Zach (02:16):

We're continuing with geek week, uh, where we met, uh, today's guests, uh, just a few weeks ago at their event here in Austin. One of the best collections of the top media buyers and advertisers in the world, all rolling up to this place. And, uh, today's guest is a, it's pretty much the premier go to creative shop when it comes to working with, uh, direct to consumer and e-commerce advertisers as clients spend upwards of $500 million a year in ad spend, and clients include thrash CEO launch and a slew of including disco, hydrant, DFO, global, and many more. I'm excited to bring them on the show. They've got some amazingly, um, uh, beautiful, like visually stunning video ads and I'm excited to get into, uh, but ultimately the place to turn clicks into conversions. Cody Iverson. Welcome to this show.

Cody (03:24):

Hey gentlemen. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Zach Dylan. It's an absolute pleasure, man. It was great meeting you guys in Austin and, uh, excited to, uh, share what we have for your audience. Yeah,

Zach (03:33):

Man. So Le get them up to speed on, uh, what is [inaudible] media and, uh, what are you guys up to these days? Sure.

Cody (03:43):

So Viscount media is a creative agency. We help seven to 10 figure brands scale aggressively on social media, through conversion focused, direct response creatives. Uh, currently we're just scaling dude. That's what we're up to today. Um, helping brands really like break through and get past, uh, iOS 14. Uh, a lot of things are changing then in the landscape in terms of what is resonating with their, uh, customers. So staying on top of that and helping them stay profitable.

Zach (04:16):

Well, what I'm excited about this is we've had a couple different creative folks on the show, but no one that influencers or touches the level of spend that you guys do at biz cap, right? I mean, in terms of creative, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is not a, your, your typical client is not somebody spending, you know, five, 10 grand a month on ads. It's, it's somebody that's spending seven, eight figures plus, uh, and scaling aggressively. Is that fair to say who your, who your typical client is and who you guys are working with? Yeah,

Cody (04:50):

Very much so. And, um, you know, we work pretty much. The criteria is that they have to be a seven figure business. And from there, um, it really gives us a lot of opportunity to know what's working quickly in the market with how much is being spent, which gives us an edge to always stay on top and like spot trends.

Zach (05:08):

It is man. That's, that's literally like the counter to why people should work with ad agencies and not like bring it in-house is just the perspective right. Of here's here's the creative trend of what's working now. And if you just got like one creative, like internally, uh that's uh, you know, you don't have that range of, of exposure. It makes a ton of sense. Yeah. All right, man, let's get into it. What's this rich ed what's working now

Cody (05:39):

Right now, what's working exceptionally well is going to be your, what we call UGC demos. The UGC demo is a spin on your traditional UGC content, except there is a videographer involved. Now we're not going crazy with the videographer, but we want to add engaging elements or we're going to add cuts pans POV's. Um, but we want to remain in the realm of authenticity. Almost look almost as if it looks like it was made from, uh, like a YouTube influencer, a content creator, Tik TOK right now is currently like influencing a lot of the styles of ads that are working successfully.

Zach (06:24):

I liked all of these like pants. So like break down, like the, just the little cuts that you guys do. Uh, so EGC demo, you've got pants, like, what are the, how would you kind of break down, like all your little, like three second spots?

Cody (06:37):

So we do four second spots, um, that allows for the viewer to be able to read the caption if it's like a print caption, as well as taking the visuals. Um, yeah, it's different if it's, um, audio speaking that just flows with, you know, the audio there, but, um, the way we break down our ads is all down to like an element level across any ad you'll ever see. That's successful. They're all made up of elements. Not every ad has the same element, but when you combine them into different formulas, they work differently successfully. So you have your hooks, you have your pain, you have your authority, um, product demonstration, product result, uh, use case UGC lines, CTA guarantees. There's a lot of different elements,

Speaker 5 (07:31):

Man. This is like the playbook. I love it. Uh,

Zach (07:34):

That's awesome. So let's just look, um, I'm holding this card, right? Like in the card space, which we're in some of the best ads I've seen in the, um, consumer, like neobank space, uh, like, um, company called current and Moneyline is just like a lot of females holding up flash in the card, zooming in on the card. And then basically they'll do like a digital print, like of the benefits of the card, like next to it. And then it's the classic like kind of zoom in on the, on the lines and stuff like that. But, um, so you guys crank stuff like that out every day, all day, any day, seven days a week, when it comes to you, like walk us through your process of taking inventory of, you know, their current creative and like what you guys would recommend for next steps or what they need to scale up. Sure.

Cody (08:37):

So the very first thing we're going to do is ask our partners to fill out a creative brief. The creative brief is what allows us to work as an extension of their in-house team to give us the knowledge that their team would be expected to have to create their ads. It's a, it's a lengthy, it's a lengthy beast. It's like 57 slides, but it's everything that we've ever encountered that we've had to come back to our partners and ask them about. So we want to be able to get all this information from the start so we can move quickly. Um, from there, that's going to include such things as their claims we can or cannot make, uh, PR, uh, as well as the most important things would be past successful and unsuccessful creatives. 10 of them paired along with winning ad, copy the lenders. Those are the main things, cause we're going to want to, uh, align the ads, uh, either with what their audience has seen in the past or with where the traffic's going.

Cody (09:37):

But from there, we're going to use our proprietary system. The proprietary system is, uh, a collection of proven frameworks that time after time, I've produced six and seven figure winning results. And we're going to start there, see which ones are resonating with the audience, taking in elements from the past experience and success that they've had. And then from there, after the first round of content creation, we're going to go 80 20. We're going to produce 80% of the next round of content in the winning frameworks for your audience. And we'll use the 20% to continue testing new frameworks, new offers, new angles, try to expand it to a different part of demographics. There's such

Zach (10:16):

A playbook for you. This is like, this is like Cody could be doing this interview and asleep right now. It's

Dylan (10:24):

Now out of curiosity with the kind of creatives y'all make, what's been the biggest budget put behind one of these videos, like a single video. Y'all kind of create, I'm kind of curious there,

Cody (10:34):

Man. Like, that's not, I'll give you the answer. It'll be like 10 K, but that's not what we're interested in. So for anybody who's spending the rest of the way on Facebook knows that if you pump a lot of cash into it, it's going to die off probably within a month. So we make all of our content like modular. So it's interchangeable and you're able to use it for months to come. Uh, when you begin using or begin creating variations, but like from a baseline price point, like we're probably one of the cheapest in the industry because we are marketers at heart. We came from the e-com space and a lot of those production houses are raping in their pricing. It's just absurd. Let's talk about it. Let's, let's talk about it. Uh, you want to take a, you know, Squatty, potty videos, those videos, that's like 250 K yeah,

Zach (11:33):

Yeah. It's a gamble.

Cody (11:36):

Um, we just recently did 200 videos for a single contract and that was like just under 60 K. Wow. You got to realize that like all of the content that's working successfully for ads, the ones that are native looking to the platform and most of them, none of them, there's no professional content creators on these platforms. They're just regular old people. So like we shoot to that level. So it looks like it can be a part of what they would typically like to watch.

Dylan (12:10):

So if you have a brand who's a lot more established on Facebook versus one who's killing on Tik TOK, you kind of, I imagine those kind of creative groups, you kind of dive into what is the platform that we're looking to hit the hardest with some kind of curious how you kind of go for that cross platform approach? Cause I mean, with Tik TOK videos, those are hard to fricking make work on Facebook and vice versa. It seems, seems like these days.

Cody (12:30):

So Tik TOK is the only one that like doesn't have as much crossover in terms of like elements because their videos are so simple, but anything from Facebook we can take to YouTube, we're going to have to restructure. And the frameworks that we're using, not all of the same frameworks work, but there are ones that have crossover Snapchat is similar to tick-tock. Um, but pretty much I would say 70% of our videos are UGC driven. So we do have some like grace or like, um, ability to be able to cross over there.

Dylan (13:08):

Curiosity, when you all kind of come up with this UGC, I know you had some bad-ass actors back at the

Cody (13:13):

Geek week and whatnot. So I'm kind of curious,

Dylan (13:16):

What's your main way to kind of find good talent, you know, brands are looking to kind of, you know, get some bad content there for the most part. Cause I feel like that's one of the hardest parts, the creator marketplace isn't that bad, but I mean,

Cody (13:26):

It's, it's, you know? Yeah, yeah. So you're going to, there's really like three options, four options, uh, search the Facebook groups in your hometown. Uh, you know, so for us, it's Las Vegas. We do Las Vegas actors. Luckily for us people who haven't made it in LA yet live here in Vegas. So our book of talent here locally is over 900 people. Now, if we need to go remote, um, you can use, uh, backstage, you can use, um, there's a lot of platforms, creative platforms, uh, incense is one that we use. Um, so things like that. And then, um, go to Instagram and just do like a hashtag your city model, hashtag your city actor or whatever you're trying to look for. Um, sometimes when we were looking for plus size models, we would do like a hashtag plus size Las Vegas, man. That's fricking brilliant. That's killer that are there. Well, this has all been really good. Let's

Dylan (14:33):

Hear about some nightmare stories, man. I want to hear about a poor that just kind of crashed and burned. He thought would probably kill him. Right.

Cody (14:43):

man. I mean, it happens a lot more than you think. Like we're good, but like ultimately we're not better than the algorithm of Facebook. Um, so a poor ad that crashed and burn, uh, you know, truly the only time that it hurts is if we're going to do like a video, that's a little bit higher budget, like, uh, you know, $5,000 video, those ones hurt dude. Um, they take a lot more to write and I've written a couple of them that like I thought were just absolute gems. Uh, they made me laugh. Uh, but that was probably the issue was that they made me laugh. Uh, a lot of the times when you try to get into like the funny you'll lose, like side of the salesmanship needed, you know? Um, I guess another, yeah, there's just too many of them to like really give you like a big like story, but I guess some of the funny ones would be, or like burns would be, uh, when the camera's still rolling and we're doing like some just like funny on camera, like dancing goofy or like weird. And then editors like put it into the video and the client like just runs it. We've got some really funny like videos that are out there that have like that should have never made it embarrassing stuff for some people. Um, so kind of blooper reel style. That's really what it is, man. And like, it can also work because like people relate to it. Like it takes it, it brings the ad to feel like less of an ad.

Dylan (16:28):

I feel like it's gotta be at the end of it though, you know? And I can't really squeeze that in the front or the beginning. Cause yeah, it's kind of like the, the credits, like see how it was kind of made to an extent, but yeah, it's always funny as, man.

Cody (16:40):

Yeah. Oh man. Some of like the, really the only other like horror stories is like, we've gotten a lot better at this now is like creating an ad going through it, you know? Uh, and then the client is like, this is not it. This is not it at all. They're very unhappy. Um, luckily this hasn't happened in many months, which is thanks to our creative brief, but uh, back when it was just a couple of us, like, you know, we were just slang and ads trying to go as fast as we could.

Zach (17:14):

What do you think, I guess, uh, differences from some of the, um, kind of plug and play content sites like incense and below, um,

Cody (17:24):

Bill, do you have

Zach (17:26):

A preference between those two or, and then like how would, how would you kind of educate somebody that's like, eh, I'll just go on there and kind of like pay 50 bucks versus all right. I've tried that a couple of times. It's not working for me. You know, maybe I should really consider, um, vis cap or, or someone like this cap to take over here. Gosh,

Dylan (17:47):

Below it's a numbers game where you're caught. I think I've gotten like 20 videos to of it.

Cody (17:54):

So, uh, to answer the first question incense, um, but, uh, so the main difference is repeatability. Okay. If you want to be able to do those content creators successfully, you need to know what is leading to the success. That's the main difference here is that we understand all of the elements and how these things need to be structured for them to be successful for them to open up with relatable topic for them to grab someone's attention for them to weave in a bit of story, but not get lost, not let the viewer get lost, um, and then really just remain genuine. So that's the differences. Like we know how to recreate that at scale, without having to play a numbers game without having to waste time resources, someone's got to be reaching out to all 20 of those people. Now it's a VA position, so it's nothing to worry about. But, um, you can't like successfully continue to scale if you don't know how to repeat it or you have to play a numbers game.

Zach (18:53):

Yeah. I think that's really well said, right? Like there's no, it is a numbers game and it's not formulaic. Um, and you guys have this like literally modular, um, specific approach to, um, the ads and sometimes it can be scientific sometimes again, like it's not, but, uh, um, but yeah, I think that's actually really, really well said. And you might, you know, below an instance might be cheap to get into. Right. But, uh, you know, if it's a numbers game, it could like, you know, flip the other way where it's like, okay, this is just, you know, inefficient and you're not getting the product to the creative that you

Cody (19:37):

Need. I recommend both. Um, there's definitely a good, like you'll get some good stuff. Um, and even if their whole video isn't good, you can chop it up and then put it into like additional like direct response style ads and networks exceptionally well. And you're able to do that, get that content from them for quite a bit cheaper. Now,

Dylan (19:59):

What are your thoughts on like when it comes to this talent out there, do y'all give them a whole kind of framework or do you kind of say, Hey, here's the product, here's some of the value props, just do your thing, kind of a deal. Pretty much say, Hey, here's the first have a product right here, the pain point, et cetera, et cetera. I'm kind of curious how you format that to Mayo work. I feel like the more direction the tougher kind of gets for them to be themselves with the product.

Cody (20:21):

So we have, depending on the framework where they're going to do it, like teleprompter scripted, because it's going to be a more complex script and we need them to be on point. I would say 90% though, of what we're doing these days is all bullet points. So we lay out the structure for them and just provide them like a couple things to say, and then it's up to them to weave the sentences together, but we'll shoot it modularly. So we'll give them like two or three lines. Boom, that's it. Two or three lines. Boom, that's it. And we'll cut it up because like, if you notice, if you guys go to YouTube or any of these like, uh, platforms where you're going to watch somebody like tell you about something an influencer, it's never just one straight take, they're chopping it up. So people are used to seeing chops in the video so much so that when you don't see it, it's almost like, are you really a real person? Yeah. Yeah. So the, the other benefit to having it done in short little segments is that you're able to chop it up. But when people start talking really fast like this, you don't have the opportunity to cut the clips because there's no spaces. That's the story of me, man. I talked too fast.

Zach (21:39):

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Dylan (22:43):

This has been super juicy. Let's go ahead and take a hard left turn with the name of the podcast. It's pretty close to a book, you know, so we try and find the kind of crossroads of marketing, the financial side of things. So, I mean, based off your expertise, what kind of financial tips or principles can you kind of share with the audience, whether it's business, personal client expectations, but it's for videos kind of when

Cody (23:04):

You go there. Um, the main thing is that you don't need to go super big budget, overproduced videos. You can save a lot more cash if you like to fit natively on the platform. So for any brands that are looking to have content made, don't always feel like you have to go to like the big marquee people who charge a ton way over overpriced. Um, but for anyone, I mean, one of the principles that we live by is like customer retention. Um, if we want to grow a hundred percent over this next year, we want to grow more than that, but let's say a hundred percent, uh, then if we moved 20% of our customers, we now have to grow 120%, which makes it more difficult. So like customer retention, client retention is like the number one thing we care for most to a point where like we go out of pocket or come in, even on many contracts just to continue to continue, like get it right. I want to be with someone for five years, 10 years. And sometimes like, if we need to work a little bit harder or spend some extra cash to continue testing or get another model back, whatever it is like through a crazy idea, that's like out of budget, but we think is going to crush it. Hey, if we crush it, they come back. Oh yeah. And

Dylan (24:28):

Hey, it's way easier. It's hanging than having to go get 20 new clients. You know, that's very free conditioner. And yeah. Now out of curiosity, when it comes to some of the brands you are working with that are spending, you know, shoot a million a month, 500 K a month, what do they spend on creative? You know, these new tests. Cause I felt like it's a hard thing to kind of gauge and you don't always have to be overproduced, but do you ever kind of see some little, you know, some correlation there or just kind of, Hey, it's, it's, it's very hidden.

Cody (24:55):

Yeah. So as far as the budgets go and what people are spending, like, you know, it ranges, there's seven figure brands we work with there's 10 figure brands. Some brands spend upwards of 200 to 500 pounds, just the tests, but that's a lot of creatives that they're doing. And they're also like doing things that are a bit more ballsy, we'll say in terms of their testing. Uh, but the rule of thumb is like, you always want to test so that here, like you can do it without having to waste a bunch of cash if you're only testing new creatives. So you're using proven ad copy, proven thumbnails, and it's better to go for getting each ad enough, spend based off of your own brands metrics rather than letting the API, uh, or the algorithms and like decide, Hey, out of these four ads in this ad set, like this one gets the spend. We don't know like what the other three ads could have done. Yeah. And like, then you're wasting cash because you're basing a, let's call it a $2,000 video, a thousand dollars video, $500 video off of your test, which may be 300 for that ad set. Now you've got three ads in there. If they're a thousand bucks a piece that's 3000 bucks that you just wasted over a $300 test too, man.

Dylan (26:22):

So it seems to be kind of pretty fricking case by case there because yeah, the algorithm sucks when it comes to create a test and you throw four ads in an audience, Hey, one's going to flourish, but the other, you know, so that makes complete sense. There will shoe snap, man. What's next for you? Anything you kind of want to share with the audience, how can we kind of support you? You got a Lander over there, so mean give the people what they want.

Cody (26:45):

Um, yeah, I mean, I would just like advise like everyone, you know, um, pay attention to making sure that the content looks native. Um, pretty ads don't always work well, make sure that you're speaking to people's desires their emotions and you know, we'd love to help you, even if we're not able to work together, but, um, you know, just kind of share some info, look at your guys', uh, creatives, give you some feedback really at the end of the day, like there's enough business and knowledge to go around for all of us who are in this space to truly win. So I think the more that we can all collaborate, like the more we can all win. So, um, reach out there's a land are going to be attached, but, uh, ultimately until new scale, a man breaks records. Yeah. Uh, what's next for us? We're adding, uh, tech, uh, we're adding MRR right in our own influencer, uh, platform. Uh, we got a new office we're scaling up to like 16 shoot teams per day. So that'll be 16 times three, a day 30, 54 shoots minimum per day, like 250 roughly shoots, uh, per week. So lots happening, um,

Dylan (28:05):

Machines man. Yeah. Hell yeah. Cody man. It's been absolutely sick man. Um, April jumping on, we'll kind of regroup in a few months to kind of see how it's all kicking cause new office space, the new teams. I'm sure about it. Be pumping out some creative man

Cody (28:21):

Without a doubt, man, without a doubt. Um, appreciate you guys. Thank you very much. Um, and that's all winded.

Dylan (28:27):

Hell yeah, man. Shoutout, extra jumping off. Absolutely.

Zach (28:37):

Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the rich, add more at podcasts. If you're like me and listen to podcasts on the go, go ahead and subscribe on apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and rich dad, poor dad.com/podcast. And if you absolutely love the show, go ahead and leave a review and a comment share with a friend. If you do take a copy screenshot of it, email me zach@funneldash.com. Show me you left a review. I'll give you a free copy of the rich add or ed book to learn more about the book. Go to rich ed for a.com to leave a review that a rich ed or ed.com/review. Thanks again.

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