Growing an Agency: The Trends We're Currently Seeing
Tired of guessing? Foxwell Digital Membership connects you with the strategies and support to grow your business.
Austin Dandridge joins the podcast to discuss running an agency with his wife and the challenges that can arise when working in business and life with someone.
Austin shares their strategies for generating new leads and the vision on how he and his wife are growing their agency. (Hint: it includes the use AI in their advertising and agency operations.)
Key Takeaways:
How running an agency with a spouse can have its challenges and rewards
Why referrals are such a valuable source of new business
How podcasts can be a powerful marketing tool for agencies
The AI tools that can help with persona building, data modeling, and personalization in advertising
Why regular creative refreshes are important in marketing
How landing page testing can also improve performance of this one thing.
The one thing that cannot be replaced by AI when it comes to marketing.
To learn more about Austin and his team go here.
To learn more about the Foxwell Founders community or to join head here
Full Transcript
Austin Dandridge (00:01.063)
been doing it for about 13 years and I run it with my wife and we started out as kind of... yeah? Cool. Yeah.
Edwin @ Snappic (00:05.068)
Me too. Yeah. Is your wife the actual boss? Because my wife is the actual boss.
Austin Dandridge (00:12.804)
Yeah, I take a lot of direction from her for sure, Edwin. Yeah, I'd be interested to talk more about that, because that's an interesting dynamic running an agency with. And actually, it's a pretty common theme. So we live in Charleston, South Carolina, and there's like three or four other agencies in town that are husband and wife duos.
Edwin @ Snappic (00:17.644)
Yeah.
Tris Dyer (00:17.907)
Ha
Austin Dandridge (00:36.327)
Yeah, so it's a, but we've been doing it. So I started the agency actually about 13 years ago. And, really we were starting as like a content production design agency, building websites, things like that. And then she came on board pretty, pretty soon after we started and
We transitioned to doing digital marketing, mainly do paid search, paid social, email marketing for e -commerce brands, for hospitality brands, some real estate. And we've done that for probably five years. So transitioning to just doing that. But really it was started because my background's in photography and video and graphic design and I
an outlet for that and was getting enough freelance work at the time that I just started an agency.
Edwin @ Snappic (01:27.958)
That's great. That's good. Do you and your wife fight a lot? Like, because you guys work together so much?
Tris Dyer (01:29.075)
Nice, love that.
Austin Dandridge (01:35.972)
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's an interesting dynamic because husband and wife communicate probably most, you in person or, you know, text message or whatever. We have three kids too, but.
Edwin @ Snappic (01:49.878)
Well, God bless her.
Austin Dandridge (01:50.372)
My wife and I, yeah, my wife and I, we communicate a lot via Slack when we're not kind of seeing each other, you know? So it's just a different, it's a different, we have, we kind of work things out about life in general just on Slack. You know, who's picking up the kids and stuff like that. So I don't know about, how about you Edwin? How do you guys, how do you guys, do you guys fight? Yeah.
Tris Dyer (01:56.071)
What?
Edwin @ Snappic (02:12.956)
Bro, every single day. Are you kidding me? But I think we preface it with, we tell our employees sometimes because in an employee environment, it's weird to see people contradict each other. But I think everybody knows at this point, if we're on a conference call and I say something and then she's like, that's stupid. No one is shocked about it, but they know that we always
Austin Dandridge (02:38.831)
Yeah.
Edwin @ Snappic (02:40.98)
we get on the same page and we work it through. And luckily our core team has been together for like five years. And so everybody has a very good sense of each
Austin Dandridge (02:53.893)
Yeah, I gotta say it's that that is maybe the trickiest part, but also good to your point, like a little bit of argument in the workplace is good. I feel like there is a way of like separating out, okay, these people are married and they're they're quarreling over something that no one else may be.
can kind of influence, but you do actually get to show, you know, it's okay to disagree about things. And that's actually where you find the solution a lot of times.
Edwin @ Snappic (03:25.29)
Yeah. Yeah, that's where we find most of the breakthroughs. Like it's like the time that me and my wife work together, like because she works on like stuff individually. Sometimes I work my stuff individually. But the time that we work together is is literally the most valuable time, like where we get the most breakthroughs.
Austin Dandridge (03:47.956)
So how do you break down, what is her role in the company and what's your role?
Edwin @ Snappic (03:54.498)
She everything design everything design wise and like really big shit thoughts are like her and then I like all the day to day and like like basically all the day to day is me so like account managers engineers they all report to me but like if we're like hey we are we're gonna like our agency gets most of our
of our inbound through outbound cold lead or outbound ads on Meta. She was the one that was like, fuck it, like, this is how we're fucking doing it. And we executed and that got it. Or like, for example, our first million was built off the back of cold email. She was the one that like, fuck it, we're emailing and she's Italian, she's not a native speaker. And she wrote the emails and she got our, we got our first million off
Austin Dandridge (04:53.961)
Well.
Edwin @ Snappic (04:54.208)
And then, and then ads, like everything like the second million and everything after that came off the back of ads. And that was her saying like, I couldn't get it to work. And, and we had like, we had Molly Pittman helping us with it. And like, Molly has her way of doing ads, but it just didn't work for us. And she was like, fuck it, I'm gonna do it my fucking way.
And that's how we made the next million and everything after that.
Austin Dandridge (05:28.107)
What do your ads look like? What do you, cause I've tested that before and I've, I've maybe I'm, we have a pretty target niche, I think in terms of the types of businesses that we work with. They're luxury products, high AOV. We've just found that that's generally the, the spot that works for us in their consumer goods or.
You know, we do a lot of shoe companies. Are you running ads for the business that are testimonials? What do you find that works the best? Yeah.
Edwin @ Snappic (06:09.858)
Testimonials. I literally have over 40 people, like, on camera telling them that, like, I made the millionaires. So, like, when I get on a call, I tell them explicitly, like, I have 40 people on camera. I've made 40 millionaires. That's only the people I have on camera. Imagine how many I've actually made. Like, honestly, I've made at least 100. I've made at least 100 millionaires. Like, join the bus. Get on the bus.
Austin Dandridge (06:38.154)
Nice.
Edwin @ Snappic (06:39.714)
Come on.
Tris Dyer (06:43.005)
like that. like that. And so Austin, just on your side then, when it comes to generating new leads, generating new businesses, are you running ads yourself? How are you finding new people coming in? It's mainly referrals, perhaps.
Austin Dandridge (06:58.495)
Yeah, unfortunately, you know, we haven't had much success with cold outbound leads or cold, you know, cold advertising or doing any sort of, you know, we've run paid search campaigns. run paid social campaigns, of course, because that's what we do. We're email marketers. We found that referral works best. I started a podcast, active on LinkedIn.
Make it a point to reach out to old clients pretty regularly, catch up with them. That seems to be, the referral seems to be the best, but I know that to scale a business, you need more than that, right?
And so that's really what I'm trying to unlock now because I think we've spent the past few years really honing in on what is our service offering because we've been doing this for You know over ten years now our business has evolved so much The
the process of getting new business has always been referrals or people are, when we were building websites, they would say, hey, I love the look of that website or, you know, they would find us somehow who built this, you know, the Cynthia Raleigh website.
and we would get a lot of inbound leads from that. And now as we do paid search, paid social, email marketing, that work is much more behind the scenes because you can't put your stamp on that work. So the way that we found it is reaching out to old clients, reaching out to current clients.
Austin Dandridge (08:41.652)
just kind of digging through and making relationships kind of personally. Never had a sales person. I do pretty much all of the selling of the business myself. And I've also found that we kind of have a capacity for what we can take on. I found that scaling too quickly, sometimes in terms of hiring is always kind of something that I want to avoid.
Edwin @ Snappic (09:09.152)
Yeah.
Austin Dandridge (09:10.212)
And, but I know that's not the way for everyone, but that seems to have worked for us for now. And slowly, surely, I think that will kind of introduce new ways of selling.
And I think the podcast has actually helped a lot. You know, my goal with the podcast was, it's called the marketing factor and was to reach out to business owners, other marketers like yourselves and glean a little bit of wisdom. know that's not necessarily a novel idea in this space, but it has given me the ability to create content for myself in a much higher clip. found it really hard to keep up with my own Instagram to generate novel
I don't sit down and just write a lot. My wife is the writer, but I don't sit down and like write a ton of stuff about something that we do. I've just never, more of a visual learner and communicator.
And so I've found that the podcast, I'm able to craft little snippets of content from that, from my wisdom, other people's wisdom, and put it together in a visual way. And I think that's how people learn now too, you know, and see new things. Yeah, so that's.
Edwin @ Snappic (10:32.683)
And has it helped your agency grow? Like how has that affected your agency growth?
Austin Dandridge (10:37.581)
Yeah, I'd say we've gotten, you know, I've gotten probably, I've gotten new leads. I've gotten people, you know, I'm able to keep up with my email marketing and a much, because I, every episode I send out a little, you know, a digest about it I'm sending it out to about a, you know, five or 6 ,000 email lists that we've accumulated of, of people that are actively kind of engaged, which I feel like is a pretty good for a marketing agency, pretty decent.
Edwin @ Snappic (11:05.079)
Huge.
Austin Dandridge (11:06.409)
And so, yeah, think we've gotten, we've definitely gotten three or four clients since I've started. And I started it, you know, maybe three or four months ago. And so I've, I've found the value in that being kind of, you know, you want to be, you want to put yourself out there as an expert because what we're doing requires a level of expertise. And so you want to make sure that people can see you as who you are.
I've found that I want to talk to, it's also, you know, I want to talk to certain people who admire in the space or have done incredible, you know, work and made their grown these businesses pretty successfully. And a lot of what I found through the podcast is a lot of these people have grown this just through like sheer tenacity, right? That's what you find. It's not like scaling through VC firms or something like that and acquiring customers.
through paid ads. And I think that's kind of the, we get a lot of people who come to us with a business idea. They just launched a website and they want to scale pretty quickly. I, you know, I think it's, I think it's really hard right now to, to scale a business without having a lot of different factors other than just paid. Yeah.
Tris Dyer (12:25.107)
going right. it's funny, right? You say that about tenacity is it's so funny. So many of our most successful brands that are working with us, they've had some hard times. We were speaking with Trace last week about from supply. He was telling some real war stories about when stuff wasn't going right. It's the people who stick with it when it's like, you know, when when stuff is not going right, it's not cashing in on buying Ferraris. It's not going to live in Palm Beach. It's you know, it's actually, you know, it's it's when when you know you're eating ramen for a week and you're like, I really truly
this, you know, it's gonna really work. That's the people who really succeed. They're the ones that can really go for
Austin Dandridge (12:56.0)
Yeah.
Austin Dandridge (13:02.091)
Yeah. And you know, think to it now we've been based in Charleston, South Carolina, which is pretty far removed from, you a lot of metro area, big metro areas with big brands and headquarters and stuff like that. So a lot of the work that we've done has been with these smaller brands who don't have tons of capital that they can invest in this. So it's a lot. It's a lot of kind of slow growth and
They're able to, you know, these business owners are able to figure things out on their own, you know, and that's what I, that is what I found is the most successful in this is someone who can actually go in and maybe mess with Facebook business manager themselves. They kind of know it. They can run ads a little bit themselves because they've had to do, do it for a little bit at some point, you know, and, and they, they're, they need
expert to come in and help them.
Edwin @ Snappic (14:00.844)
So I guess this was so wonderful. I think we've started the podcast at this point. you talked with these people, you talked with all these interesting people. Tell me, is the wildest thing that you've heard interviewing these marketers so far doing this podcast?
Austin Dandridge (14:09.386)
yeah, okay, good.
Austin Dandridge (14:31.672)
You know, there aren't that many wild stories that I'm able to glean out of these people. It's more of this sense of no one has it figured out, right? For instance, we've worked with this company called Callie's Biscuits for...
Edwin @ Snappic (14:46.239)
Okay.
Austin Dandridge (14:53.935)
a fairly long time and we've helped them scale their growth and they sell biscuits, right? And obviously that's something you don't necessarily buy online, but they've been able to successfully kind of create an e -commerce business for themselves outside of their retail and their, you know, they wholesale it and everything else like that. But their e -commerce is pretty successful. And it's, you know, when I had the conversation with her, she...
really it seemed like she was like I can either go two ways now I can either in get an investor or I'm not going to be able to scale this much further and just hearing her say that it was like okay there's there's there is kind of a cap on the ceiling here for especially for businesses with potentially lower margins it
It's really difficult to scale a business without any sort of outside.
you know, taking it from from zero to 20 million is not that hard, but taking it to that to that hundred million dollar brand, you need some sort of outside capital. I feel like a lot of people kind of bootstrap this stuff. And so Carrie Carrie just seemed very almost like a deer in headlights at this point. And she's been doing it for 15 years. You know, she's like, I need what what's next. So that's a little
That's not a crazy story, but it's a little bit eye opening to... I always come back and I tell my team too, it's like, think of yourself as the business owner, right? You have to think of yourself as the business owner. What would you do if this was your money, your scaling? Would you want to...
Austin Dandridge (16:46.339)
Is a one to one, you know, is a one X ROAS okay here? If you were the business owner, would you be comfortable with that? And, you know, I think that it's, helps us make better business decisions for our clients if we put ourselves in their shoes.
Austin Dandridge (17:07.045)
How about you? What have you guys heard that's insane?
Tris Dyer (17:10.277)
Yeah, I was going to say just on that one there, when it comes to like that kind of question, it's funny, agency owners often have the same question posed to them. It's like, you are you, you're, you're coming in and you're asking the client or the person you're spending the money on behalf and you're like, I'm going to spend a hundred grand of your money this month. But so many agency owners and so many campaign managers don't think, okay, they're just saying one X is okay and not asking the question. Is it okay? Are you going to run out of money? Because
There's agency, I've consulted with agencies before, Webtopia, I consulted with many agencies and met so many clients leaving those agencies going, we can't afford to the agency anymore. It's like, and agencies like we're getting good results, but they can't afford to pay us. It's like, well, they weren't getting good enough results. If they can't afford to pay you, well, they're running out of money. So that's the thing. It's like they ran out of money. like, well, you've done a bad job.
You know, it's the difficulty is just kind of where do you draw that line? Where do you kind of, whose responsibility is it to go, well, are you actually making money at a 1X or do you need to hit a 2 .5 and make sure that you're actually going to be making money? And one of the craziest stories I suppose I've seen is brands kind of starting to see scale and start to really push up spend and they see
sales going up and they don't realize that it's just seasonality and then they order a shitload of stuff and then they're left with it and it's like well guys what did you expect like it was everyone bought through Black Friday Cyber Monday we advise you look this is a seasonality thing it's not gonna be big in January they bought a big bunch of the product and you know who knew comes January they're sitting there with a bunch of product going where's all the sales gone
And it was as simple as that. It wasn't as an agency owner, I that, was more of junior media buyer. But one of the things I suppose I learned from that was the responsibility is not just on the founder or the person who's running it, even if it's a person in -house, it's a whole team. It takes a whole team to get this kind of stuff to grow. And people talking to each other and listening to each other as well is massively important.
Austin Dandridge (19:22.236)
Mm
Edwin @ Snappic (19:27.286)
I think the wildest thing I heard when, well, doing this podcast is, I think when Will went over AI personas, do you remember that Tris? Like step by step over how he builds AI personas? Because basically he leverages, he did like a step by step on how
Tris Dyer (19:39.911)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was crazy.
Edwin @ Snappic (19:54.818)
Because interest -based targeting is basically built around personas, right? And that is some of the most like work that you will do, building out that persona because the brand owner never, always tells you the same thing. Like, this lady, she shops at Bloomingdale's and then she goes to shops at Church's and you're like, this doesn't help me for anything. Like I can't get any of that, right? And like he did like the step -by -step about how he, you know, he scrapes
Austin Dandridge (20:12.608)
Right. That's everyone.
Edwin @ Snappic (20:21.73)
he scrapes the comments off of Amazon and he scrapes them off of Reddit. And then he makes the AI, he inputs it into the AI and then the AI builds the persona. And then based on that persona, then he's making the creative, right? And it basically takes the stuff that used to take us a bunch of time because I've done the same work, right? And I remember like being at like nine, 10 o 'clock at night and being like, I can't scrape anymore. Like I can't synthesize.
these reviews anymore. And then it like you could you could do it in like, I don't know, an hour, like two hours or something if you really want. Like you really want to go deep into it. I think that is probably that and the fact that we've interviewed so many people that I now I think I understand that the best guys in the world are the best people in the world doing ads are basically like all within one band. Like there's
it's not there's no one like exceptionally better than the other. They're only exceptional products, right? That make us look really good. But like, once you balance everything out, like the best ones in the world are they sit within this one range, right? And then they're exceptional products.
Austin Dandridge (21:40.297)
Yeah, that's a great point. mean, I think that the product definitely goes a long way. There's only so much your advertising can do to sell product. If you have to have an incredible product to you have to have an offer. And I think it's more than just the offer too. mean, I think it has to be something that people generally want. You can create demand a little bit, but to, to scale something significantly, it has to be something that
truly unique and truly valuable for people to want to buy once, but hopefully buy again and again, and that you're offering new styles and new ways of presenting it and packaging it up. Otherwise, it's just, you can have a great product and then once everyone buys it, then what are you gonna do next, right? And I think that...
But back to your point about AI, I think that that has been one of the best things that's happened for media buyers in the past two years and even just the past six months, leveraging those AI tools to help create.
better briefs or more thorough briefs, help scrape different personas to put together and synthesize information at a much, just a better rate to take a look at something, produce something
seconds and then use that to then synthesize again and again and again. And you're really kind of breaking down the fundamentals where something, you know, you, think all of us probably have like an intuition about something that's what's made us brought us this far, right? We, we know how to do something and, what's going to work for product in our mind or how we're going to, you know, just the, general intuition.
Austin Dandridge (23:45.801)
but being able to then communicate it to your team and how to execute it, that part to me has always been a little cumbersome, a little kind of longer than it needs to be. And I think AI has helped me communicate things a little clearer.
to my team and then for my team to take that and synthesize information even further. I'm looking forward to more AI tools that will provide better data modeling for the types of stuff that we do. And I think that's not too far off. I think that it's going to be something like Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, where you can just plug in a spreadsheet and everything like this and get a synthesized way of, help me actually calculate
this a little bit better for new customer revenue or what is the contribution margin here? Very clearly building these tools out and having a platform that works because that's the value that we add now. Like you were saying to help these businesses so they don't, you know, like you were saying Tris, like, so
your clients don't say they can't pay you anymore. They're going to pay you for your brain power in the future because these platforms are just kind of, they're finding the customers on their own. There's only so much tweaking you can do at this point. It feels like to me outside of the creative.
Tris Dyer (25:18.961)
I think the one thing as well, like AI is massive, not just obviously for customers, but actually for agencies as well. We've recently on board a new AI tool called Kaizen, which is really, really useful from a, it listens to your conversations, it reads your emails, it looks at your slacks, and it kind of helps you understand not necessarily, know, certainly at scale, it's like, okay, this is what the customer is really interested in. This is the type of customer that you're talking to. This is what they should, and then it also looks at your
and stuff like that and says this is how you're comparing to what the client is saying that you want. Like AI is starting to be very pervasive into everything we're across an agency, not just with the client but actually with our own results and how we're managing that as well. You know, I mean, you're saying you've got kind of a smaller number of clients and that...
that works and that helps from a personalization point of view. But then when it comes to kind of the larger agencies and how they kind of use AI, it's starting to become very...
informative, starting to really, whereas before it's like, might write a sonnet for you and you can write maybe an email for something, it's actually starting to become in our day to day, it looks at sentiment analysis and that's one of the things we're starting to use it for in our ads as well, as we're starting to write ads, we analyze the copy and look at sentiment analysis and see what people are feeling, how they're feeling about it through natural language processing.
Austin Dandridge (26:48.12)
Yeah, that's super interesting. Yeah, that is probably very helpful from a larger agency or larger organization point of view, because that's always been the scary part for me about scaling is losing the personalization and the touch with the clients. There's a...
Tris Dyer (27:06.728)
It's massive and the other side of it as well is not just touching the client at your point of contact as well as looking at the wider scale. It's like who actually makes the decision.
Austin Dandridge (27:16.27)
Yes, for sure.
Tris Dyer (27:18.496)
What about you Edwin, what kind of AI stuff are you seeing working across the board?
Edwin @ Snappic (27:23.978)
Honestly, most of the AI that
We don't use AI super extensively. So the AI that we do use is mostly like summarizing conversations that we have with, with customers, right? So that it inputs into our CRM, like Fireflies. then the Fireflies goes into our CRM because everybody hates summarizing conversations with customers. We use.
Edwin @ Snappic (27:58.762)
We use AI for marketing to figure out, to help streamline our cold outreach a lot. For our cold email outreach, there's a ton of minute steps that we used to do by hand that now we could have AI do. So for example, finding a founder, the name of a founder of a company, right? We feed a spreadsheet
And it has their, I forget which AI we use, but like it could run a search. It could run a search and just search the founder name. And that's, it's a two minute process for a human being, but you have to deal with that human being, right? And you have to deal with the sick days of that human being and et cetera. If you have a machine that's just like, me more. That's like, it's insane. And you could do things at such higher scales.
right? And I think that's where I don't really like it so much for like, for for actual production stuff. It's more for like back office stuff that we find ourselves using it more.
Austin Dandridge (29:11.057)
Yeah, it's a great tool for ideation, I've found. Like we certainly don't use it to create the actual creative output that we're producing. Though I do think some of the video AI tools are getting closer and a little bit more useful, not to generating actual like, you know, but to help edit video clips, right? And that's not necessarily AI, but it does. I think
the real gold is learning how to prompt AIs, like prompt large language models in a much clearer way to synthesize stuff. And I found that Claude has just been terrific for that. seems to be much more powerful than ChatGBT. And I found different threads and people kind of uncovering different ways to prompt stuff to get a much richer output than...
what would be pretty vanilla coming from ChatGPT.
Tris Dyer (30:14.333)
going to say you probably used Claude mix with Chapy GPT as well. can kind of use them go between each other as well. Shift, gears slightly just to kind of more focus on what you're doing with your clients. Like one of the things that we're hearing a lot and everyone's kind of saying it's the it's the vogue and if you're not saying it right now, you're weird. Creative is the new oil. It's the new data. It's the creative is the money maker. Is that something you're seeing from all your clients? You're seeing this is really the thing that pulls kind of change levers and pulls
gamers.
Austin Dandridge (30:45.467)
We've always thought that. So we started as a creative agency. So I was always reluctant to, my background is, though I did start at a social media agency in.
2010, know, building Facebook apps and running running Facebook campaigns and stuff that were far different from what Facebook is now, Meta is now. But creative for us has always been kind of the most important thing. And actually, it's what our clients came to us a lot for. So to me, it it does.
If you're not an agency that can produce your own creative, think that's going to be a real struggle for businesses in the future. think that for marketing agencies in the future, because of the way that these platforms work now, I think a lot of it does have to do with refreshing creative. We just see that we're refreshing creative very regularly.
Edwin @ Snappic (31:54.102)
How regularly are you refreshing?
Austin Dandridge (31:57.725)
I mean, it depends on the level of ad spend, but I would say
at least every two weeks, right? We want stuff to get enough spend. We don't have any clients that spend a million dollars a month. So we're not running, you know, we're not like Common Thread Co. who's running all of these different.
very vast tests with stuff but for the tests that we are running you know for a for a client that's spending fifty thousand dollars a month we're we're refreshing creative you know every one two weeks and not refresh we're not pulling everything down obviously but we're we're making mild adjustments or
updating offers or testing different landing pages, testing different types of video content, different voiceovers. We've utilized a lot of, you know, we think that
because we work with kind of luxury brands, there has been always this emphasis on sticking within the brand guidelines that it needs to feel very much like, you know, an ad that you'd see in a magazine. And we're training our customers that, hey, you know, actually that doesn't perform as well. People want to see more UGC style content. We want to stitch together stuff that feels a little bit more in platform. And that has been
Austin Dandridge (33:30.091)
you know, I think the shifting of the creative emphasis to being like a little bit more like not rough, but not quite as polished has been been a been a change for our team because our designers are very skilled graphic designers. don't necessarily know how to make things that aren't pretty.
Edwin @ Snappic (33:51.138)
So how do you have that conversation? Right? We all know that you have to have that conversation. We've all had that brand that is really a stickler on their brand guidelines. And so tell me like, like in practical terms, having that conversation, how do you sway them to that way, the less polished way?
Austin Dandridge (34:11.306)
Yeah, I think it's a pretty easy conversation to have now. Let's run a test here.
Austin Dandridge (34:19.721)
run the same thing, same landing page, same offer, whatever else. But let's try a glossy kind of on brand look and feel. And then let's try something that feels a little bit more like we're, you you shot it with your iPhone and you could send us like an unboxing video on your iPhone. You know, they're just a small voiceover, you wearing it, putting it on, talking in front of the camera. Let's try those two things and let's see
one performs better. And I think that I had a great conversation with actually my old boss at the company at a company called Movement Strategy. He his name is Jason Mitchell. He runs a huge social agency. I think they're like 500 people or something now with offices all over. They run you know they they do social for Netflix and all this stuff and
the way that they approach these bigger businesses like Netflix to embrace this, which is actually isn't quite as hard as I don't think you would think. Like Netflix is pretty open, but they say, listen, we know you have a brand guideline, but let's think of this more cinematically. How can we actually just think about the brand as a...
or a cast of a movie or something and come up with almost these personas for creative that feel a little bit more like you can create and react to things in doesn't necessarily need to be like these are the fonts you need to use every time, right? These are the, it's more of how would
this particular character actually act in this scenario. And that gives them the leverage of, let's say a new platform comes out, know, TikTok or whatever it is, they're much easier to adapt to that and not be restrained by, here are the, this is actually like the creative restriction from a graphic standpoint. And they're able to just be like, let's utilize a persona and take
Austin Dandridge (36:40.8)
let the platform kind of dictate how we talk about this.
Tris Dyer (36:47.131)
I guess the thing is, like you can build this big brand idea, but you can have creative iterations of it within these platforms. can still have this narrative that, know, the best brands in the world have this background narratives that are like that creative that you're talking about is that movie that, you know, that's, again, just back to kind of some of the brands we talked about, the founder videos.
and the founder of creatives are the ones that work the best because it's part of that string, that narrative that goes, this is why we've created this, we've talked about problem solution and us versus them. They all fit into that mothership that is that big narrative, that big movie kind of brand that's there, right? And you can't create that on AI. That's another thing.
Austin Dandridge (37:34.307)
for sure. 100%. You cannot create that in AI. I mean, AI is great for that ideation, but it doesn't, it's never going to replace, you know, human brains thinking with emotional intelligence to craft something that feels like it was.
that it's real. mean, I just don't think that there's a use case for it just replacing people entirely when it comes to art, you know, creative. Yeah.
Tris Dyer (38:09.159)
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, they've got that video. At the time of recording anyway, ChatGPT are gonna be releasing the, or OpenAI is gonna release that Sora thing, where it's like, start to make videos out of, you know, prompts. So it starts to make its own art. But it's like, well, hang on. Where does this become, like, do they start to make its own Shopify store, make its own, do we have AI content creators, specifically on their own? It's scary where it's going, but it's cool.
Austin Dandridge (38:35.727)
That is a thing. Yeah, I've seen that there are AI content creators out there. But I do think that that is a fad. That's not the end case of AI. I think it will make things
Edwin @ Snappic (38:37.932)
That's the thing.
Yeah!
Austin Dandridge (38:56.193)
making a movie, a Hollywood feature film, will probably become a lot quicker and more efficient and less expensive because of AI. But I don't think that you're going to have... You're not going to replace the actual everything about it, the writing, the acting, the camera work, you know? I think there is something to be said for that human connection.
At least that's what I want. I don't want to read AI garbage. I don't want to watch AI garbage, you know?
Tris Dyer (39:28.957)
Yeah, yeah, it's a tough one, right? Because where does it become, where does the line get drawn? So you see, there's the stigma behind the AI garbage, but then sometimes they could be stuff that you're watching. There's ads out there that people are watching right now that are just entirely made from AI.
Austin Dandridge (39:43.928)
Yeah, but you know, I know, I can tell now at least I can tell when they are, you know, I'm a big surfer, I'm a surfer and I get advertised, that's probably the biggest thing in my feed is surf content. And I can tell just by knowing this is AI, you know, like because I'm, that's my, that's my thing. So I have to think that other people know that.
And my kids are pretty, I have an 11 year old and a nine year old and a six year old and they're all pretty savvy when stuff, they can tell when something's AI.
Tris Dyer (40:19.047)
Yeah, what's that deep fakes was that obviously the first kind of start of that is, you know, some, some scary ones. Tom Cruise, Tom Cruise running for president and stuff like that is pretty scary. What, how do you, how do you find that the, mean, look, we're, four months or three months away from a, an election. How are you finding the performance of your ads being affected by that? Do think it's going to be different four years ago?
Austin Dandridge (40:23.027)
Right, yes exactly. There's scary stuff.
Austin Dandridge (40:31.149)
for sure.
Austin Dandridge (40:46.795)
I don't think so. don't think it perhaps it becomes a little more expensive, right? We tell clients that it's gonna be more expensive. Hopefully the good news is, I guess, is that...
the election happens before Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So we have that on our side a little bit, is that hopefully the political ads. Yeah, the political, yeah, we have the real, I guess, Black Tuesday first. But I think, you know, for us, don't, it gets a little bit more expensive. It got a little bit more expensive last time, but.
Tris Dyer (41:11.379)
It's almost like they planned it.
Tris Dyer (41:18.931)
Yeah.
Austin Dandridge (41:29.654)
Everything gets everything makes these ads more expensive. You'll have a you know, I It's difficult I don't I don't see this stuff at the scale that you know I think that other agency owners see it where they're spending like I said spending million dollars a month per per brand But I can tell You know just generally when to pull back and a lot of the brands that we work with are very seasonal
You know, they have a focus or they have a particular launch they want to push. They're dropping something or they have a sale, you know, those type of things. That's really where we find pushing and pulling on ad spend. don't know about, I don't think that the politics stuff weighs as heavily on it as maybe something else does, honestly.
Tris Dyer (42:28.529)
Yeah, what other kind of things do you think are going to be affecting ads in the short term between now and say Christmas?
Austin Dandridge (42:35.937)
Well, we're already starting planning for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. I don't know how soon you guys start planning that for your brands. Yeah, I mean, we're kicking off those conversations. We kicked them off in June where we basically give them a roadmap for what they need to be working on. We're not launching ads, we do a lot of email marketing too. it's a lot of kind of warming up the email, getting people to ensure that.
SMS and all of this stuff. We have found that some of our clients, their performance is down compared to last year, I would say, this summer. And I'm not sure what that's due to if it's the ones that generally do well in summertime are still.
doing great, but they're not up significantly, right? Though we have some clients that are at 50%. So it's such a wide range of performance that I really think it comes back to your product. You have a great product. Is it something that you're generating excitement for? I,
I think there's so much more that goes into the ads working than the actual creative or the ads, the type of targeting or anything else. think it's, they have PR that's gone out? That's good. Is their organic social presence doing great? Have they released any new products? There's so much more that goes into this stuff than just the ads for the ads to perform well.
Tris Dyer (44:24.402)
We're talking about offers, kind of the big things that are really moving the needle at the moment is this, it's various different offer testing. There's a lot of landing page testing we're finding is working at the moment. So definitely though is making sure the offer makes sense. And one thing that's actually happening a lot for us at the moment is people are holding out for sales. So Memorial Day sales, Halloween, all that stuff. We're expecting some big swings during those sales. And there's something that it's more pronounced this year than ever.
Austin Dandridge (44:42.713)
Mmm.
Austin Dandridge (44:54.424)
Yeah, you think people are holding out for sales more. Yeah, I do think that you find that for the past few Black Friday, Cyber Mondays, I've found that, and I've found that people are buying earlier, right, for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So you wanna be first to wallet or whatever they call it. You wanna maintain that wallet share. That's, you know.
Tris Dyer (44:56.733)
That's definitely funny, that, yeah.
Edwin @ Snappic (45:08.77)
really early.
Austin Dandridge (45:21.474)
holding out until a Halloween sale right now from purchase decision is it's a pretty long way away. I'd find that I'm a little skeptical of that.
Edwin @ Snappic (45:33.074)
Alright.
Tris Dyer (45:33.266)
What about you, Edwin?
Edwin @ Snappic (45:36.315)
on on holding out on holding
Tris Dyer (45:37.819)
Yeah, and holding, do you think people are holding out for Black Friday or sales or do find that sales are consistently open to the right?
Edwin @ Snappic (45:48.066)
Honestly, think generally speaking, a lot of our people are up and to the right. For the people that are lagging, I think it has more to do with business fundamentals than where the market is. meaning that like, it might be a brand that did really well previously, but like they haven't released as often or their releases haven't been as on point, right?
like we had a legging brand that they did spectacularly right like 22 23 they did it spectacularly 24 not so much and then and then we we resurrected them and then and then they had a and then they tanked like for one month and i was like what's going on and i looked at what they released and i was like why are you releasing this like just the product itself i was like this is
a BS release that you just did. And the creative director, like the designer was going through some personal stuff. Right. And so she didn't release like something that was as on point or as resonant with her audience as she normally did. Right. And that happens a lot with like it's it's hard to recruit. had a brand that like that made one of the wildest swimsuits I've ever seen in my life. Like
There are very few, we handle more swimsuit and lingerie than most places. And for me to say that is a lot. And then she couldn't figure out a follow up next season for the following season. And so it just didn't do as well the next summer. Like her brand overall didn't do as well the next summer.
Tris Dyer (47:39.111)
And had she ordered a lot more product on the back of the previous one, too.
Edwin @ Snappic (47:43.816)
Yes. She was not having such a great summertime after that. But it was also to be expected because she came with this wild design the previous season and then she's like, we're releasing, we're releasing. was like, we're geared, we're geared. And she sent me the assets and I was like, what is this? I was like, this looks like what I could find at Bloomingdale. Last year you came with some really wild stuff.
Tris Dyer (48:12.359)
and she just didn't have it. wasn't the same kind of release.
Edwin @ Snappic (48:16.064)
But it happens. Like how many brand owners do you know that like they just don't they can't follow it up because and it's understandably very difficult to follow up like success after success after success. Right. And it's people.
Austin Dandridge (48:30.44)
Especially in swimwear, man, it's so hard. We've had some swimwear businesses. That is very tricky because there's always so many new brands coming out and everyone wants to try something different.
Edwin @ Snappic (48:44.074)
Yeah, and it's like, it's not, people talk about continuously growing like it's a normal thing. It's not. Like it's not, right? Because you continuously be creative, and you got to continuously have great marketing. Like, it's hard. And like, it's hard. And then and then the market forces have to be behind you as well. Right?
Austin Dandridge (48:56.253)
Yeah.
Austin Dandridge (49:04.081)
Yep.
Austin Dandridge (49:09.414)
for
Edwin @ Snappic (49:10.514)
you could have the best restaurant in the world but then like if you opened it during COVID you're mocked. Like that's just how it was. That's how it
Tris Dyer (49:16.443)
Mmm.
Tris Dyer (49:21.945)
It's It's crazy. Anyway, Austin, one thing I like, I absolutely loved this. was actually probably, I don't mind saying so, it's probably the most natural feeling one that we've done yet. It's just chatting, three agency owners just chatting about like stuff that's happening and stuff like that. So much so we didn't even do an intro. We do normally do like an, pardon me, we do like an intro where we talk about like who you are, where you come from, everything else.
Edwin @ Snappic (49:23.296)
It's wow.
Austin Dandridge (49:42.166)
Tris Dyer (49:51.539)
Do you mind if we do that intro now and we can cut it and we can put it back at the start? Yeah, we'll get that going. your podcast, sorry, sorry, your company is called the Cobble Hill and then your podcast is called, is it marketing .tv, isn't it? Marketing factor, that was it. Yeah. Love it, love it. So what I'm do is I'm gonna intro, I'm gonna be like, hit us off with the first question, Edwin.
Austin Dandridge (49:55.634)
Sure.
Austin Dandridge (50:07.394)
marketingfactor .tv marketingfactor .tv
Tris Dyer (50:21.725)
They'll cut that part and they'll put it back at the start. And then Edwin, you do an outro and we'll finish that and then we'll finish it off with that. If that's all right with you, Aston, yeah.
Austin Dandridge (50:30.355)
Sounds good. So what's the, do I need to still, am I doing my intro?
Tris Dyer (50:31.303)
Super. No, you don't need to anything. I'm just going to do it. Just smiling. Smiling away. Super. Sorry, I've been trying to hold that cough in the whole time you guys were talking. I was like, shit. Okay, cool. Hey guys, welcome to the Foxwell Founders podcast. We are stoked here today. We have the founder of Cobble Hill Marketing and they
really, really in detail in everything that their clients do. They understand so much what's going on and actually are really starting to plan some big plans for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Another thing that Austin has has really recently recently launched is the Marketing Factor podcast where you interviews of founders of brands who are scaling, who are really in the weeds and know what they're doing. So we're really excited to have him here. Thanks so much for joining us. And Edwin, kick us off with the first question.
That's your bit. OK. So what they'll do is they'll cut that and they'll bring that back to the very start. So, Edwin, do you want to finish this off
Edwin @ Snappic (51:25.63)
All right.
Edwin @ Snappic (51:33.906)
Yeah. Alright guys, that's it for us today. We heard a ton, a ton from Austin about running a podcast, running the agency. It was a lot. I'm Edwin. We'll see you on the next one.
Tris Dyer (51:46.706)
I'm Tris.
See you later.
Austin Dandridge (51:50.249)
See you guys.