Merging Brand Marketing with Performance Analytics

Merging Brand Marketing with Performance Analytics Speaker 2: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Better Advertising with BTR Media podcast today. I'm incredibly excited to have Matt Zielinski on the podcast. Matt, you're the VP of Digital Strategy for H&H Group, but I would love to hear more about your backstory and just how you got started in our space. Speaker 1: Backstory is probably a little non-traditional. I did not start out in e-commerce, but I know you asked what's your superpower, and I think that's probably my superpower. I am definitely the convergence of I'm a traditional brand marketer that has entered into performance media and e-commerce over the last decade. I started out in sales and strategy at big CPG, went into brand management through Nestle. So I started my career off in sort of the larger CPG houses. And at that point in time, Prime was something that was starting to I come through the household penetration of the U.S. People were adopting Prime memberships more and more and Amazon was growing. So it got the attention of larger CPG and everyone thought Dollar Channel and Costco were going to be these growth engines and no one was paying attention to Amazon. So I kind of put my hand up and decided, hey, this is, I think, a space that actually is going to continue to grow pretty fast. And just speaking with peers and how much they're buying on Amazon, I'm like, this just makes sense because it's all about convenience. And so I started leading with a few people of the Amazon team on Nestle and kind of went from there, left big CPG, went into private equity for a while and pretty much haven't looked back from the PE space. Speaker 2: That's amazing. Well, I'd say you made a pretty good bet at the time in the growth of Amazon. Speaker 1: Slightly paid off, yes. So far, the trend has been solid. Speaker 2: That's awesome. Well, one thing I'm frequently talking about, especially with the addition of AMC, and I would just say that access we're getting lately, is we're seeing a convergence of brand marketing and performance marketing. So I'm really excited to pick your brain on it because I got started at Amazon Advertising seven years ago and that's all I know. I mean, I was managing AMG campaigns when it was an AMG campaign, but we've seen so many changes and How both of those are ran. Can you give us a quick rundown on, one, what you would say the biggest differences are in this space and how we have seen such a big change knowing that you have both sides of the coin here? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, you know, probably the catalyst point still goes back to removing cookies, Web 2.0, right? I mean, Meta, Amazon, all these advertising platforms have really changed in the way that they've operated to where it's more and more and more hands off the wheel ASC type campaigns. You've got, you know, Google, PMAX campaigns. In Amazon, if you're only invested in lower funnel, right, your paid search, you're just kind of at the mercy a bit of your creative, your conversion that you can generate on a PDP and You know, I think it's a dangerous place for, and this is kind of conversations I've had over the last five years at multiple places, is just if you're ROAS minded, and I was like an early person saying I hate ROAS. I think it's the most misleading measurement ever because I've seen You know, pumping up ROAS when it's just, you know, bidding on branded terms, you know, very short sightedness based off ROAS. Like we need to really think through what's your long term strategy and goal and not just week to week. What are you trying to chase in terms of a number by putting a dollar in and expecting a few dollars out? So creative, really, right? Your brand messaging, your ability to break through the consumer, the ability to convert someone on a PDP. How do you do that across display? You know, if you're in the digital space like I am beyond just Amazon, how do you do that through Meta, Google, all these other channels like TikTok? It's been more and more and more and more of a trend and specifically as The targeting on outward channels, not necessarily Amazon, but like Meta and Google, have gotten a little bit more restricted and weren't kind of the cash machines they were five, ten years ago. Creative continues to be that pillar that businesses and brands really need to rally around. And that really is just the overture thing of like, are you building a brand or are you selling a product? And I think brands, and there's plenty of studies out there time over time will show that brand will always win. So that's what I'm passionate about is building brands and taking Challenger brands that are either in startup or scale-up phase and really helping them make that pivot into becoming a true business and true brand that stands beyond just a PPC platform and a PDP page and builds longevity and profit over time. But it takes time to do that, right? And it takes sometimes, depending where you're at in your journey, a big shift in thought as well. Speaker 2: Absolutely. I think there's a few different things that we could cover there, but we're seeing Amazon make the same shift. We're seeing Walmart make the same shift. I mean, Walmart went into it with that mentality because they had the realization that no matter how much people want to believe the digital shelf is infinite, it's not. It's page one that matters on any of the platforms. That's really what matters the most. And how you get there is just a combination of volume and conversion rate. As you mentioned, it's all about creative. It's all about that brand building story. So we're seeing Amazon make that shift. They started as anything, everything store. They wanted hundreds of products. Now they're like, no, no, no. We want the best products on the store there. I would say being a lot more advantageous for the brand builders in terms of the rollouts and the products that they're allowing us to work with. And I think the second part that people forget with that narrative is if you're not building a brand, then your advertising costs are at the mercy of market demand. That's why there's an increase in CPCs. If you're not improving your conversion rates, someone's going to be willing to pay for that advertising real estate and you are just going to see your margins decrease. Speaker 1: And depending on the category you're in, that market demand is potentially finite. If you're in a new You know, very infancy stage type of category or one that is maybe super high competition. You know, your ability to generate traffic or generate conversion or the combination to potentially you're plateauing in some of those areas. So, you know, I think the biggest thing and it's funny where I started actually getting involved in media was figuring out the relationship between Amazon's DSP and PPC and what we were doing back when I was at Nestle. And how that was actually, from an ad tech standpoint, accelerating faster than a lot of the meta Instagram and Google ad tech that was out there at that point. So I learned media based off Amazon and then I applied that everywhere else and then just continually did. I stayed up to date with all the changes that were happening in the media. I think DSP is a pinnacle part to any brand building story. Even if you're just a small business on Amazon, if you're not investing there, you're going to find yourself probably in a hard place in two to three years. Speaker 2: Absolutely. You have to create your own demand. I did a video yesterday and it was like, if your only goal is to be compared on the shelf to everyone else, you have three competitive advantages that are easy. It's price, which is a risk to the bottom and you don't want to get into a price war in my opinion. Unknown Speaker: It's reviews. Speaker 2: We're now seeing that playing field level out where six to seven years ago there was a lot of ways to acquire quick reviews that were not necessarily within TOS. And it's creative. And you can get relatively unique with creative, but Amazon's also becoming more restrictive with creative as they're rolling out AI to improve their operational efficiency. They're not going to allow for anyone to do anything and everything on the main image. Speaker 1: I mean, they just rolled back their rules around keyword length and title length. So they're catching up on keyword stuffing and titles. They're going to restrict variations like they have over the last year. We'll see where that nets out. They're going to start restricting titles. They already have done that, right? So they're going to continue to do that because their main focus is not your brand or your business at the end of the day. Remember, Amazon's only mission is to be ultra consumer focused. So we have to realize that as a business on Amazon, there's a set finite of levers we can pull on and there's certain guardrails and the ones that win understand how to pull on those levers at what point in time and how to operate within those guardrails. But that's it, right? They're going to say, hey, here's the operating model and it's up to you to kind of figure it out. I've been on the 3P side. I've been on hybrid side with Nestle. We have like multiple different things going on there. And I've been on the 1P side and it's all the same story, right? Here's our guardrails. Here's our levers. We change things periodically. It's up to you to navigate it. Good luck, right? Speaker 2: Absolutely. It's that in-consumer that matters. You know, you hear people posting all the time of like, Amazon hates sellers. I'm like, no, they hate people that aren't thinking about that in-consumer. Are you actually creating a product that solves a problem that customers are going to want to buy? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Or selling on Amazon to make money, like that's not the right mindset to have. And I think the second area that they're also really good at other than optimizing for that in-consumer is optimizing for operational efficiency. They're closing those guardrails in order to make sure there's a lot more consistency with the end product when it comes to, like you said, title and main image. But again, that takes away the competitive advantage that sellers have maybe relied on in the past to hack their way to the top. So that's where the advertising and the brand building comes into play. It's creating that demand. Speaker 1: It's funny, you know, I shamelessly stole this quote or this example and I used it in a presentation because I was trying to help other people understand the pitfalls of just being so bottom funnel conversion ROI focused. And I said, you know, there's how many X sellers of yoga pants out there? And if you could take the PDPs and the images and put them together right across all the different vendors, You'd see the exact same YBI bullets, right? The same key components of, hey, these are our product attributes and these are the black image, basic black yoga pan on white background. Price point would be the only thing that would stand out. But if you look at Lululemon, their sales are way higher, their profit margins are 2x what those sellers are. And it's for reasons because they're a brand that's built their brand around this space versus someone who's saying, I just want to sell yoga pants and I'm going to compete on, you know, pricing and why bias, you know, your attributes. Brand is what drives growth and brand drives profit. And I think a lot of folks that, you know, have come up in this space, maybe say in the last five years or so, have come up In seeing the advantages of performance and thinking that that's a long term game, right? Like I put a dollar in and I just want to stay in my platforms, look at, you know, my models and try to just generate four bucks, five bucks out. And that may have worked for a while, but eventually you get to this fork in the road of sales plateau, acquisition costs getting too high, and then you're left with like, well, what's next? And that's where it gets really hard if you're not investing again in brand building and DSP and stuff like that, to make that shift quickly, because now you're so reliant on, well, I've got X percent of my spend and lower funnel search spend, and how do I now shift that and not let the bottom drop out? Speaker 2: Absolutely. And from most of what I've seen, it's a lot easier to give a brand builder more KPIs, more clean rooms, more analytics to bring them to that middle ground than it is to give a performance marketer brand building assets and help them understand it. It is a stretch. We're all spoiled by performance. And I think digital marketing becoming as powerful as it is gave everyone all the analytics to feel like they're in control and feel like they know every single decision. And that's what makes brands so scary, I feel like. Like you said, the timeframe's a lot longer. And people struggle with the attribution of those timeframes. And it's a nice thumbs up. And I think that that's a big difficulty. So do you have any advice for people that are, you know, trying to make the shift and trying to find that middle ground? How do you recommend they approach that? Speaker 1: I mean, test and learn. Test in, but don't go in thinking it's the same product as your search, right? So you can't look at something from a ROAS standpoint. You're not going to have that same set of criteria for DSP, whether it's static, whether it's remarketing, whether you're trying to run your first streaming TV ad or fire TV placement. It's all different parts in the funnel in terms of where the consumer sits. So I think just going into that and having that set of expectations is critical because if you go in the other way, you're just going to be looking for a negative outcome and you're going to find it pretty quickly. But start to make the pivot into what's digestible. So, you know, look, I think we kind of came full circle a little bit, but brand performance, you know, marrying creative, marrying your positioning and content with some of the way you used to attack performance marketing is super interesting. And where I'm excited is that there's more and more and more and more data out there with the addition of AMC and clean rooms. Incrementality testing through different vendors to see more and more of that halo impact, and I can even talk about that a little bit later. I would say slowly start shifting some of your spend into it with a set goal that is more about what do I want to accomplish? And so for me, within the last five to six years across various organizations, I'm looking to see if I can change behavior. That's really it. If I can start getting people to click more into something or visit my web page, right, or go to a certain landing page or even maybe try to lower that burial trial and get them to add something to the cart, That's all I'm interested in. And then I'll continue to optimize every point below that. So if it's email marketing or it's following up with something like a remarketing DSP campaign or seeing if my branded search increases because now I'm driving more off traffic. There's plenty of data in AMC where you can look at all that actually across the funnel and look at that different consumer journey mapping and understand how to optimize around those. That's what I'll start doing. But, you know, you got to take that first step, really. I mean, that's what it comes down to and being okay with. I'm going to start putting money in the upper funnel and I'm going to see what it is about my business brand, points of differentiation, communication, etc. What value I'm producing to the consumer and see what resonates back based off the measurement. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Speaker 1: It's not two weeks. Speaker 2: It's not two weeks. I think the timeframe is one of the biggest barriers we see to understanding. Number two is understanding the right metrics, like you said. I think brands sometimes struggle to put themselves in the shoes of the customers. Every time I ask someone who I'm having this conversation with, like, how do you shop? It's never open up Amazon, AdDirect, Descartes and check out within five minutes. It's like, oh, I was on TikTok. Speaker 1: It'd be amazing if it was. We'd all be a lot better off and easier. Our marketing budgets would be bigger and we'd be having a fun time. Speaker 2: Absolutely. But the path to purchase is not linear. And we've seen multiple models. One of them, I would say, Not craziest to believe, but one of the models we saw suggested that whenever we increased our spending on Amazon search, we saw a 20% increase in in-store purchases. And it was hard for the brand to understand how that all connected, right? And it is, again, it's just consumer psychology. I think we were so caught up in advertising. I think we forget about the marketing element here. Speaker 1: It's the number one thing I tell everyone I work with or underneath me, part of my team is put yourself in the mind of the consumer. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And again, I got like performance marketers. I think we sometimes And I've been guilty of this. You're chasing a number, you're chasing goals, you're chasing whatever it might be, even if it's marketing goals like penetration or something like that. You get so rooted in the number, you forget to think through the consumer side of it. And I think that has to come back into e-commerce. And it's funny you mentioned that because At one of my past organizations, we had run an MMM sprint. And we did it, you know, not the typical year-long MMM model. We did it in quarters and looked at each one results. And I actually had left at that point the organization. I asked my friend who's still working there, I said, hey, how are the results? Like, what came out of that? There was a conversation that happened previously to the results that they did not believe that Amazon was really driving incrementality and that the shift to DSP and the fact we were spending 30 to 40 percent of our budget into more top funnel off Amazon placements was really moving the needle. Well, when they came back, they told me they said, actually, Amazon was the number one most singular incremental spend We had all of our marketing budget and we were spending billboards, we were doing digital billboards, we were doing meta, like every channel we were operating within. But Amazon still was the most incremental. It's because of just the way the consumer interacts with Amazon, how they half the time are picking up their phone when they're on the shelf. I mean, it's a digital world and nine out of 10 households have a Prime membership. So why wouldn't it be? Speaker 2: Absolutely. I mean, multiple times I've been in a retail store and I pulled up my phone. I'm like, okay, this product looks interesting. The packaging caught my attention on the shelf, but now I want to go see the reviews. I want the immediate feedback to understand what are the reviews online and then I'll complete my purchase. You think of things like how Amazon advertising works and how you came to find that product, you did probably see their ad. So the attribution there gets kind of funky, I feel like, but at the end of the day, me seeing the positive reviews is probably what drove me to convert. So no, maybe it wasn't the ad, but the ad drove me to the listing. The listing did push me over the edge, even though what caught my attention was the product. It's fun to think about that. With that, do you think that with the addition of all of the analytics we're getting and future accessibility, and I was walking CES and they had a camera, that when I walked on camera, it had my age and my sex display. The AI was able to read, say this person is 29 years old and female, so the in-store ad was going to be adopted to my demographic. With all of that, Do you think that there's ever going to be a perfect attribution model in the future? Speaker 1: I mean, I wish. I mean, we certainly have gotten better. You know, five years ago, all we heard was goodbye cookies and walled gardens. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And it happened. Right. But at the same time, now we have data clean rooms. We did. All right. I'm sorry. I did. When Amazon was launching their omni-channel list study, which was in beta, you know, taking IRI data and that network and doing exactly what we just talked about. Right. Like seeing the attributional window of Amazon and that halo impact to in-store purchases. That was this small if you're looking at just Amazon, but it was this big once we got the data back and we're like, this is great. We're getting better and better and better, but I think if you're a retail brand versus a D2C brand, that's a different conversation. If you're a retail brand, then it's really beholden to those retailers sharing that first part. And they're never going to do it, in my opinion. That is their profit center. And if you look at where their profit is coming from, there's more and more percentage of their EBITDA coming from ad services. So we've seen Walmart totally innovate and ramp up that space. But I can tell you, there's two or three different retailers I'm talking with that are already launching their own ad platforms and getting away from partnerships like Citrus or PromoteIQ. Everyone's recognizing that that shopper cart data, as it has been for decades, you know, traditional CPG, just moving into the digital realm is truly, truly, you know, a huge value for their business and is a profit center. So whether they start to share that, I can't tell, but I would imagine that they're not going to just give up. So, you know, hopefully we can find that happy medium between more data room sharing, because I think that's inevitably going to happen because you also get to this place of, well, why am I going to invest if you hold all the data and you can't provide any info back? Speaker 2: It's a fun space to be in. We see a lot of, even right now, AMC is not new, but it's being talked about a lot more frequently. So I think brands are being challenged to have an answer to their shareholders in that regard. I think there's a little bit of a level of paralysis and over-analysis at this point because the teams aren't built to understand the insights. And we still have this crazy pool between brand and performance. And I think we're going to continue to see that. And I would actually expect to see a lot of budgets in the next probably two to three years, maybe push back towards more brands. As everyone moves to, I would say, the performance, it's going to be a lot less competitive and it's going to have to, we're seeing it now, the shift happening, but I think it's a fun balance between remembering the psychology of influencing a customer and also leaning into the accessibility of the data that we do have. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think AMC has been a really important tool. I think a lot of people still don't know how to use it. And, you know, when it's an open query platform, like, where do I start? Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: It's definitely a challenge if you've been so narrowly focused on your ad spend previously on how do I now then adopt this into my strategy building. That's hard. I still think, though, you know, start with what's your core business strategy? What are you trying to accomplish? If you're in acquisition mode, understand what the demand looks like within your current category. That's plenty of information on Amazon. And you can get that, you know, in droves from your Amazon advertising rep, if you have one, to understand kind of where that that exists. You know, if you're in a category that has You know, X category search and all the branded searches at or above, then you're probably in a small new category where a lot of the awareness and traffic is coming from people educating consumers in the space and building that around their brand. So you better get on board with brand building. If you're in a more of a commoditized market where people are like, I don't care what brand it is. I just need this and I just want to buy it. Then, you know, you might be good for a certain point in time, but you're definitely going to have profit issues at some point in time as well. Figure out where you are in your journey and really start looking at how do I strategize around, and I think DSP is obviously just the easiest first step. I've heard I had actually a colleague come to me and say, hey, how do I talk to the CEO around DSP? They've got all these questions. And I said, well, what do you mean? They said, well, I think it's a scam. And I'm like, oh, my God, it's not a scam. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: So it depends on where you are in your journey. But when you've got to take a small step forward, I think that's that's That's the first step. Speaker 2: Absolutely. One last question based on that, because that was a little bit of a mic drop moment, so I feel like we got to round it off after that. Speaker 1: Sure. Speaker 2: How do you think people take that first small step? Is it education? Is it following the right people? Is it courses, classes, or just diving in and figuring it out? Speaker 1: You know, I learned best personally by diving in and figuring it out, but I don't know if that's the best thing for everyone, but that's just kind of me. I think the first step is looking at your business, understanding what your goals are. So let's just say you're in acquisition mode, right? You're a small business that search is sort of plateauing. You're not really sure what to take as a next step. And you know, you need to build brand a bit, but you can't go invest a ton of money. Start thinking then through like what percentage of your spend are you willing to lose? Just I don't care if it does nothing, right? Just I'll take 10% off the top and be comfortable with that. Then start looking at, OK, what do I then want to invest in next? And again, I think static DSP, like more time than not, some of the just the dynamic ads on Amazon perform the best. You don't have to come up with quality creative, right? I'll take it right from the PDP. Start looking at that. And start investing there and seeing what's going on. I've worked with a few companies where even just putting a little bit of spend, all of a sudden they're like, wow, our new to brand rate is going up. And I'm like, yeah, that's great. And, you know, make sure you're prospecting people and you're remarketing and retargeting those people because those will have different ROIs applied to them. But you'll start to realize that you're sort of building a little funnel of people that are, you know, coming into your brand. And then, again, start small. Really educate yourself then as you're doing those testings around what DSP is, the difference between DSP on Amazon and off Amazon. Off Amazon is a whole other world. And try to figure out where you are in your journey. If you don't understand where you are in your business or brand journey, then you can just start spending money everywhere and it's just going to be chaos. You know, so if you're a larger business where you're really mature on Amazon, it's probably time to start thinking about, you know, marketing off Amazon and bringing people back into that space, which majority of time is going to happen naturally anyways, right? Like I said, nine out of ten, I think it's nine out of ten households have Prime memberships. A lot of people are going to go back there naturally. So you don't even have to drive a ton of effort around specifically pointing them in that direction. Speaker 2: That was incredible. You broke it down in an incredibly simple fashion, which we still don't see often in that space. And I think your points around testing and learning, you don't have to go all in. A lot of people will be like, well, I don't have $100,000 to invest in DSP and you don't need it. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 2: I think it's more about the education, the mechanics. You almost need to run that test so you can start understanding the psychology of why it matters. Like you said, the small correlation between new to brand or branded search. Even if it's a 5%, it's like, okay, there is correlation. So you can start to forecast what's going to happen when you invest more and more. And I think that's the best way to look at it. It shouldn't be scary. Speaker 1: It shouldn't be scary. You got to be open to, you know, it's like, you know, betting on a stock or something, right? Like you got to be willing to lose the money. And if you're comfortable with that, then there's only upside. Right. And so if you start investing in more of that brand building type of activities and you're willing to look at it across 30, 60, 90 days, There'll be patterns that come out. And I know because I've done this before with other leaders and I'm like, trust me, I'll report back, I'll show you. And they're like, okay, it seems like it's working. It seems like we've got a $7 ROAS on our marketing DSP, but prospecting is sub a dollar. I'm like, yeah, that's the point, right? You have to build, I think now it's something like 20 impressions. Used to be like 10 or 13. It keeps going up. Before a consumer really even considers taking an action against your brand, you can't expect someone to just look at your PDP once, go, yep, I'm going to buy, and that's done. We've got to build that consideration, and that only happens through speaking directly to consumers. And again, as this targeting worsens in terms of what we've seen over the five years, breaking through to consumers through creative and brand building efforts just becomes more and more important. Speaker 2: I am ready to hit the pause button and play this from the rooftops, like walk down the streets with stereo on my shoulder playing this podcast because you provided so much value in a way that's easily understood from everyone. So I cannot thank you so much for hopping on the podcast, Matt. We're definitely going to give you a huge shout out on LinkedIn because I think everyone needs to understand what you're saying. And again, just thank you so much. Speaker 1: Noah, thank you for having me. This was great. I really appreciate it. Speaker 2: Amazing.