchase. We're like 500 bucks for this person. And we owned the, you know, the, the product, like let it let's go. And then we would build like DPAs for that with kind of customized images for it. And it was just smashed it because the algorithm would serve, I didn't have to do anything. Um, I looked really good. That's brilliant. Like I'd have the ads running and be like, oh man, chase is really smart. I'm like, no, I'm really not. Uh, the algorithm is smart.

Chase Dimond  (21:37):

Um, absolutely AOV has something to do with it. So I would call it like sub two 50 is, is an your purchase. Plus two 50 is, uh, is a consideration purchase where it takes more time. And so you either need to, at the beginning of the purchase cycle, go heavy on social proof. Um, so that people like are buying it, especially for that higher AOB product. Or you need to know that like in your kind of buying flow, whether it's in your ad stack or kind of the entire purchase that you get an email the first time is like pump that social proof so that they know that there are other people like them who also have money who are buying this stuff. So they get FOMO. Plus they know that it's a good product. Um, and I've seen that kind of consistently bear out whether it's in a email flow, you know, a, um, an SMS flow or just, you know, doing an, an add stack flow, um, like what we like to call it.

Rabah Rahil (22:29):

Interesting. That's awesome. Yeah. That's super awesome.

Ash Melwani (22:31):

It's got me thinking. Yeah, got me thinking,

Rabah Rahil (22:34):

See the words turning over

Ash Melwani (22:35):

There. That kind of like, okay. So that, that basically I will lead me to my next question is like, is there anything right now that you're seeing creative style wise, that's been kind of trending right now and like, does that change often? Like do you see that changing often or has it always been kind of consistent throughout?

Chase Dimond  (22:59):

So I would, I would maybe pivot my answer towards, I see assets, the type of assets people use change and like the styles of ads kind of remain the same. There's kind of the tried and true things like five real styles of ads that people ever use. It's more, what are the inputs that they're leveraging? And so for instance, we, we talked about a little bit at the top kind of the, the rise of UGC has led to kind of the saturation and, um, I don't know, uh, people becoming a little fatigued on it because it doesn't feel very organic anymore. So what I see is a huge amount of everyone brings UGC. And so actually when I see an ad that doesn't have UGC, I, I love it. Um, and so same thing when people bring in stuff, it actually feels a lot different.

Chase Dimond  (23:44):

Um, and we have a lot of customers who will get frustrated when the algorithm doesn't use the whole UGC. And we're like, you need to give them a few different fields so that they can get a sense of the entire product and brand that they're buying, not just this person, that's talking to them. And we find that that actually bears out a lot better than just the straight, um, the straight U GC ads with, you know, the captions kinda the standard operating procedure. You're seeing these days, it's literally exactly TikTok style. And it's literally because that has become so ubiquitous that it's, it's kind of it's become played out. And so just doing different things, using different. So like this is a funny one. I got a complaint today, the UGC then has a product shop on a, on a styled background. I'm like, but this is the product you're trying to sell.

Chase Dimond  (24:25):

Right? They're not even holding the product cuz there's a billow ad, right? So they're not talking about the products, just the talking head and um, nothing wrong. Shout out the bill, love those guys. Um, but that's not gonna sell in this market where it is just so competitive. You have to have different things and you have to hammer your brand and your product because that's the value that you're providing to a person. And so my, my answer to you Ashe is I see that this has become, this is risen. Same thing as like I talked about statics, what I would say to cut other the other direction is don't let a creator always own your brand. You need to own your brand. You own, Ooh, I like that. You own the colors. You own your brand messaging, you own your product. And that is your unique value selling proposition. So let an algorithm or your designer, whatever you want to do, use those things and let creators amplify it. But it shouldn't be, you know, Rob, I heard you say, it's not, it's fuel, not the fire. Don't let creators be the fire. It's just fuel.

Ash Melwani (25:22):

Yeah. I love that. So like for, for example, a lot of things that we're doing right now is we have our like creative agency that does a, like all of our photography, like just lifestyle imagery. Um, and then we use that as the basis right. Of the asset. Then what we're doing is we're sending that to the, to the graphic designers, Hey, add these elements on top of it. Right. So, but also on the flip side, there are times where also just product renders do well on like a white background or whatever type of background they wanna put up. So I'm curious, like are, are like, because there, there are times where like the renders will outperform and it's literally just render white background text. Right. So I'm just curious, like, are you seeing similar where like lifestyle photography with a little bit of elements and then like, or like renders and like lower quality stuff that kind of stands out or mix of the two plus UGC, you know, like what kind of assets do you feel like people should be like, cause I know with pencil, right? You have to upload your assets. Right. So like if somebody was to sign out to pencil right now, what kind of assets do you think people should be uploading for the best chance to win?

Chase Dimond  (26:33):

Yeah. It's a, it's a great question. So to answer your first thing, first thing. So imagine you're in a, in a photo, in like a gallery, like if they have like colors everywhere and then the, you know, the images are close together. Like nothing really stands out. But what they do is they have a really stark white background and then they have mm-hmm <affirmative> paintings 10 feet apart and you're like, shit, look at those paintings. Wow. Now imagine your feed and you're in it and it's just color, color, color, color. And then you do hit 'em with white and it's like, whoa, what's that? So it's like very much. How do you, how do you find blue ocean within the feed? Um, is kind of a really big one. So in terms of the second question, which is what assets do they bring in? I'm a big person of like, you need to have distribution to give the algorithm like the chance to play, right.

Chase Dimond  (27:15):

It needs to, you need to have a little bit of like range. So same thing. You wanna have a sandbox that you live within, but like, if it's this big, don't expect much. If it's this big, like there's a lot of ranges. So I always recommend two to three videos that are longer than 10 seconds and four to five different like product shots or brand images. And the system will then kind of do its magic because what it can do with the product images, it will remove all the background and then put like color, like different colors from your brand kit on there. Um, and then it will animate put like, you know, text animations and animate some of the different brand, the like brand lifestyle shots, and then add in different clips of the video. And what it's trying to do essentially is it reads what has worked in your ad account.

Chase Dimond  (27:54):

And then it reads what is in the image. And then it reads what you've tr you've signaled it to write about. And it composes all of those three things together to give you kind of the highest expected outcome. So the idea being, how do you give it enough stuff to do that really well? Cause it's shit in shit out, but if you give it gold, it's gonna get a lot. You're gonna get bars. Right. So how do we get, how do we stack gold bars in terms of ads, the a ad accounts that do that consistently crush. I like, I have people who will literally email me in the middle of the night. Like, do you see what's happening right now? This is incredible. It's just cuz we're homies now. So it's like, I'm in it with them. Like I, I just care about their business cause they've been with us since the beginning.

Chase Dimond  (28:33):

Um, but then, you know, we all work with customers who are unhappy. Um, the ones that don't do it, you go and audit their account and they have not put any effort in and that's not necessarily their fault. They didn't have any of the assets to begin with, but it's not a good fit. Right. And so I think the, the thing we've learned is we can't help everybody. They need to be able to help themselves. We just need to let them know what the actual kind of floor is. Yeah. And so the last portion of answer on that is I really believe look at what your customers are engaging with, look at who your competitors are and then look at where there's blue ocean. And then you have those assets in hand. For instance, you're talking about the white backgrounds use that, like try it.

Chase Dimond  (29:11):

What's the problem, test everything. Our data across again is 600 plus million is if you test 10 ads, you'll find one that is an incremental profit driver, two to three that are revenue drivers, which you need. And then the rest are shit. So let's you got, how fast are you gonna test 10 that's that's we ask that to everybody. Some people take some six weeks and they're unhappy. Some people do it in three days and they're like, fuck, I found something it's scaling. It's incredible. And so it's really up to the, the, the people who are running the ad accounts. Um, but we, we try to arm them with all that information, but you know, there's a lot of business things that are going on that we can't control. So we just try to control high level outcomes from, uh, from the platform. Um, and yeah, it's, it's worked, um, it works when people, when people do the work.

Ash Melwani (29:56):

Yeah. I'm curious if you guys are able to see, or does the, does the algorithm take into account of the amount of like engagement, something gets versus strictly sales?

Chase Dimond  (30:08):

Uh, so you can, you can pivot essentially how the predictions and the algorithm are looking at stuff. So it will, for instance, when you generate, you can do something, you say, look, I'm looking for RO as, and it will make ads based on what it's seen have real as if you say, I want CPA, it will do that. So we'll go against what is the kind of highest predicted outcome. And so the algorithms have a 73% chance of predicting a winning ad. It's pretty good, but it has a 97% chance of predicting a losing ad. So if it says it's gonna lose for CTR and you're going for traffic campaign, don't fucking do it. But if it says it's going to crush on CPA, you know that maybe your CTRs will be not as good, but you're gonna find more high value customers cuz it looks like things that have been in your account already that have performed so interesting. Um, yeah, that that's been one and frankly we haven't productized that very well, um, to be able to get people to understand that, cuz it's still one of those questions like, well what's this what's that? Um, and so that's something we're working on going forward.

Ash Melwani (31:03):

I had one question robo, sorry there, um, we had so, uh, uh, chase, like I had set up an account with pencil, right? Yeah. And there's another thing that I find really interesting is that the AI is able to tell you the level of fatigue a creative has. Yeah. How, how does that, like, how do you figure that out?

Chase Dimond  (31:23):

So I'm not gonna say it's, it's the AI, what we've built into the system is something that tracks essentially your core metrics over time and watches them degrade. And so it's essentially saying like, look, if your metric last, you know, your CTRs last month were 3.5 and now this month across your account on these, these different ones, these ads you've been running are, you know, 2.75 it's been degrading over the last 30 days. And so essentially our big, like this was one of the things that I, that I, I worked to build with the team really directly was people don't understand what's fatiguing, cuz it's really hard to measure because you have to go do all these little, little things it's really annoying and really frustrating. So we built that. So you can get a really quick view and know that you need to swap out the ad or do something with it and take action. Um, and so that's, that's what it is. It's not like a very like scientific algorithmic thing. It's just, we look at the ad account and essentially we structure it so that it's looking month over month and gives you a score on what, what the percentage of fatigue is looking like.

Ash Melwani (32:21):

That's amazing, man. That,

Rabah Rahil (32:23):

That is really cool. The algorithmic double dip. Yeah. Um, I know Ash, you have a hard stop in almost two minutes. Yeah. So let's get to the creepy question and then, uh, we can plug pencil some more plug mentor pass for you and then a and then we'll call it a pod. So the creepy question for today is do you guys think there's more dogs or children in the us

Ash Melwani (32:51):

<laugh>

Rabah Rahil (32:53):

Chase you're up first

Chase Dimond  (32:55):

Owned dogs or just dogs in general?

Rabah Rahil (32:59):

That's a good point. I don't know.

Chase Dimond  (33:01):

Uh, there, there has to be dogs. I, they proliferate way more like if someone has seven kids, it's like a it's it's on the news. If someone has seven dogs, I'll go. That's just has to be more dogs.

Rabah Rahil (33:11):

<laugh> oh, that's just Mike next door. Yeah. Okay. So you're you're team dogs. What do you, what do you about you Ash?

Ash Melwani (33:16):

I feel like it's kids cuz not everybody has a dog.

Rabah Rahil (33:22):

Interesting. So I, I think I got, but

Ash Melwani (33:24):

Again, obviously not everyone is a kid, but I think there's more kids.

Rabah Rahil (33:28):

So let me see if I could do

Ash Melwani (33:29):

This. Like think about all the schools versus like how many like doggy daycares, there are in a town

Rabah Rahil (33:34):

And also to be fair, I am defining kids as minors. So under 18, does that, does that sway you at all chase or no,

Chase Dimond  (33:42):

I'm just gonna let it ride. If he dies. He dies.

Rabah Rahil (33:45):

Okay.

Ash Melwani (33:46):

<laugh>

Rabah Rahil (33:48):

Drum, it's actually dogs 89.7 million to 73 million. So actually a fair amount. So, so chases chases, uh, of course you can trust the guy. He got the crazy question, right? Of course you can trust that. Making your ads, the, the double algorithmic dip over here. Yes,

Chase Dimond  (34:07):

Sir.

Rabah Rahil (34:07):

AI

Ash Melwani (34:08):

Baby.

Chase Dimond  (34:08):

Yeah.

Rabah Rahil (34:09):

AI amazing. Um, awesome chase. So how can people get more involved in pencil? What can they do? Doesn't matter how much you're spending is like if you spend more, is it better or can lower spenders get involved or is this more of like a kind of an enterprise? Like if I'm spending proper coop, I need to get pencil or I can use it as smaller stores or who's kind of the, the person that's gonna get the most value from pencil.

Chase Dimond  (34:30):

So we just launched something, uh, called pay as you go. So essentially anyone can go in there and they'll get three free ads a month, um, will help them set up their, their ad account or their, uh, their workspace. So we wanted to give it to everybody, um, and just be super generous. Um, the best customers, um, we see are spending kind of above 10 K cause they're able to really leverage speed. Yeah. But if you need an add or two and you don't wanna, you know, sit and work with can templates, which is miserable, um, you can just, you can just join us at, uh, trippen.com, um, which by the way, everyone calls us trippen on, uh, on calls and I'm like, dude, we need to get, we need to buy pencil.com from this like weird venture fund in, in Asia. Um, so yeah, that's, that's, that's on that's the next on the docket. So yeah, you can get involved with us there and then you can follow us pencil AI on Twitter. Um, amazing. Trying to be as cool as the, uh, the dudes at, uh, triple oil.

Rabah Rahil (35:20):

Amazing. Well, and you're also on the Twitters.

Chase Dimond  (35:22):

What's your name? I

Rabah Rahil (35:23):

Your handle. You're a fun follow.

Chase Dimond  (35:24):

Yeah. See CR Moen, if you wanna, you know, get very limited value. Um, yeah, follow me. I just, I just, I just hype people up.

Rabah Rahil (35:33):

Amazing. He's a big type man.

Rabah Rahil (35:36):

And I can absolutely empathize with the verb in the, uh, URL. We're actually finally going to trip well.com. We're moving the app over to app. Yeah. We're getting rid of the try. It's cleaner that way. That's two social network jokes in the same podcast I need to go to. I'm tiring it out. See my, if I was in pencil right now, I would have, uh, joke, fatigue, just yelling at me in new jokes. Um, Ash hit me up. Tell me where to follow you. What should we do if we go to a vitamin shop, are you on mentor pass? You know what to do?

Ash Melwani (36:04):

Yes. Yes. Follow me on Twitter at Ashford Melan also on mentor pass. Um, if you need help with anything paid related, talk Facebook, Instagram, I'm your guy. Um, and if you need some collage in your life, hit a vitamin shop, check it out. It's down the road from you. I guarantee it. Um, if you're there, take a picture of Avi on the shelf and send it to me. Um, but yeah, that's it

Rabah Rahil (36:31):

Amazing. Uh, also big shout out to Ron. How does, how does, uh, beautiful baby boy amazing. Well done. Well done there, Ron and wifey. Um, love you there. Um, alright folks, that's it. We're two minutes over, sorry, Ash, but I will close it out. Um, if you wanna get more involved with triple well, we are tri triple well.com. We're on the bird app at triple well, and then I am also on mentor pass. This is actually, uh, a mentor pass E I don't know what that's called, but uh, this is like jet fuel, man. It's it's crazy. So really fun stuff had another call today and it's just, uh, shout out to Kenny. He was actually on the previous one. If you wanna hear more about how it works and stuff like that, but really, really cool platform. What else we got whale mail, Tuesday, Thursdays, amazing newsletter sign up for that. And then again, Pingus on the Twitters. If you want to come out, we have a ton of in real life events going on this summer. So hit me up Ash, or I can get you invited to the coolest hippiest parties chase my man. Thank you so much from the east coast or west coast. Excuse me. The best coast. Sorry. Amazing. Oh, I forgot. Cuz Ash is east coast, west coast, the middle in Austin. Fantastic.

Rabah Rahil (37:39):

Um, so thanks so much everybody. That's another episode of ad spend. If you like this, subscribe, tell your friends to subscribe, uh, subscribe to our YouTube channel and then, uh, tweet at us and tell us what we can do better. What we do. Great. Um, again, chase so so much, man. Thank you for coming on the show. Hit me up forever out in Austin and I'll see you next week. Mr. Marwan.

Ash Melwani (37:57):

See you there.

Rabah Rahil (37:58):

Cheers Jen. Thank you. All right. We're out.

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