Duke Cannon Keeps It Simple

Duke Cannon Keeps It Simple Speaker 1: Welcome back to Better Advertising with BTR Media. My name is Destaney with Sean and today I'm incredibly excited to be joined again from Josh from Duke Canon. Josh, thank you so much for being here. Speaker 2: Awesome. Happy to be here. Speaker 1: Today we're actually in person at the Prosper Show and we're recording from the Amazon ads booth, which is a really fun place to be because Amazon has driven a lot of advertising innovation over the last few months. I mean, heck, I woke up today with a new announcement that we're now going to have the opportunity to have more control over our Amazon-sponsored prompts. And I think the direction is exciting, especially for a brand like Duke Cannon. So before we dive into all the specifics, can you give us a little bit of context on Duke Cannon's unique competitive advantage that they've really carved for themselves in the space? Speaker 2: Yeah. So for those not familiar with Duke Cannon, we're a men's grooming brand. We're kind of a challenger in the space. So think bars of soap, body wash, cologne, deodorant. There's some big players with big dollars. And so that's part of the challenge is like, We can't compete on a dollar for dollar with them. We've got to find ways to stand out. A lot of ways we do that was with our tone and voice and we bring humor to the table. I think our things are punchy and funny. We do humor is like more of like a how men talk to men, not the like adolescent derogatory to women type of things. That's not our space. Like we want to be, you know, What men really stand for and what they want. So how do you bring that to life in a digital space? And that's how we try to stand ourselves apart and get those clicks and get that customer attention. Speaker 1: I love that. And I think that's a question a lot of brands are asking themselves. You go to Amazon, you type in a keyword, how do you stand out on a crowded digital shelf? You have your main image, you have your reviews, and you have your price points, which are all relatively similar. I think a lot of brands are asking themselves, how do I make sure that tone of voice, that sense of humor, that audience I've identified, how do I get that across to the customer in a digital space? And I think that's a problem that Amazon has really worked to solve over the last few months. Now, a lot of these rollouts are relatively new, so I know brands maybe haven't had the opportunity to test and learn just yet. But you have things like Sponsored Products Video. That was announced at Unboxed. If you haven't seen it live, it's similar to a sponsor brand's video in that it takes up a lot of your screen, but it actually comes with thumbnails. So customers can interact with the video based on the part of the video that they want to watch, whether they're interested in your ingredients or your smell or your line extension. Customers have a little bit more control. Then you have things like sponsored prompts. Sponsor brands video, all of the TV accessibility. How have you guys leaned into this opportunity to really tell your brand story and give yourself that competitive advantage that you've carved externally on Amazon? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a good question. To be quite candid, I think we're still figuring it out. We just started our 1P journey about six months ago. We're very much in accelerating that and growing that. So we're kind of right now focused on optimizing lower funnel, but we're starting to test and learn about how do we kind of go up funnel and try some of those things. Video is a great way to stand out in the crowd. I think the challenge for us is We make a lot of really fun content. We have a great Valentine's Day ad. We do a lot of stuff with social and stuff. How do we make that come to life in the right way? For our products to get those clicks and inform the customer, that's the challenge right now I think that we're internally thinking about is like our creative team makes a bunch of great awesome stuff, but how do we customize it to kind of hit the right things and then start to test that, get that feedback loop that Amazon's great at providing, and then, you know, double down on what works and kind of scrap the things that don't. Speaker 1: I think that's a problem a lot of brands are having. There's almost too much opportunity. Speaker 2: Oh, for sure. Speaker 1: You hop onto any of the platforms or the masterminds right now, and it's like, I've automated my whole life with AI, and I have this opportunity, this opportunity, I can go viral here, here, and it's like, where do I even start? And that is probably the most difficult piece. And that's another area where I think Amazon has helped quite a bit. You know, you mentioned the maximizing the bottom of the funnel before moving up. And I think that's where things like sponsor brands video has been successful since day one. It's highly interactive. It takes up an incredible placement on the page. But in my opinion, I think Customers get a little bit overwhelmed because they hear brand and they think brand marketing and brand dollars. At the end of the day, a sponsored brand video ad is still, in my opinion, Bottom of the funnel. It is keyword based. It's CPC based most of the time and it's pretty low risk. You can go into your ad console right now. You can pull your search term report and say, hey, I have 300 search terms that I know have converted incredibly well for my sponsor products campaigns. You upload them into a sponsor brand campaign and you add a video. But it's overwhelming because it looks a little bit more complicated than what it is. And I think sponsored products video is going to be relatively similar. We're, you know, seeing them dabble with scaling it out from an inventory perspective. But because you have so many assets elsewhere, it's really about how do I Edit the asset to be the right sizing and the right format. Amazon's given us Creative Studio to help overcome that hurdle. And then how do I find the right keywords to target that's going to pair well with my video? And I think that's another area where brands maybe get a little bit overwhelmed is You have a brand with, you know, multiple different products that are differentiated typically by scent and ingredients. So how do I align a certain video, whether it's UGC or brand, to be really paired with the right search terms? That way my audience, when they're searching for a certain style of product, they see a video that resonates with them and converts. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's I mean, it's a good question. It's a loaded question Because that is the trade-off or the challenge with a small brand unless us to is like we're resource constraint There's always going to be trade-offs. You have to be very thoughtful and try to maximize your dollars to get the most And so the way I always think about the way we as a brand because like if we're not doing this We're doing something else or like trading things around It comes down to like what's the goal? What are you trying to achieve? I think once we start to like take that step back and be like I Here's what we're trying to do. It makes it a lot easier to find those trade-offs and what you're willing to lean into or not. For example, on our Amazon space right now, we went 1P to get that price point of our single offering items down because the way we were working through a third party, those were almost double the prices they were on Target and Walmart, which is I'm going to hamper your ability to grow. Customers are not stupid. They'll shop around. We did that, unlocked that, and now it's like, how do we utilize that to get new households? How do we think about that is very different than, as I would say, a stock-up, somebody that's familiar with your brand coming back to Amazon because it's convenient. I think we're very much in like trying to create a testing roadmap for the year on all this stuff. So because like ads are a huge component of that, but just even like the structure of our brand, how it shows up. So think about stock up. Customers are probably willing to buy more. So do we need to move up into bundles? And then do we target those products differently than the singles that we're using to drive new acquisition? Because the challenger, our last business that we had before, it was mostly bundles. That's a pretty high price tag to get someone unfamiliar with the brand to commit to, to try it. That's a lot. There's a lot of things at play and that's why we're really specifically thinking right now of like, how do we sit down and test these certain things so we can learn what we need to. Speaker 1: Start with the problem first. Speaker 2: To get, yeah, to solve those problems and then, you know, we'll either learn more information and new problems will pop up or we'll solve that one and we'll feel good and be like, here's where we double down, here's where we pull back. So we, like, because we're early in the journey, there's so much of that going on right now. But again, I think the key to anyone out there is like how do you be very focused on what matters most and kind of carve away at everything else. Otherwise, you can easily put yourself on you're spending a little bit and a bunch of different places and not really moving the needle. Speaker 1: Absolutely. Spreading yourself too thin, not identifying what key problems you're trying to solve. These are some of the biggest issues we see. Just being coming overwhelmed with shiny object syndrome. But I think the good news is, you know, even talking about your problem with your lifetime values, subscribe and save, loyalty customer segment. That's a really big opportunity with Amazon advertising. It's one that's not just for the large brands. I'm going to use the term AMC. It's one of the biggest buzzwords in the Amazon advertising space right now. And the reason it's a buzzword is because it's so impactful for brands of any size. You mentioned wanting to do a better job of identifying and segmenting these audiences. You then can layer in creative element as well. But you're able to identify someone who has already purchased from your brand, someone who's already interacted with your brand in an advertising unit, and then adjusting your bidding methodology on the search term level for that person. So think about that when it comes to your video assets. Think about taking someone and saying, hey, I know you're returning, so I want to push you into a bundle. I want to push you into a scenario that's going to increase your overall order value. You can do that with AMC and you can do that with your video assets. Same thing on the net new customer. You know, one of the biggest advantages of Amazon, in my opinion, is new customer acquisition, right? Especially from a D2C perspective and all the transitions we're seeing externally. Being able to identify as someone incremental, potentially, because they typed in a non-branded search, and being able to bid differently because of how they interacted with ads in the past is a huge, huge competitive advantage. But again, I think people get caught up. There's too much to do. They don't know what's best for them. They don't know where to start, because you can't spread yourself way too thin in our space. Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. You hit it on the head. That is the challenge. You think about it again, going back to like the purpose. These are very different customers to your point. Like I love what you just said about customizing to the customer segments because also what we can do is we get smarter about what these customers want and need. You can change the content and then having the right content increases conversion. You get that flywheel going. Yeah, we're trying to do all that because I think the way we as a brand approach and I think the way a lot of brands approach is you create something, you just kind of push it out there and then you either Go with what works or doesn't. But again, utilizing AMC, utilizing all these things to get a feedback loop to like, what kind of messaging really works because we have a lot of claims on our products. Think of our bars of soap, like they're triple mils, they last longer. They're bigger than competition, so they last longer. Which one of those things matters more to the customer? It's hard to figure that out. But if you start to run two different ad units and then start to learn from those and then feed that back, you can be way more impactful with the same kind of budget and the same kind of things. But I think that is the challenge of a small brand is we have to be super nimble. We have to learn really fast. That's the competitive advantage. We can't just be stagnant and turn things on and then just let them die. Speaker 1: I couldn't agree more. The part with all of this is there's an operational cost. It is a lot of time and a lot of work to create a sponsored products video for every single one of your products. To create a net new video for sponsored brands or streaming TV, you definitely have to take that into consideration. That being said, that is your competitive advantage. As an agency that's worked with multiple of the largest CPGs, a lot of the largest disruptors in the space, the disruptors are winning because they test much quicker. I remember when Sponsor Brands Video first expanded their inventory, I went to one of my brands and I was like, hey, I want this video asset and I want a bigger budget behind it. It took six weeks to get approval on a video asset I was already running. It wasn't the video that was struggling with the approval process. It was the budget behind it. But then I would go to a small brand and say, hey, this is incredible. It's a CPC model, so it's really low risk. Let's move on it quickly. First mover advantage in e-commerce is incredibly, incredibly important. And I think that's why we're seeing so many of these smaller brands are now competing with these large budgets. Because AI is democratizing a lot of the creative element. We've already seen that with Creative Studio being able to get a streaming TV video up in under 24 hours. But then you have the operational element as well, where it's much easier to hop in, identify an audience and get an advertising campaign written. The budget was the biggest, I would say, you know, competitive advantage of larger brands and now smaller brands can compete on an operational perspective. So what's their second biggest advantage? It's moving incredibly and quick and being really, really nimble where other brands are dealing with PR and HR issues. You all can test and learn much quicker. Speaker 2: We can, yeah, if we have the right structure. And so part of it, smaller brands, structure might not be our forte. So that's my job is to build that structure. Okay, it worked. Speaker 1: Now let's do it again. Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. To bring that information to life. And so now we've been able to get the right people on time. To your point, like we saw opportunities to dive down just even in the lower funnel stuff because we weren't maximizing and we were doing, you know, It's a hard thing as a brand. You want to do higher level stuff. You want to keep feeding that funnel, but it's hard to figure out where that like point is of like feeding that funnel, but also like driving conversion. We were seeing, you know, again, Amazon 1P, these singles is very new for us, but we were seeing extremely strong conversion. We were seeing really high new to brand from these things. So it was a quick conversation. Once I brought that information to life internally, it's like, Oh, let's take some of this like sponsored TV stuff that we're doing as overall and then double down here because this is kind of more that middle funnel that's doing a little bit of both for us, but also driving the brand, driving dollars in a channel we really want to grow. So again, like the challenge for us as small brands is creating that structure, having the resources to get all the information and getting the right information. But once you have that place, like you said, like I can go to the people who make the decision, or it might even just be as much as me, being like, all right, let's do this. Speaker 1: Having the data. I mean, to your point, historically, if you had a really large brand campaign, or you're running a national media campaign, you're leaning into just a general lift test, and then piecing it together with a multimedia or incrementality software. A lot of buzzwords there. But all of that to say, now when you go and run a sponsored TV ad, or if you run a streaming TV ad, We can connect the dots with AMC. We can clearly see when someone interacted with our streaming TV ad here, they typed in a search term and clicked on my sponsored product ad here. And as long as you have enough information to work off, that's when you kind of mentioned you can start systemizing it quite a bit better. But it's the black box that gets dangerous because you're like, I think this is what's working. Our sales are up. But is it because of the TV campaign? Is it because of this affiliate, this influencer? Connecting the pieces can be really messy, especially when we know nowadays the path to purchase is not linear. I mean, I will pull out my phone. I will see an influencer. I'll go review the website and then I'm going to figure out what's going to be shipped to my door the quickest. It's a lot of different platforms that brands are having to tie together and the brands that are trying to do it perfectly, in my opinion, are the ones that are losing. The brands that are leaning into things A little bit more high level and my new favorite thing is telling brands to lean into your audience, not to the algorithm. Instead of trying to gain the algorithm, think about how your customers are interacting with your brands and then make intuitive decisions based off that. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. And I think a little bit too, I've worked for big companies and I think one of the challenges, one of the advantages we have with small companies, a lot of those information sources are segmented at a big company. You have sales channels and they're very focused on the sales channel and then you have like Brand, there's no one tying a lot of that together. At the smaller company, like all the same people are doing the similar things. So it's easier for us to have those conversations and move very quickly and look more holistically of how these things are driving. But honestly, that's always been a challenge is like getting the right information to like actually paint that picture and to make better Overall decisions, because incrementality is key, but it's one of the hardest things to measure. It is. Speaker 1: And it's never going to be perfect in my opinion. I love the idea of it, but you know, when I'm having these incrementality conversations with the brand, they're like, can you prove it's net new? I'm like, well, I can't prove that they weren't sitting on their couch and saw your influencer and then they saw XYZ because at the end of the day we've also seen that customers are more inundated with ads than ever before. You're constantly being shoved brands down your throat even when you're scrolling social media. You have people that are affiliates. Most people don't realize that affiliates are paid in some way or incentivized in some way. So it really, again, it's leaning into that customer psychology of frequency. How frequently are you getting in front of your brands? And then also, again, realizing that they're not going to be loyal to any one platform. They're not going to be loyal potentially to any one brand. We can clearly see that by non-branded search versus branded search. But how do we make sure we're showing them an ad at the right point in time to finally drive that conversion? Speaker 2: Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, I think that's a huge unlock is finding the customer where they're at. Like, I've definitely worked places where we're, again, structured, we're trying to drive certain sales channels, but that's not how the customer works. And if you're doing that, you're missing out on an opportunity. So I love that thought from your end, like the approach of like, Ultimately, you don't care. I personally don't care where the sale comes from. I just want the customer to buy our product. So how do we optimize to that? Speaker 1: Well, I think this has been a fantastic conversation, Josh. Thank you so much for joining me again. Speaker 2: Yeah, of course. Speaker 1: And I'm sure we'll hop on in the future to talk about all exciting things, Amazon advertising and Duke Canon. Speaker 2: Awesome. I appreciate the time. Speaker 1: Thank you. Speaker 2: Thank you.