RISHABH JAIN

In today’s episode of the Intelligent Marketer, we had Bryan Cano on, who somehow talked about brand marketing by combining Sydney Sweeney’s cultural moment with Bigfoot.

MIKE DUBOE

It was great having Bryan on. He is the head of marketing at a brand that everyone in e-commerce knows, but perhaps is larger than many people realize: True Classic. It’s one of the larger brands on Shopify. It’s really interesting to hear the perspective of someone who historically has been associated with running performance marketing talk a lot about the application of AI to brand marketing and downstream cultural and operational implications of that. We think it was a fascinating conversation talking about the future of marketing and e-commerce and we hope you all enjoy it.

RISHABH JAIN

Welcome back to the Intelligent Marketer. Today I’m really excited to introduce our next guest, Bryan Cano, a good friend and one of the best marketing operators that I know. He’s actually the first marketing operator for this podcast, so far we’ve had builders here. He is currently the head of marketing at True Classic Tees, one of the fastest-growing Shopify Plus brands and prior to this grew a brand called Nood from its very early stages into one of the fastest-growing Shopify brands in the ecosystem. So thank you, Bryan, for joining us.

BRYAN CANO

Yeah, man, I’m excited to be here. I saw that you guys were doing this project a couple months ago on Twitter — or X, I should say — and pretty cool to be a part of it now. So thanks for having me.

MIKE DUBOE

Yeah, Bryan, thank you. I think maybe what some listeners might not realize is that True Classic is obviously a big successful D-to-C eCom success story, but actually you guys, the reputation in the industry and kind of the Shopify world is you guys are high taste in terms of the tech stack that you use to build the brand as well as how you go and approach marketing. And so we’re excited to get your points of view on the future of marketing. We’ve not actually, despite Rishabh and I being from the background, we haven’t really had D-to-C operators on this show yet. So yeah, we’re excited to hit some of these points with you. I think maybe to jump into it, just to hit it head-on, D-to-C e-comm is in an interesting place right now. People say e-comm businesses tend to be rough businesses at scale due to a reliance on performance marketing. And so maybe just to jump in on that, because you guys have continued to scale really nicely. What’s your overall point of view on performance marketing for True Classic, and then we’re going to dive into some specifics.

Bryan Cano:

Yeah, we're in an interesting period and I think that — Rishabh, you know this — I always like to think things in stages of a growing e-comm brand. And you're right, the first 100 million, it's all direct-response performance, and around that 100 million, 75 to 100 million markets where you need to start diversifying. And that diversification could be through distribution channels, your ad platforms, and then your creative where you're thinking about the different funnels and personas. You saw a lot of that with us at Nood. At TC [True Classic], we're well beyond that. We're — 300 million is what we're chasing this year — on track. I think with us, we're in this sort of pivotal point where we are starting to do less ... having this sort of forcing mechanism and having the tough discussion of how do we do less on performance and more brand and establishing ourselves as a household name to the point where we're having crazy discussions.

I mean, last week we were like, "Let's shut off all of Google Ads, let's just see what happens," and, "Let's shut off all ..." We have these performance marketing agencies that we have. I'm sure you guys, the audience has heard of them, the ones that charge you a percentage of ad spend. At our scale, that percent of ad spend hurts. You feel it, it doesn't matter what the percentage is, you're just taking money off the top. And so we're like, "Crazy idea, all the tools, all the platforms, the analytics all say that these are the best-performing campaigns. What happens when you shut it off?" And we turned it off. We turned all that stuff off and the business is fine. Profitability actually skyrocketed, ROAS actually went up a little bit, year-over-year new customer revenue is up. And so we're starting to enter this phase of the business where we are proving to ourselves that at this scale — we grew the business on Facebook ads, yes, but now there's so much word of mouth, there's so much brand awareness, there's so much distribution in other channels such as Costco, Target, even Amazon and TikTok Shop, where all we've really done is eroded margin through performance, through Meta ads, and we kind of decided to burn it all down and go to zero and then build it back up so that we can start to see what is that marginal ROI and do we continue to see the top line and the bottom line move up and to the right as we add more spend.

Another thing that we're doing is starting to think more about cultural relevance. How do we stay relevant? How do we do brand campaigns? Not in the sense of like, "Oh, we did a brand campaign," and it's like it made people feel good and hopefully they walk away remembering True Classic, but rather taking what American Eagle has done with Sydney Sweeney. It's like, that cultural relevance given all of the attention that she gathered from the Dr Squatch campaign, I think [it's] very smart of American Eagle to tap into that and stay relevant. It's not necessarily what we would do. It's not on brand for us to partner with a big celebrity, but we are starting to think about how do we stay relevant and tap into the societal topics and discussions that our everyday customer is talking about that we can kind of get in front of. It's interesting times here. We are kind of forcing ourselves to wean off of the DR stuff and then shifting our spend more into brand marketing.

MIKE DUBOE

All right, so there’s …

RISHABH JAIN

So you said …

MIKE DUBOE

… three or four things. Oh sorry, Rishabh. I want to dive into so much there. Maybe I’ll hit a couple then Rishabh can. So brand versus performance is a very, you’ve framed these as two different things. I think — I’ve made the case in the past — I think all marketing is performance marketing, it’s just a question of time horizon. How do you guys view it? What is your definition of brand marketing versus performance? Are these truly two different disciplines within True Classic?

BRYAN CANO

They are two different disciplines, but it's exactly what you said. It's just what is the timeframe of ROI? For us, we've actually started to code that out. With DR, we're expecting a payback within seven days. That is the average path. First click to purchase for us is five days. So we're like, okay, we'll give ourselves a seven-day attribution window. With brand, we actually took an approach of looking at post-purchase surveys asking the question of how long did you hear about us? What was the type of ad that you saw? Was it like social impact? Was it this comedy ad? Was it something that was feel-good content? And we started to break down the path to conversion or the timeframe of conversion for those ads. And we extended our window. We used ChatGPT to help us break down this analysis of what should the ROAS be or what should the cost per comment or the cost per engagement be within one day, within seven, within 30, 60, 90.

And what's that maturation knowing that we need at least six months for that ad to really mature for that payback to arrive. So we do think about it as separate disciplines because the execution is different. We have a set of campaigns, we have a set of ads that we are looking at ROAS, we're looking at Triple Whale still, we're looking at cost per add to carts, and all the sort of leading indicator — sorry, the hard metrics — on performance. And then we're looking at, for the sort of brand swim lane, we're looking at leading indicators. So things like clickthrough rates, CPMs, new reach, cost per share, cost per engagement, and then even tracking post-purchase survey data to tell us the type of content and extrapolating a post-purchase ROAS, if you will. So we're thinking about it the same way as you are, but it is separate disciplines and we need to think about it differently and we can't measure it as one. And I think that's the mistake that a lot of brands make is that they say, "Oh, we need to give ourselves a different time horizon when we measure this." But they don't. They still look at it blended and they're like, "Oh, where's the payback?" So for us it just lets us really think about what is the job to be done.

MIKE DUBOE‍

Maybe even taking it a step more tactically, how do you set things up internally for there not to be conflict between budget owners on this? How do you break down brand versus performance when you’re doing budgeting exercises? How dynamic are you over time versus setting something at the start of the year, and maybe how has that changed as you’ve scaled?

BRYAN CANO

Yeah. We drew a line in the sand at the beginning of the year and started to invest in big partnerships like the UFC, for example. But we do review this every month, and I think it’s every quarter is when we’re actually making a meaningful change where me and finance … At the end of the day, what this is is a P and L exercise. So finance or leadership, we’re going to say, okay, we want to hit this top-line goal and we want to hit this ebitda, this contribution margin, and that’s going to require this amount of spend. And so then it’s on me to basically break down that spend and say, okay, I want to put 20% of that spend into brand and 80% of it into performance. And so if I only have 80% to hit this top line, this is the ROAS target. And it’s really just a simple P and L math exercise. What we do on a quarterly basis is we say, okay, is 20% enough? What happens if we dial that up to 30%? What happens if we dial it up to 40%? And then over time you start to see that reaction where we are giving ourselves enough time to not be so reactive if it doesn’t work right away. But like the UFC, the LA Clippers, the LA Rams, those were massive, massive bets that… At the beginning of the year, we were like, what are we doing? Finance was not the most happiest, but you take those bets, you see what the P and L … how the P and L reacts, and then you sort of calibrate over time. It is slow, and it does require a lot of patience and a little bit of guts, if you will, but it’s the only way. There’s no easy way, and I think that’s the beauty of this type of marketing is that it in itself is a moat. Because in order to do that, you do have to have a very sort of close pulse on your P and L and that patience and knowing what those leading indicators are and how you measure those things and make the most out of those partnerships. Whereas everyone can upload a Facebook ad and make sure that this number looks bigger than that number, and if it is you put more money. That’s so simple. You can have AI do that right away. But brand marketing I think is going to continue to become a moat for businesses as AI adoption increases.

RISHABH JAIN

Yeah, I’m curious. You said … You were talking about channels earlier, so you were talking about your e-comm channel and then your Costco, your Target, and as you’re thinking about the spend across the different marketing buckets and the fact that people are now going to buy it across all of these multiple places, not only do you have a leading-in-last-click indicator challenge, you have a wholesale-to-direct-to-consumer challenge, right? So now you have a multifaceted question of what is the right way to invest this capital? How do you think about that? How do you think about that investment payback when you’re looking at other channels? And when you think about D-to-C as traditionally described — it’s put money into Facebook, get order on website, right? To you at this scale, is that view basically no longer the right view? Is it just a many-to-many building a brand and that one-to-one is not the right way to think about it?

BRYAN CANO

It is that. I think we’re … I’m in this sort of interesting phase where I’m still operating as the former and saying like, “Hey …” It’s kind of like a microscope, Facebook ad to D-to-C, you’re zoomed all the way in. If you start to zoom out, you can start to get Facebook ad to Amazon and TikTok to D-to-C, and it’s the little … but still within digital. You zoom out a little bit more, you start to get your own stores, because if people see a True Classic ad, they’re going to look for “True Classic near me.” It pops up. You zoom out a lot and then you start to get wholesale, but not just wholesale from the commerce commercial lens, but also wholesale from the customer there is the buyer. So making sure that my ads aren’t just getting in front of people that go into the store to drive sell-through, but also getting my ads in front of people that are buyers at these retailer or at these wholesaler locations and these wholesale accounts. Right now, we are still operating in the P and L and everything is sort of mapped out in this microscope lens where we have different levels of zoom or magnification, and each one of those magnification levels has a different goal. So the D-to-C, this is the goal, but then we know there’s a halo effect, so that ladders up into this goal with Amazon and then it ladders up more with wholesale when you bake that in. This just gives us the ability to be nimble and have the ability to zoom in and zoom out and zoom in and zoom out and then look at it over a long time horizon. That is the trick with this is you can’t look at this and like, “How’s today looking?” Because your wholesale business is constantly driving awareness in itself, and so you have to look at it over the course of a two-week … every two weeks and all that. Now, what you just said is super important. That’s that sort of awkward phase that I’m in where I’m trying every day to understand what is the value of an impression for me. My TAM is a superpower. The fact that I sell T-shirts and men’s apparel is incredible. That’s an advantage. I don’t really need to think about like, “Oh, it needs to be this audience, this gender, this demographic,” like where I was at Nood. It’s very much like, “If you wear T-shirts, guess what? You’re a customer!” And so I’m thinking about CPM value and like, okay, the CPM is $7, but what is the value of that CPM? Is it $9 for me? That’s where I’m starting to make these strategic bets and thinking about brand marketing in that way from value of an impression, the cost of that impression perspective and trying to calculate ROI there. It’s very difficult. It’s very awkward. But that would be that one-to-many and I think that’s where brands start to thrive more because it lets you take bigger bets. You’re not beholden to your Meta ROAS. I remember when I was leaving Nood, I was looking for my successor, and as I was interviewing people from these massive omnichannel brands, so many times I heard the story of like, “Yeah, I led D-to-C and we launched into all these retailers, and as soon as we did, D-to-C revenue started to decline. And I couldn’t explain to leadership how we couldn’t do much about that because basically people were now shopping in store versus shopping online.” I think that’s sort of the death spiral that brands can fall into, where as you start to make yourself more available, people will have more options to shop. And yeah, your D-to-C performance may tank, and if you react to that and you say, “Whoa, we need to pull back spend,” well, guess what? Now you’re affecting the other channels. So we’re trying to avoid that trap by switching from that magnification lens to now, hey, what is the value of an impression? Knowing that we just need to meet people where they are and drive awareness and drive cultural relevance for this business, knowing that we’re starting to show up in as many places as possible.

MIKE DUBOE

Do you feel like, at the scale you’re at, you’re starting to just kind of fight the laws of gravity? I mean, one common critique of D-to-C e-commerce is that there’s no opportunities to really grow super linearly. And many founders will pitch, “Hey, the more I spend on marketing, I’m going to get more efficient or smarter.” And so the CAC is going to go down and it never really does. At best, maybe you could actually make the ROAS look better because of extracting more customer value, understanding who the best customers look like, but these businesses tend to not benefit from the same either network effects or other scale effects that might make some software businesses start to look better with scale. Is it a game where you feel like you are either opening up new pockets of audience from product line expansion? Or do you actually feel like marketing and being really good at marketing could give you opportunities to grow super linearly here?

BRYAN CANO

It’s an interesting question. I would say it’s twofold. The path of least resistance will be product expansions and giving your customers — your existing and new customers — the ability to try your business out with new products. For us, we launched curved hem, something we should have done forever ago. Soon as we did that, oh my gosh, the customer acquisition on that was incredible. It was like, whoa, the business day one, because we had this pent-up demand that we built to people that just wanted to buy the curved hem or maybe didn’t think about us before until we offer that product. Same with the Pima. The Pima launches 100% USA-grown Pima cotton. It is a silkier version of our classic shirt that grew the business, and that has acquired an entire new customer base that we previously wouldn’t have been able to sell to because they weren’t interested in the existing line. So the path of least resistance is always going to be new products. However, I do think that marketing’s important, and it’s going to be very dependent on your niche and category. If I use Nood as an example, I was pretty much creating the category at the same time as tapping into it. There’s only so many customers that are available to buy my product on a given day. And so if I scale up into that and I exceed that, then you will start to see those diminishing returns. And I think that’s what a lot of brand operators see, and that’s like, “Oh, I can’t scale.” Or as you scale, there’s the gravity just pulls you down and you get less and less efficient. But what they’re forgetting is the importance of creating their category. It’s an interesting topic for us at True Classic because, well, can I create the category of T-shirts? No, it already exists, but what I can do is I can find a way to make black T-shirts the outfit. How do I get someone to wear a black T-shirt at their wedding and make that go viral and make that a thing where someone’s wearing black T-shirts to places, areas in their life where that would be unusual or not normal. How can I influence culture in a way to make that okay? That’s a wild example. Guys wearing black T-shirts at their wedding is a little bit crazy, but the same thing happened with jeans. I can’t remember the year this happened, but this whole casual Fridays, wear your jeans to work. I think that was started by Levi’s where they made this a sort of cultural movement to make it okay to go to the office on Fridays wearing jeans. Guess what? [That] increases the usage of jeans, which makes people need to buy more jeans, which thus increases their TAM. You can’t really increase the TAM of jeans. You either want jeans or you don’t, but what you can do is make jeans more relevant and make it part of society’s cultural signaling. That’s where I think about a category expansion. That’s where marketing comes into play if you want to scale past that horizon of seeing those diminishing returns. So that’s where my head head goes at.

MIKE DUBOE

Yeah, these are great examples that highlight the importance of leaning into brand at the time you are. And one of the things I’m reflecting on here is the new crop of people who are doing brand often are starting to come from a performance background like yourself and kind of understand the appreciation for both sides. We’re at this interesting moment with AI where actually these two are often pitted against each other. AI is more geared towards the mechanical and I guess quantitative discipline of perf marketing. In reality, I think AI is often giving people the kick-start of creativity that they need to actually approach interesting brand campaign ideas and be able to execute them easier in a more efficient way. How are you guys … We want to ask questions on how you’re leveraging ad performance marketing. I think the more interesting question is what you’re doing there from a brand marketing standpoint. What are some examples of how you’re using AI for more of these brand campaign ideas that you’re discussing here?

Bryan Cano:

Yeah, I have a very tactical one, right? For April Fools', we ... In the span of 48 hours — going back to speed, like you said, and you can make this applicable to performance too, but it was very interesting for brand — within the span of 48 hours, we didn't have an April Fools' campaign, and someone took the time to send me this picture of this ... They're like, "Hey, this is kind of funny." And they took a picture of one of our models and they AI-ified him to make him look like a baby in the T-shirt. And well, I have a kids line coming up. I have a kids line launching. The boys line is launching in August next month, August 14th, and I have women's and girls launching around late October. And so I'm like, "Wait a second, this is brilliant." And so I took that photography and I built this entire brand campaign and we did what's called the baby crew. I built this landing page, had AI do all the assets, do all the copy, everything.

We did this brand campaign of basically teasing people in that we did the classic crew, we did it for babies and wrote it from the point of view of a baby and people ate it up. It did so well on LinkedIn, and actually, ironically, it did better on LinkedIn than it did anywhere else in its paid social. But we got a bunch of signups, a bunch of interest. People were like, "Wait, I thought this was real. I wanted to buy this for my son." And then you start to tease that out. And so now I'm starting to create that demand for a product line that's launching in a few months. But that was a very tactical way of using AI, skipping through all of the red tape of "We need to get a photo shoot and we need to do this and we need to map this out."

We just got to work, executed, and within 48 hours launched this April Fools' campaign with the baby crew. I think that was our first taste of actually using AI to prove to ourselves that you can move really quickly, be super gritty, and just lean in. Now, how we're currently using it is just insights. I'm really big on understanding what is culturally relevant right now and things like, okay, what is the ... using Perplexity or using ChatGT to do deep research for me to break down what is the pain points that different aspects of society, what they're having, how is it tied back to T-shirts? Just doing a bunch of research to understand those little tidbits, those golden nuggets of insights that I can then use that to tap into some sort of brand campaign. But once I have that idea, storyboarding is a lot faster now, actually developing the pitch and thinking about the personas, thinking about the audience, thinking about the TAM, is this a brand campaign that actually has enough juice and is the investment worth it?

And then looking at that through different angles, just all the research and I think work that would be done by consultants in the past, it's now a lot easier and a lot faster. And then you can do the generative aspect of it, which is the example that I gave with the baby crew. But I think AI and brand marketing, they're going to be ... There's a lot of synergy there from an insights perspective because I believe that insights is what drives brand marketing, that cultural relevance and having that data and then being able to actually develop proof-of-concepts and bring those proof-of-concepts to life. It's easy. I'll give you one more example, actually, that's very relevant. One of my creative strategists pitch to me, he's like, "Hey, there's this agency I found that'll do three AI videos for us for like $5,000." And I was like, "Have you lost your mind?

What do you mean $5,000? That's insane." And I got into ChatGPT, I started watching some YouTube videos, and within an hour I developed a Bigfoot campaign, which was like the whole brand concept was Bigfoot. We all know Bigfoot, he doesn't want to be seen. He's running away. All the clips of Bigfoot is him running away trying to hide from humans. And so I was like, well, you know what's funny? Bigfoot's actually been hiding away because shirts don't fit him. He needed a True Classic and now he's going to be hanging out with humans. And so I did this entire storyboard. I went on VO, went into Flow, mapped it out, got all the clips, put it together, we launched it — I did all that within an hour — we launched the ad. I can't believe I'm saying this because I wanted to keep this a secret. The click-through rate on that ad is a 5% click-through rate with 39-cent cost per outbound click. The comments, the virality, the amount of shares and engagement that I have on that ad is insane.

Guys, I will send you the example so you guys can look at it. But I saw that and I was like, wait a second. This was an hour of work. Someone wanted to charge me $5,000. I got this done in an hour. I broke down my steps. And now we're pumping these out. It's a little bit of this performance-brand hybrid. I would call this a little bit more performance, but when you start to look at the awareness, the engagement, the virality of this piece of content and tapping into AI and all of the sort of AI memes, cultural relevance, digitally cultural relevance, I look at it as a brand campaign, and it's crushing, and we got that done in an hour. I think brand marketing — again, the superpower there is going to be speed and execution and just roll up your sleeves and bring it to life.

Rishabh Jain:

I have a bunch of reactions to this. I don't think I would've expected any of this, especially because 20 minutes ago when you were talking about cultural relevance, you used Sydney Sweeney as an example, and where my head went was like, "Oh, there's no way AI can do cultural relevant." Because the culturally relevant thing feels, when you say that, it feels like it should be human. When you say the words "culturally relevant" to me, it feels like it should be a human thing. And that's why the Sydney Sweeney thing hits so well is because it feels like it's a human thing. And yet all of the examples you just gave are completely generated, like ideation, storyboard, the actual content itself. I guess like ... Help me understand, for someone who is resistant as marketer or to using these gen AI tools, it's like, "Oh, it's not good enough," or it's not X, it's not Y. What was the unlock that happened for you that got you to the point where you were like, "Oh yeah, I can use it in all these ways." Because in the same 20 minutes, you can go from Sydney Sweeney: brilliant, culturally relevant. Bigfoot campaign: brilliant, culturally relevant. There's a thing that happens at some point where you just go from like, "No, no, no, this is not going to work," to, "This is going to work," right? How did you get there?

Bryan Cano:

I think one, the first stage of getting there is understanding that there's two ... Cultural relevance is ... It's not something that's two-dimensional. You can find cultural relevance in different aspects. So like you said, real-world cultural relevance. But then I can go a step further in the real world and say, what's culturally relevant in San Francisco may not be culturally relevant in Austin versus Miami versus New York City. And you can then look at it from the digital side. You can go, okay, cultural relevance on X versus Facebook versus Instagram versus TikTok. I think understanding that, coming to terms with that and realizing that there's two pathways, and within those two pathways — digital, physical — there's other communities and each of those communities have these sort of microcosms of culture and what's relevant to those groups. Your job as a marketer is to try to go as wide as possible, but staying as relevant as possible at the same time. When you think about it that way, it doesn't matter if it's a Bigfoot AI-generated ad or if it's Sidney Sweeney or some other big celebrity, you just have to tap into, again, what is relevant to the audience that you're after. For me, Bigfoot was easy because, right now, those Bigfoot ads and those AI ... I don't know if you guys have seen them or if the audience has seen them, but they're very fricking popular right now. It's like everyone is pumping these out. And so people are expecting to see that. They obviously are pumping them out for a reason. They work, right? They're going viral, people are commenting, they're finding them funny. If it's a good one, they find it funny. They share. And so when you have a brand lean into that and is kind of like, "Yeah, we can do this, let's go," it's magic.

And I would say to the person that's on the fence, well, stay on the fence. That's fine. If you don't want to compete, that's totally cool with me. But these things are like lightning in a bottle. It's not going to be relevant forever. It's relevant now, but that trend is going to die, and so we have to constantly think about, okay, well, what's the next trend? What's the next thing that ... whether it's within TikTok or within Facebook or within digital as a whole, as a society — digital, I think of it as a society. I think people interact and behave differently online than they do offline. And so you think about it that way and you're like, okay, wait a second. Yeah, there's two types of cultures — swim lanes — here. How can I tap into both or one or the other? [It] basically boils down to where your audience is. And I think coming to terms with that, thinking about it that way, it starts to make a lot more sense for me where I don't need it to be perfect. I just need it to be genuine and native to the community that I'm trying to tap into.

Mike Duboe:

I want to spend a minute on some of the culture and organizational issues around this. Your example earlier when you mentioned spinning up this Bigfoot campaign in an hour from idea to eventual deployment, you're running marketing there. You don't need, really, permissions to get this stuff out. And I think you are very calibrated to the type of speed that is required to be successful in this environment. If you're a more junior or mid-level marketer ... Or, how do you enable people lower in the org to operate this way? What advice might you have to other heads of marketing who are trying to instill a similar culture but are maybe a little bit behind?

Bryan Cano:

Yeah, I'll start with the latter. You have to make it okay. I think right now there's a lot of shame for people to use AI. They feel like they're cheating. They feel like, "Oh, my boss thinks this is lazy." I think leaders have to educate and say like, "No, no, no, this is a force multiplier. Please use it." Now, you want to train and coach and mentor, right? Don't just use it and send it to me blindly. Use it, read it, edit it, make it your own. Where does it make sense? Where does it not? Really use the tool. It's not just a ... You can't one-shot a brief and be like, "It's perfect!" You got to talk, you got to interact, you got to go through your visions, you got to take what it gave you and then upload it back up and say, "Okay, now tell me why this won't work? And what are the issues with this brief?"

And that's all the stuff that I think leaders should be teaching people. And then I would say make it fun, make it an exercise, something that I keep playing around with right now, knowing the success of this Bigfoot ad and knowing how much we've leaned into AI is I want to have my team — they haven't heard this yet but they're going to get this exercise soon — where I'm going to have them pick their favorite Super Bowl commercial, and I'm going to force them to recreate that commercial with AI. It's like a great exercise where they have something as inspiration that they can try to recreate, and I hope there are some good ones out there. I'm going to do it too. And we can create some good ones and we can go, "Look at that, guys. This is a $20 million commercial and you just made this in a couple hours with AI. Look at the possibilities."

And I want them to open their minds about what's capable. I've heard of other leaders, they'll do games, they'll do competitions, they'll do like, "Hey, everybody do a hackathon and the best app gets 50 bucks." I think Sean at Ridge, he does games. People ... they have to code a video game, and if they do it, they get some prize. So make it a team thing, really push people to spend time to use it.

As for juniors, let's say you don't have the privilege of having a leader who thinks that way. I would encourage you to use it. Think about it as a leveraged creator for yourself. Again, just one-shotting. The output is not it at all. You do have to learn how to use it. And then find ways where you can make a bigger impact at the organization by using the tool. And when you can do that and you can say, "Oh yeah, I used AI to do two more things or three more things than I typically would do in a week where I was able to do it faster or cheaper or better," then I think leaderships and the teams around them will start to go, "Whoa, wait a second. This person's onto something." If you're in an organization that doesn't appreciate that, guess what? You have now become a highly sought after candidate at another organization that will really appreciate that. So don't let that discourage you because it's only a matter of time before that becomes a requirement in the job description. So keep doing it. And if you need to do it manually or, sorry, edit your work because it's going to get you in trouble, then do so. But I wouldn't allow any leader right now to discourage anyone from using AI. It's just going to set you up for failure in the future.

Rishabh Jain:

Hey, Bryan. So I'm curious, these things that you're doing, how are you thinking about — and this might be very tactical — but how do you think about what tool to use and keeping up with what is possible across the various tools?

Bryan Cano:

Man, that's a great question. There is so much out there. You blink and there's another tool on X. Look, what I've just ... I went through this period where I was trying to, like, every tool, I was like, "What's Sean saying? What's Rishabh saying?" Like, save all these bookmarks, screenshots. I have so many screenshots of all these apps, [I] couldn't keep up with anything. What I landed on is if you can get really good at ChatGPT, you probably realize 90% of the value. So I've kind of gone back to the simplicity of just get really good at ChatGPT and within Chat, if you need a tool to help you create an image or you need a tool to help you do a video, you'll find it. But I think chasing this shiny object and distributing your time across a hundred different tools is not going to be as effective as just getting really good at one and then going wide as needed.

It reminds me of the concept of the T-shaped marketer. So a lot of performance marketing leaders before this D-to-C digital-first world existed, a lot of us started as paid ads people. Most of us were media buyers. Well, guess what? Over time, media buying required creative strategy. So then you become a creative strategist. And then you're like, well, I'm sending all this traffic to a website, and so I got to learn a little bit of CRO. So boom, I go into CRO. Well, CRO requires an understanding of analytics and Google Analytics and GA4, so I'm learning that now as well. And then guess what? Oh, there's these LTV curves. What's that about? So you start to learn about LTV, and then you're like, oh, well now I have to understand finance because what is this CAC-to-LTV payback thing? If I can convince my finance guy to let me afford a higher CAC knowing that it's going to pay back, that'll make my job easier.

So you start to go wide, but you think about that one discipline and then you start to think about the other disciplines that are tangential to that one to help that single discipline makes your job easier. I think it's very similar. So I would encourage everybody to just get really good at prompting, get really good at ChatGPT. Whether it's ChatGPT or Perplexity, it doesn't really matter. I think the fundamentals are there. And then once you get really good at that and you're doing generative stuff and you just have a strong foundation, you can start to expand outward. For me now it's ChatGPT, I use Midjourney, and then I'm using a lot of the Veo 3 stuff right now. You can go with all these other tools that are building, but guess what? You're going to try to go learn a tool that's probably got $1 million or $500,000 of funding, or you can learn from OpenAI, the people that are ... They have teams of scientists that are working on this every hour to try to make it better. So I think we're going to find an interesting compression that we're in right now where everybody wants to build an AI tool. And then I think there's going to be a lot of either mergers or tools that are going to become obsolete as OpenAI continues to broaden itself out. I mean, it wasn't long ago before open AI couldn't do any images. Now you can create static images with one single prompt. So I think, just get really good at the single tool and then that'll take you a lot further.

Mike Duboe:

So if you extrapolate all this stuff, let's say five years in the future, how do you think about right-sizing marketing teams? Do they inevitably get smaller? Should they expand based on everything you're saying and marketing becoming so critical and there's more alpha in it? How do you think about that?

Bryan Cano:

It's interesting. I think that it's going to vary by organization, but the majority are going to seek ... There's two schools of thought, I think, and then maybe they blend into each other. One school of thought of brand operators that I've talked to, they're looking at this as a force multiplier. So retaining the existing team, but now making that team be able to provide a higher output, higher quality of output, faster output. It's like, we're going to need these people anyway. We're going to eventually grow into the size, we can afford them now, let's keep them, and then guess what? We don't need to hire any more. That's it. The team kind of stays the same, but now we can have the output of a brand that's 40% bigger or 100% bigger, twice the size.

And then there's the group of people that look at this as a leverage creator where you need to streamline your operations and you can start cutting and you can lean into the tools that say, "Well, we don't really need a copywriter because we can do it with ChatGPT, so let's save ourselves that overhead. We don't need copywriters anymore." I'm kind of in the middle where I will take that copywriter, I'm going to say, congratulations, you have been promoted to product marketing. We still need product marketing and copywriting is no longer just like a thing that you can do because I can go and prompt that. So why don't you get really good at understanding how you use AI to understand the pain points, the needs, the triggers for how you best sell this product. And then you use AI to write the copy and the briefs and then you distribute that across the entire organization.

So that's a bit of leverage creation, but also Op-Ex savings in that I don't need to hire a product marketer anymore. I can take someone that is — call it for what it is — a little bit more junior, has cost savings, and train them to be as good as a product marketer. So I'm saving the Op-Ex of not having to hire an expensive product marketer, but then I'm also creating that force multiplier, taking my copywriter and getting them to a place where they can develop. And they're so grateful for that because I'm future-proofing that individual. Now their skills are extending beyond just copy. Now they're using AI to be able to do a lot more for an organization. That's the swim lane that I'm navigating. I'm finding that to be the most successful with teams, I think there's a lot more appreciation. There's a lot more willingness to lean in and learn because they know that another organization could have just laid that role off or not done anything and then allow that person to become obsolete. But I think that what we're going to see is ... Sort of the natural progression is going to be brands will get smaller or they're going to stay the same size.

Rishabh Jain:

Oh, actually, I wanted to ask both of you, Mike and Bryan, especially with a lot of these AI companies, especially the coding AI agents, right? A very common question people will ask is, do you think it makes a 10x engineer 100x, or a 1x 10x? And which one of those two is the more important outcome of these tools? Because, Bryan, I would argue you're the prototypical 10x marketer, and it's hard to say that these tools have not improved your output. At the same time, you're saying the 1x is becoming a [10x] — and of course these things are never perfectly separated, but if you were to ask, or, if you were to answer the question, which one is more important, the 1x to 10x, or which one are you seeing more of? Is it the 1x to 10x or 10x to 100x? Which one do you think it is? And yeah, Mike, I'm curious, when you're looking at other companies, do you use that same framing? Or what are you seeing?

Bryan Cano:

I'll go first. I'm seeing a lot more 10x to 100x because the 10x people, they are, I mean, that's just how they're built. They're looking for that competitive advantage. They are athletes, they're competing. They're like, "Oh, AI, this is going to make me better? Heck yeah, I'm trying to dominate my competition by not even making it a fair competition." So I think that we're seeing a lot more 10x to 100x because they are just natural early adopters. That said, the volume of that group is going to be a lot lower than the 1x to 10x. And I think that there's a lot of people out there that have the potential to be 10x marketers or 10x operators, 10x independent contributors. They have that potential, they just haven't maybe gotten the training or the exposure to do so.

And so when I look at the cost assessment of it and knowing that I managed the marketing P and L, I do have a couple of these. I have very few 10x people and now getting them over to the 100x and they're doing that on their own. They don't need a lot of that coaching. They're great as this. They're going to get there. But where I can make some serious magic happen is if I can start to pinpoint who are the 1x people that have that 10x potential and then helping them get to 10x. Because once they're at 10x, hopefully that momentum just continues to grow with that person. Not just that, but the two salary ranges on the 10x person versus the 1x person, if it's the same salary range, you have a major problem in your organization.

But for me, at least, it's a massive difference. It's insane. We lean a lot into talent overseas and they're incredible. And my gosh, some of these are the hardest-working individuals, and I know they have so much grit that if I can just get them the right environment with the right coaching, the right mentorship on how do they really leverage these tools, they're going to be unstoppable. I think they're going to actually outperform my current 10 to 100 because they just have so much focus in this and desire to grow that that will naturally make them [finger snaps]. It's just going to be a massive momentum flywheel.

Mike Duboe:

Yeah, and I want to ... I will answer the question briefly, Rishabh, I also want to ask Bryan, just to preview the question: When you're recruiting nowadays in a hiring process, what are the attributes you look for that give you a confidence someone is going to be 10x upon entering versus a 1x? And how has that differed from what you're looking for before, specifically with marketers.

And Rishabh, maybe just to quickly answer ... My answers align with Bryan's. I think it's hard to answer in generic terms, but I will try to genericize it. Across companies, I'm seeing more commonly that these tools — and, more importantly, the way of working — is more likely to take someone from 10x to 100x, and it actually is also more likely to expose that a 1x might be sub-1x. Taking the 1x to a 10x, I think I've seen that be less common because nowadays we are able to judge people more by their output, so there's a little bit less to hide behind. And a lot of the attributes that make someone more likely to be high output and high quality of output are actually supercharged in today's environment. And that could actually expose some weaknesses as well. So anyway, just ... But Bryan, for you, in the marketing hiring process, how have you changed your evaluation criteria? What are you looking for to give you confidence that someone's at 10x?

Bryan Cano:

Yeah, it's a lot more soft skills. So every time I interview someone, I always do the STAR interview format: situation, task, action, results. And the questions I typically ask are rooted around understanding this person's attention to detail, their intellectual curiosity. Are they just a naturally curious person? If you start to ask them why, you start to think about what questions do you ask yourself before you dove straight into that project or why did you take those actions? What are the questions that they're thinking about before describing the situation? Attention to detail, intellectual curiosity, and then just a sense of ownership. Is this someone that has demonstrated an ability to see a problem and just say, "You know what? This affects me. I'm going to just take charge here." Or not even take charge, but just be the squeaky wheel and hold people accountable to make sure that this thing gets done.

So those are some of the skills that I'm looking for now. I think that those are very difficult to train. And Mike, earlier you said that sometimes these tools can help identify the people that are sub-1. I couldn't agree more. And a lot of times what I'm seeing, those groups of people, it's because they lack two or three of those categories. How that's varied from previous hiring, I mean, previous hiring was very technical, but that doesn't matter anymore. Any technical response you can just put into ChatGPT and it's going to give you something that's 90% there. Experience comes into play a little bit where, okay, I have the experience to know that maybe you shouldn't 5x your brand spend because ChatGPT saw that the number for ROAS was bigger than the others. That's a very commonsense thing that the AI doesn't have the context for.

So that's still important, but knowing how to set up a campaign, knowing what are the funnels and the emotional and functional benefits of a product and all of these technical things that you learn that you would typically be very reliant on experience for, I think those are becoming less important. And the soft skills are more things that I think you have to look out for because if you get that, you get the tools and you have a little bit of experience, you have a leader on your team that can help with that experience, closing that experience gap, then you are set up for success and it's going to be better than the people that just aren't curious and are going to be waiting on you to tell them how to use the AI. And they're just going to stop their learning right there.

Mike Duboe:

I want to change gears. So we've spoken a lot about acquisition marketing and growing your user base, your customer base. These tools also give us great potential to better understand our existing customers and more smartly deploy touchpoints against them as well. I know you guys have historically been pretty smart in how you handle SMS marketing and more customer journeys. Maybe share what's really working for you there and how has AI transformed how you're doing customer lifecycle marketing?

Bryan Cano:

Yeah, I mean, it's just been a massive enablement of tools — sorry, of insights — so I'm really big right now on what I'm ... clustering, segment clustering. So download as much of your data as possible — sales data — by zip code. I think you can tell a lot by someone's zip code and what is the AOV that they purchased. And then their names, because that's indicative of their gender. And you upload all that and you start to do this segment clustering to understand based on LTVs or first product purchased or just in general, what are the different personas? What are the opportunities? What's the repeat purchase behavior? Was this someone that in this zip code with this AOV and these products launched? Was it a one-time customer or is this someone that has a high LTV? And you start to just get really ... Your world opens up in terms of the amount of insights available.

So I'm really big into that because I think that lifecycle marketing starts with acquisition and you got to acquire the right customers or else you're just going to be acquiring a bunch of one-time people, one-time customers, which Rishabh knows that I'm very familiar with from previous roles. And then from there, I think just carrying those insights over, understanding what are people buying, what makes sense. When I worked on ... In a previous role, I did a lot of work with Macy's and Wayfair and a bunch of other retail stores. And something that always stuck out with me is this notion of customer development and product analytics. What should you give? What should you advertise or promote to someone for the second purchase based on what they bought [in] their first purchase? All of that information is not just more easily accessible. So it helps shape strategy, it helps you make sure that you're showing the right product to the right person at the right time.

And then in terms of tools, one that I'm really interested in is this email platform called Arita, which is basically doing a lot of analysis on your customer behavior and even when they come on site, what they bought, time spent on site, how often they're opening up their emails, the frequency of messages that you're sending them through email. And it's basically predictive, right? So you have this big segment and it's moving people in and out of these audiences dynamically based on their predictive engine. We're still very early on on this, so I have no data, I can't speak to it, but in theory it sounds really interesting. I'm excited to test it. And I think little stuff like that where we can start to create things in a more dynamic fashion so that we stop annoying people. If you don't want to get an email from us, let's not send you an email.

Saves me money. I don't want to send you a text message that costs me a couple cents each one. Or if you are already going to convert, right? And the predictive engine can understand that, I will save us all the money and time and energy in the world and we won't send that email. So I'm thinking about stuff like that. And then the other thing that's really exciting is with a partner called Blotout, which is helping us try to understand new versus repeat — new versus repeat site behavior, frequency of site behavior, and then trying to personalize the website dynamically based on that frequency of site behavior. If this is a new customer, new site visitor, we should arrange the website in certain ways. The product's tiles should be rearranged. Let's show them the bestseller, the product that people typically buy first, [that] 80% of customers buy first. And then if you're a repeat customer and you've already bought that product, let's introduce you to new categories and rearrange the entire website. So those are the things where I'm getting some excitement where I think you can increase relevance, you can increase personalization.

Rishabh Jain:

That's awesome. So just looking ahead while we're on the topic of things that you're excited to explore and try, looking forward, 12- to 18-month time horizon, what are the things that you feel like AI will enable for you that you're most excited to introduce to your workflow or to how you do marketing?

Bryan Cano:

I think about AI in three categories. It's generative, which we talked a lot about today. You've got the insights and then you've got operations, like actually doing the work. I think the operations is one area where I'm really excited. How do I get it to start doing the media buy. How do I get it to develop an ad concept, download it, upload it into Facebook, launch it, monitor the performance, and then based on that performance, create the next ad. That entire sequencing, that would so cool. And so I'm excited for stuff like that. Ending on the insights piece, right now, insights is very prompt-oriented, so you have to have a very clear understanding of how to prompt. You have to also have that intellectual curiosity. I was on a call earlier day with some teammates and they're like, "Oh, developing ad creatives with AI takes so long."

I'm like, "What are you guys talking about?" I just started in there on the call, they're complaining about how long it takes, I'm just like, "Here's the prompt, guys." And I hit enter and I was like, "Boom, now you take this, you copy-paste it over here." But because I've been doing this for two, three years, I was doing this at Nood, right? So I've been using AI from a long time. You remember, Rishabh, my marketing team at Nood kind of forced me, the size of that team forced me to have to use AI to create leverage because I did not have ... I had a marketing team of two people. We were a $60 million brand with two people. But they're new at this. They haven't explored all that. So because of that, prompting is actually a blocker for a lot of people, for the majority of people, where they don't know how to prompt.

And so I'm excited about getting to a place where in the next 12 to 18 months, you don't have to prompt. Instead, the AI is integrated into your businesses, is actually proactively telling you stuff. You wake up in the morning and you see the Slack message from an AI and it says, "Hey, Rishabh, guess what? Your website conversion rate yesterday dropped around 30%. It looks like these products went out of stock. Or you loaded up an image that has this size. So here's the recommendation. Would you like me to take action on that?" And you just have this thing working in the background for you, proactively prompting you as the human, saying like, "Hey, I'm requesting your permission to do this action. I'm requesting your permission to take this action. By the way, I just did this analysis. I'm requesting your permission to take this action."

When we get to that world, it's going to be absolutely insane. And I worry for the brands that are not leaning into AI because they're the ones that are going to look at that and go, "Oh, whoa, safety, brand safety!" and all these things. Whereas I'm going to be leaning all in on that. Please, if I could have an army of AI agents working for me 24/7 and I wake up and all I have to do is read and approve, deny, oh, let me handle that one. I'll let the human handle that one. Hey, tackle that one. And just go through. That's going to be such an insane force multiplier. Something like that I think in 12 to 18 months is going to be really interesting.

Mike Duboe:

Bryan, I know we're at time. This has been a great conversation and I think you've painted a very compelling view of what budding marketers can aspire to in this e-commerce world. And I think my personal view, having lived it a long time ago is, I think the job is more fun than ever, given how quickly it's moving and all the tools at your disposal, and it feels like you guys are in a great position to make best use of them. Thanks for sharing all these insights with us and we have a bunch to follow up on here. And so we really, really appreciate the time.

Bryan Cano:

Thanks, guys.

Rishabh Jain:

Yeah man, thank you. And please, we'll make sure we got a link to that Bigfoot ad. Yeah. That way people can watch the ad and buy some T-shirts. Yeah. Thanks, man.

Bryan Cano:

That's right, that's right. Cool. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me.