Samir Balwani 0:00

I'm Samir Balwani, host of Chief Advertiser and founder of QRY, join me as I talk to industry leaders about their strategies, challenges and successes in managing their advertising and marketing. On our episode today I have Louis Monoyudis, the CMO at Bokksu, who I'm really excited to chat with him. He's super smart. We're gonna talk some AI stuff, and it's gonna be a great time. Thank you so much for being here, Louis. Thank you for having me. Let's start with just background. So how did you get to where you are now tell us about your career path. Everyone always wants to be CMO. So what worked for you.

Louis Monoyudis 0:43

I like to start, believe it or not, at in college. So I went to Harvard and concentrated in Harvard or major in, as I like to joke, the highly marketable degree of folklore and mythology and as, yeah, pretty great, right? As obvious as that might sound, it actually laid the groundwork for my entire career, because it's all about the power of storytelling and narrative, and what is brand if not storytelling and narrative? So in many ways, that gave an academic foundation for my work in marketing, what? I went a little bit of a around the path route. So I started at a big agency called Leo Burnett in Chicago, doing brand strategy for Motorola, Coca Cola, big brands like that. And then moved to New York and got a second degree at persons. Then spent about a decade helping big brands like Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, John Barbados, launch new divisions and price points. And then after that, pivoted into the early stage d to c e comm ecosystem, really focusing on premium and luxury price points, but a variety of verticals, everything pets to plus size women swimwear to Japanese snacks, to travel like you, name it, I probably touch it at some point.

Samir Balwani 2:08

That's so cool. I love I love that you're a person's grad. I'd love that you know all about folklore and mythology. I agree with you. I think storytelling is the key. And I think a lot of people have forgotten that marketing is honestly storytelling, and it starts with an emotional connection. I always say performance marketing has led to really bad habits in the marketing world, in that we just look at numbers and you think that that is the end all be, all of marketing. And so it's always nice to talk to somebody that understands this. So tell us a little bit more about Bokksu. Who? What is it? You know? What makes it special?

Louis Monoyudis 2:47

Bokksu is an incredible brand? It? We have five or incredible company. We have five standalone brands within the portfolio. So in many ways, the marketing and creative teams, we're almost running an internal agency where each brand is a different client. We have overriding thesis of importing the very best products, primarily food and snacks, from Japan. So we have two headquarters, one in New York City, one in Tokyo, where we do everything from really beautiful gift baskets for holidays, like Mother's Day graduation with like, you know, chopsticks and matcha tea and all kinds of great things, cool soup boutique. And then we have another property called segoemar, where we focus much more on and that's a marketplace focus much more on anime collectibles, figurines. We do a really fun thing around all the collectibles that come out of Starbucks in Japan. So, yeah, that's really what Bokksu is. In a nutshell, I

Samir Balwani 3:55

love it. I love the idea of an internal agency across five brands, because it's like, it's a unique perspective that not a lot of people get the opportunity to see and to learn from around how, you know, one thing that's working for one brand may not work for other. You know, we we all fall into the LinkedIn, you know, echo chamber, where everyone is talking about everything, and it's if this worked for me, it must work for you. And, you know, being on the agency side, I get a chance to say, yeah, that's not true at all. And in fact, your mileage may vary, is very accurate across all pieces of it, and you get a chance to see that firsthand, absolutely, yeah. I mean, I'd love to talk honestly from that around how you're looking at your brands and what are the channels that you're activating against, because you and I talked about this before, but the omnichannel approach is so key. Talk to me about how you think about omnichannel, what that looks like for you.

Louis Monoyudis 4:52

Omnichannel is much more important than I think ever before, especially with the incredible pressure on customer acquisition costs to drive P. People to your own branded website, and what we've been doing at Bokksu is really meeting the customer where they are. And I can give you a million reasons why you probably don't want to be on Amazon, except that you have to. And there's both an offensive strategy to secure more customers and dollars. There's also a defensive strategy where, particularly, depending on the product you're bringing there, you know, you could maybe have people that are going to duplicate you, or your competitor is going to get a lot of market share you do, so you need to stake your claim there, if you're not there already. But in addition things like Tiktok shop, things like flip, which is another mobile shopping app, thinking about if there's anything specific. So for us, we're like on yami buy and some like, you know, Asian online food marketplaces and all that, with the idea that, yes, you're taking a margin hit. There's a commission structure. Usually there's additional platform fees. It's logistics, very heavily on logistics. But, you know, the chances of someone, a lot of people, will go to Amazon first to see if a brand they don't really know is available, right? Yeah, return policy, you know, you can get it in two days. You don't have to create a new login, don't have to get some company, you know, your credit card. So I think it's just where the future is going. Yeah, it's interesting.

Samir Balwani 6:24

There's this, like, inherent trust, right? Like, we talk about trust on E comm all the time. It's so I think about this as, like, the double edged sword of Shopify, right? It made it really easy to start a Shopify brand, but it also made it really easy for anyone to start a Shopify brand, and with that comes a lot of brands that you just should not trust or will go out of business and and so I think being on Amazon gives you this. I mean, I would say it's a false sense of security, because it's not always accurate, but, but, like, the Amazon Prime tag is enough to give people enough of a sense of security to want to purchase from you, and so I think it doesn't open up like this concept of a new customer base. Yeah, so I mean, when we're talking about omnichannel and D to C, I have a perspective on this. I'd love your perspective on it, and it's, do you think that brands can still succeed purely direct to consumer.

Louis Monoyudis 7:26

I do. I think there's different types of brands that have different growth vectors and trajectories. The other part of omnichannel that I failed to mention is good old school, you know, wholesale, wholesale retail accounts, right, which have a real presence, right? So you have brands that are like influencer led, right? So obviously those are going to be Tiktok or Instagram first, in terms of where they're driving their, you know, awareness and probably sales. You have brands that can be more D to C focus, but the days of only being a D to C brand, and if you remember the in some ways arrogance of like these brands that 10 years ago said we are never going to do retail, we're never going to do wholesale, we're only going to sell on our own website, and then be old and behold. So at the end of the day, like you might have the best cupcake shop in the entire world, but if it's all the way out in Coney Island, and I'm living in Manhattan, I'm probably just never going to go there, right? So you need to come to me as the retailer. And that's the same thing in digital so the fallacy is that people are just going to come to your site, and they're probably, even if you get them to your site, they still might want to buy someplace else.

Samir Balwani 8:48

Yeah, I think it's, it's really hard to change consumer behavior, and, in fact, you have to kind of adapt to it, right? So I think there's a big market of people that will purchase online and and, you know, so DTC works really well for your early adopters, the people that really love to try out new brands are, you know, not risk adverse. They're willing to do, you know, to take that leap of faith with you and that you that person that needs to have the newest, coolest thing, but that is a finite market, and the scale comes in, into the middle mass. And the middle mass is not changing the way they they are not searching for the next new product. They need to be presented with it. It needs to be easily accessible in front of them. So from my perspective, a DTC only brand will win the early adopters and struggle in the middle mass until they kind of enter into these like wholesale, retail or marketplaces in a meaningful way. And so for a lot of brands, they've got to think that margin into their, you know, structure into their ops, because marketing and ops need to work a lot more closely. Than they have been up until now. Absolutely. And

Louis Monoyudis 10:02

this is one of the big challenges, is everyone thinks that marketing is going to solve the business issues, but and in you know, good mark go from bad marketing good marketing, absolutely, you'll see an increase. But if, let's say you don't have inventory in stock, and you're asking customers to wait a long time, the days of the pandemic are over, right? People expect delivery. So if you don't have the inventory to fulfill, you're going to have a drop in conversion. If you don't have the opportunity, you don't have good customer service, you're going to have, you know, negative impact on the business. There's a lot of areas that have to work in sync for a company really, to succeed.

Samir Balwani 10:38

Yeah, we were talking to another brand founder the other day, and he was saying, how, in his mind, when he looks at his media team or marketing team as a whole, that's an optimization channel, so you're gonna get three, 4% improved performance there. You're not making your moon shots on your marketing. It's not gonna drive that 20% growth that comes in in product. What product are we building? What's the next new product launch? That's where your moon shots come from. And so it's like having an understanding of the of a realistic expectation of your marketing and a realistic expectation of your product, R and D is how you kind of grow a really big business, like all the, all the businesses that you know we talk about, the DTC darlings, they did something unique and novel. It wasn't the marketing that drove those businesses. Your Warby Parker's try at home was huge at the time, and so that, that is what you know, made them different, that and their price point, right? Absolutely, yeah, yeah. And in fact, I'd say Amazon is just a logistics company. They're not a marketing behemoth. They're just a logistics company.

Louis Monoyudis 11:46

Absolutely, very good at logistics, yeah.

Samir Balwani 11:49

So, I mean, as we talk about this concept of, like, three to 4% so as you guys are opening up new sales channels, you know, becoming a true omni channel, you're selling in online, D to C, you're selling wholesale, you're selling marketplaces. How are you looking at your advertising? How are you measuring the impact of all of that? You know what? What is good to you, what is fire to you, like? How do you manage that?

Louis Monoyudis 12:14

The overarching philosophy that I like to do at any business is look at mer. So marketing efficiency ratio, which effectively just means you put $100 into the marketing machine, and let's say the business overall, regardless of channel, generates $400 you have a four mer, right? Also ROIC return on invested capital, things like that, but effectively that methodology. So I like that at a high level, which is because that also takes into account organic traffic and social traffic, and things that you know are much harder to control, but have a if you're doing it right, have a big impact on the bottom line, and then from there, go in to look at each different channel, particularly the performance marketing channels, or the life cycle channels, and say, Okay, what are the goals that we have for each channel, and where in the funnel do we think this is going to happen, and what's the CAC and what's the LTV? And then you start to layer in those metrics. But I find that oftentimes when they come into a company, the initial conversation and structure I have to put in place is looking very high level, because fundamentally, you spend more on Facebook ads, you're going to get more from organic traffic, and your Amazon sales are going to go up. And you run a TV ad, and even though it has a coupon code and a dedicated URL, people are going to buy more of your stuff when they see you. You know the local store, right? And that's the whole point, right? Brand does not live in silos, and customers do not live in silos,

Samir Balwani 13:46

yeah, and I love that, because I do think that there's this value in having an overarching metric that measures Halo without over complicating it, right? Like, because we can go down the MTA, mmm, increment, constant, incrementality test, but then you start to lose the value of your campaigns, and just having a really quick is this working? Is this that working? Right? Because there's 100 things you've got to deal with. At one point, you've got to figure out what, where are you going to spend your time?

Louis Monoyudis 14:16

One of the other things that I like to do, just strategic or tactically, is make sure that there's a post purchase survey. So if you're on Shopify, you know, there's apps that do this, and you just say, How did you first hear about us? And what's the time from when you first heard about us to when you made a purchase? Because you can find out that, you know, you're going to have a number of people that are impulse purchasers, but then maybe you have a longer consideration cycle. So you know, I've been at brands where there's like, a three month consideration cycle before a large cohort of people pull the trigger. So that also is thinking, okay, numbers are really good or really bad. You know, right now, what were we doing three months ago that could have impacted that? Yeah, right. It's not just yesterday's ad that we put on Facebook did something.

Samir Balwani 14:58

Yeah, you. Yeah, I think people forget how long the journey is from when you first heard about a brand till the time that you actually purchased it. And you know, it's the concept of the 5% in market, 95% out of market at any given point. And right now, all of our performance marketing focuses in on that 5% and it's really, how do you kind of tap into the 95% so when they become part of that 5% they're ready to purchase from you over your competitive set. So I love post purchase survey for trying to figure and kind of tease that out, right?

Louis Monoyudis 15:31

Absolutely. Yeah.

Samir Balwani 15:33

So Louis, when you're talking about measurement, the most important person that you have to communicate that with is generally your CFO and CEO and so let's talk about how you how, how should a good cmo engage with a CFO and kind of manage that relationship?

Louis Monoyudis 15:57

I think structurally, the two roles are probably the most at odds with each other. The we're all fiduciaries of the company, but the CFO, obviously, is going to probably be a little more conservative, and the CMO is going to want to spend the money to generate the money. My tactic is always to make sure that I'm in very clear contact. I make the CMO my best friend or the CFO my best friend, and not in a fake way, but like, not that we're always drinking buddies, but like, we need to have a lot of respect for each other, and we really need to hear what the other is saying, because if you're managing cash flow in a really serious way, then okay, let's have that conversation about what that might mean in terms of the short term impacts for marketing and longer term impacts on results, right? So, you know, you have a conversation, we'll say, Listen, we want to be a little more conservative for whatever reason in this month. And I'll be like, okay, we can pull it down, but this also pull down the revenue expectations that come this month, and then, in the case we were talking about before, like, three months from now, right? And, yeah, just make sure that there's no surprises. I think that's really what is going to get any C suite person, but particularly the CFO perturbed is that they're like, I had no idea this was coming, right? So just keeping my head up over communicate and you know, you'll make their job easier. And when you make their job easier. They make yours easier. Yeah.

Samir Balwani 17:22

What are the metrics that you found out they are most interested in? I guess. How in the weeds do you get with your CFOs? Or is it generally high level?

Louis Monoyudis 17:31

It's generally with the CEO or CFO CFO CFO CFO, it's more high level in terms of allocate. It's usually a media budget or a CAC goal, and usually those kind of work in tandem. And I always like to say, if we're hitting the ROAs or the CAC goal, I want to talk to you, but we're going to open up more budget because we're now operating at a level of profitability or return that we're all really excited about. So we want to keep capturing that right. We don't want to be limited by budget, so making sure that there's a bit of a reserve for those instances. And hopefully you're hitting those instances frequently, but more than other than that, though not really getting into the weeds of, you know, daily or weeks, yeah, just kind of keeping that high level with them.

Samir Balwani 18:17

Yeah, I love that. And then I guess a secondary question is, you talked about earlier on, about inventory being a key piece of this, and cash obviously to have to spend is important. How do you offset that? Or how do you manage that against just inventory levels? To Have there been moments where you said, Hey, there's a lot of demand. We just don't have the inventory. We may have the cash, we just don't have the inventory. To actually do this, how do this. How do you kind of manage against that? And how do you kind of plan for that?

Louis Monoyudis 18:47

It's been a wild few years, you know, yeah, doing DSD during the pandemic, when almost everything was going to be delayed to coming out of the pandemic to now, and at the end of the day, there's certain things where people will wait a little bit depends on how long they have to wait. You can still do the, you know, order now for like, a pre order or join the wait list will let you know when it's back in stock, but both of those are going to have, you know, really bad conversion rate, make your overall marketing funnel not as effective as it could be. So if something's out of stock, then what can we replace it with? Hopefully, that's pretty close in the inventory pool, right? Or conversely, if we have a ton of inventory or something, it's like, okay, let's like, shift focus here, because or we need to get through it. Like at Bokksu we're in the food space, things expire, right? So sometimes, like, we got to get through this inventory before, you know, just to make sure that it looks good on our balance sheet and that the customers can get what they want

Samir Balwani 19:45

to that's really interesting. So Louis, I know we also talked about this, I'm going to take, like, a hard pivot into something that everyone has been talking about lately. And I, you know, when you and I were talking earlier on, you blew my mind with how. You guys are using this so AI and marketing, everyone's talking about it. It is making everyone's lives easier. We use it at query daily, across the whole team. How are you guys using it? What have you seen work?

Louis Monoyudis 20:13

Ai, obviously everyone's trying to figure out all the different ways that it can impact your business. I'll give you an example of a workflow that we've put in place that has really saved a lot of time and allowed us to be far more iterative in our creative production, specifically around performance marketing. So what we did is we downloaded all of the reviews from our website. We moved any identifying data so you know, any customer name, any customer email, we just wanted the content and the star rating and the product listing, and we threw that all into GPT. And then in the same, you know, conversation with GT, GPT, put in our brand guidelines, and you know, anything else that would help GPT, like, really understand who we are and what we're about. And then we said, okay, based on what you know, based on the feedback from customers. What are the 10 reasons why you think someone might not purchase from us? That's really cool, because you want to overcome customers objections, especially depending on the stage of the funnel that you're targeting them. So is it, well, I get it in time. What about allergens? Is this stuff really from Japan? How will I know I like the flavors. Is it easy to gift blah, blah, blah, right? So come up with all the reasons why people might object to you. And then we said, okay, for each of these different reasons, come up with five different scripts that we are going to do as a podcast app, right? Yeah. And then so we workshop the scripts and we get it into a spot that we like. We then throw it into 11 Labs, which will do an incredibly realistic voiceover, so no more voice actors to the scripts. And then we'll flight it into Spotify, because it's pretty easy on what's engaging and what's not. Once we start to see the winners in terms of hook, in terms of content, whatever it is that we're testing, then we will work with our in house creative team to do, you know, video ads for Tiktok or Instagram, or in some cases even longer form for CTV. But this way, we have a ton of learning leading up to those decisions, as opposed to having to go through, like, a ton of iterative cycles with the copywriter and all that.

Samir Balwani 22:27

That's so cool. I love that, because it just allows you to really quickly test new concepts without all of the costs that comes with production, right? And I think that's amazing. So how have you seen this kind of benefit, you guys, you know, how, how often are you doing this? And how often have some has something, one that you've been, like, really excited about? Yeah,

Louis Monoyudis 22:51

I think the answer is, like, nobody's doing it as much as, you know, non stop all the time, right? Yeah. But you know, it is something that we do as we have a reason to refresh our creative, right? Yeah, so obviously you need to have, there's only so much creative you can be testing at one point in time. So we really try to, you know, narrow in on those hooks, like the first three seconds of content and the specific words. So are we focusing on authenticity? Are we focusing on local makers? Are we focusing on attributes, things like that? Is it a male voice, a female voice, you know, things around that? So I would say the real thing is this, like we were able to do that entire process of flight, from doing the reviews to flighting the ads, in like two days, right? Yeah, it's incredible how fast that happened,

Samir Balwani 23:43

yeah? I mean, I just, I think the amount so as an agency, we love this, because it just means that we're able to learn things a lot faster. And so going back to our conversation about the CFO is, you know, CFOs hate risk, right? Like any risk to the businesses is not good risk. So anything you can kind of say, well, we tested this, we know this is going to work, and we feel confident in investing in this because we de risked it by doing X, Y and Z. It just makes your life as a CMO easier, the CFO happier, and just improves your likelihood for success. So being able to find things like this, which is huge, you know, I know I know that there's a lot of benefits to AI and marketing, but as you're kind of looking at this, what are the things that you're nervous about, like when you're seeing AI kind of play out, what kind of keeps you up at night? From that perspective,

Louis Monoyudis 24:38

I think what you know, I think maybe you and I were having this conversation that there was this idea that there were one day be like a billion dollar company that's just like a founder and like a bunch of AI running it. It's going I think what it's putting into perspective is that more and more we're able to give algorithms inputs that you. Successful results that before really did require human so if you think about, you know, media buying now, a majority of people's budgets likely go into, you know, ASC or PMAC. PMAC, where you're not necessarily as the media buyer, getting, like, remember, you get super granular on the day fighting and video fighting and video fighting, and like, audience segmentation and insight and like, it was

Samir Balwani 25:24

so much I still remember choosing hours, right? You'd be like, don't, don't advertise from midnight to 2am there's no one there.

Louis Monoyudis 25:33

And like, those days were, you know, just a different way of media buying, right? And now it's more algorithmic, and I think that what it's going to force particularly in the marketing role, where a lot of people are nervous, and rightly so, is the real emphasis on storytelling and brand structure and narrative. And I'm sure AI will be able to do a lot of that as well, but you're still going to need someone to make sure that all the different getting back to omni channel, all the different touch points carry through that brand messaging as well as they can.

Samir Balwani 26:04

Yeah, I almost feel like, at some point we as people become the conductor, right? Like you're gonna have these AI agents doing things, and at some point there might be a conductor AI agent overlooks, but you still need to, you know, verify and make sure everything is working accurately, because, you know, they're not infallible. And there is this concept around being able to do higher level things. So for me, the AI is fantastic at doing things that we've already solved. It's not great at doing net new things. And so on the media side, we love ASC, we love pm x, because it allows us to focus in on, okay, well, what's the next big thing we're going to do? What's the next big, you know, creative opportunity? What's the out of the box thing that doesn't exist? Like, how are we actually going to tie all these channels together? But then there's also the idea of, okay, PMAC is one algorithm, ASE is another algorithm, but someone still needs to figure out how much budget to give to each of these. And there's this still orchestration of budgeting that's happening outside of that, which is really interesting experience also. So yeah, I love the I love being able to bring it full circle back to storytelling, because I, I think that that is the lost art of marketing, and it's, it's exciting to kind of see it come back, but you know, thank you so much for joining us today. Louis, what I would say is, if someone wants to find you online, where can people learn more about you? Absolutely

Louis Monoyudis 27:32

can find me on LinkedIn, probably the easiest spot to connect.

Samir Balwani 27:36

Cool. I'll include it in the show notes. But thank you again.

Louis Monoyudis 27:40

Thank you. This was so fun.

Samir Balwani 27:45

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