Progress Update No. 05 - Changing My Business Model, A Necessary Evil (Part 2)

Click here to catch up on Part 1. 

As a reminder, the pain points I zoned in on were:

• getting new landing pages made
• ad creative production

Option 1: Whitelisting on Steroids (the complicated one)

This is the more complex one for sure, but it solves both pain points - and unconventionally, which I'm always a sucker for.

Quick note: 'whitelisting', if you're not familiar, is when an influencer or blog lets a partner brand run paid ads through their social accounts. So in the newsfeed it looks like it's coming from the blog, but the partner brand is the one running (and paying for) the ads. 

This is an example of how it flows:

The interesting thing here is that both landing page production and ad creation often hit bottlenecks due to multiple internal teams needing to input and sign off before either can go live.  Depending on the size of your company as many as four, five or even six parties need to get on the same page. 
Typically, this means a tonne of meetings and endless back-and-forth and suddenly a month has passed and you're still not live. 

Whereas with this whitelisting method, all the new stuff being made is either on the blog's website (for landing pages) or the blog's social media pages (for paid ads).  This means there's much less need for other internal teams to be worried.  And in turn, fewer meetings and less umming and erring around sign off.

So here's the dream setup that I wish I had when I was working for a brand.

Image this:
You're the senior performance marketer for a brand and you have a whole bunch of ideas for ads and landing pages to test. 

You could go the usual route - beg and bargain for Creative's limited resources to get the ads made, submit several tickets to Product and wait patiently for landing pages in the "backlog - v3" column of their colour-coded kanban board.  And organise a multitude of meetings so that Copywriters and Brand Marketers can give it the ok too. 

Tempting. 

Or this:  open a Gsheet template, sketch out your ideas and tick a few boxes saying how many videos/images/LPs etc you want this time. Click send. Then someone outside the org (so you're free to load them up with work without feeling bad) says they're on it. 

Two days later, they message back with the first versions. 
You write a couple of bits of feedback, but it's mostly good. 
Then later that day, another message arrives saying that all the assets are ready (in all the aspect ratios), and the landing pages are live... PLUS the ads have been created for you in Ads Manager...in the campaign/adsets of your choice...with your naming convention. 

All you need to do is choose a budget and turn it on 😊

Normally, this is complete fantasy because even if a 3rd party makes your ads and LPs, they'll still need to be ok'd by Brand, Product, Creative etc and you're back in the same waiting game.  The key is removing the need for those internal teams to be involved. Without all those meetings and approvals, the path to getting sh*t done transforms from some winding mountain road with bits missing into an efficient, rapid autobahn.

So it's one solution that's solving both problems. 

Great!
(In theory). 

A Better Name is Needed

Still though, "whitelisting on steroids" probably isn't the best tagline. 

And "whitelisting" is already a well-known term within Performance Marketing circles and generally comes with the connotations of being a pain in the arse - the exact opposite of what I want this to be. 
So a little rebrand seemed appropriate. 

I settled on "Performance Publishing" which does a fairly decent job of describing what this is about. And most important of all there's alliteration. 

Trial Phase - Getting Set Up

It was time to turn theory into reality. 

First up, I created a new blog with an all-encompassing enough name to cover lots of potential categories. 
Then I filled it with ~100 articles of content to give it a lived-in feel, including edge-of-your-seat thrillers such as "How to Match Socks with a Suit" and "How to Grow an Onion at Home".
I found a few brands that were open to doing a trial. And after the usual back-office malarky of setting up ad accounts, pixels, analytics and permissions,  we were off. 

We made ads by remixing their existing raw assets to save time. But just like the plan, we agreed on the strategy of hooks and angles and then made the landing pages and ads all on our side to bring them to life. 
Being the first run at it, it wasn't quite as slick as I would eventually want.  But it was end-to-end and it helped me iron out the fine details of the mechanics. 

The fickle Gods of Marketing were even smiling on us as we had a couple of solid hits right out the gate where the ads drove some stellar results - this was unexpected but gratefully accepted! 

Initial Feedback

All along I was gathering info from brands I pitched to, brands doing the trial and people who'd be on the supply side of it to figure out whether this thing had any legs.

Initially, I aimed to focus just on the landing pages and to find another company to handle the ad production.
Since I have a DTC brand already that needs ads being made, I reasoned I might find some kind of efficiency savings by getting all the ad production done together. 

But even though this would simplify operations a lot for me, the costs of using a creative agency just seemed too high. I wasn't confident I'd be able to pay them, make enough margin myself and have happy customers paying at the required prices to make it work. So it seemed like I'd need to find a way to handle the ad production myself too.

On the demand side, pitching was proving challenging. There was a big divide between those who'd already run whitelisting campaigns and those who hadn't. If they weren't familiar, it was a struggle to communicate what the hell this was let alone why it was good/better. It was a lot of new information and unconventional concepts to get across in a short meeting.

Also, many people were more interested in just a specific piece of the bigger offering I was presenting. Namely the creative remixing - i.e. using their existing raw assets to make lots of new ads for them. 

Enter Option 2: Ad Creative Remixing

I guess sometimes you have to listen to what people want.

Maybe I was getting carried away with something I thought was cool, but was perhaps overkill and too fiddly. 
The creative remixing piece they were more interested in is still very useful and upon reflection, it's also something I would have loved to have access to. 

Particularly if:

• It was still the external setup so I could still load them up with work without feeling bad.
• they had Performance Marketing DNA to avoid rounds of unnecessary feedback (eats up so much time!)
• the default assumption was they'd do tonnes of variations 
• the pricing was reasonable enough and built to encourage testing lots of iterations.
• they allowed me to do fast testing of my new ideas by knitting together existing approved assets rather than shooting/sourcing new content each time. 

Also, even though I tried to avoid it, I would most likely need to build the capacity to handle ad production on my side anyway. So this Creative Remixing option is very much just a subset of the bigger Performance Publishing option. 

So considering everything, my current view is to start with the smaller Creative Remixing offering and later I can always layer the extra pieces on top for those who want to get more advanced and do the whole Performance Publishing setup. 

What's Next?

Next time I'll see if I can post some results of the trial activity of the Performance Publishing campaigns. If not, I'll do some of the early slides I was pitching to brands which will start to bring these blog posts up-to-date with the present day. 

This post was quite a technical one,  so if you have any Qs about it - or if either of these happens to be something you want for your brand and you'd like to chat further - my DMs/email are open:

greg@dtcforever.com.  

Any feedback you might have at this point would be very useful!

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