Intro 0:04

Welcome to another episode of Ecom Experiences, a podcast for ecommerce marketing leaders who want to grow and scale their brands faster. Join us as we interview some of the smartest brand founders and marketing leaders in the industry. Explore the lessons they learned, discover the keys to their success and discuss what excites them most about the future.

Samir Balwani 0:29

Hi, it's Samir Balwani here, host of Ecom Experiences, where we talk to brand founders and marketing leaders about their experiences growing brands. This episode is brought to you by QRY. QRY is a paid media agency that helps brands balance brand awareness and performance marketing to drive predictable and profitable growth, to learn more about how we can help you visit. We qry.com, today's i We're gonna have a lot of fun. Today I have Eleah Portillo. She's a Fractional CMO for For Wellness. She's got a lot to teach us, a lot to talk about. And I'm so excited to have you here. Thank you here. Thank you for joining us today. Thank

Eleah Portillo 1:04

you. I'm so excited to be here.

Samir Balwani 1:05

So Leah, let's start with the easy step. Tell us about you. Tell us about the brand that you work for

Eleah Portillo 1:10

sure. So right now, I'm working for For Wellness. And so historically, the brands I like to consult for, they're always in the health and wellness space. But historically, I really gravitated towards people that remind me of myself, right? So targeting moms or targeting to women, and this one's a little different, because I'm actually targeting 50 plus golf fans of Phil Mickelson. Now, why am I here? Is because, well, first of all, they have an incredible team, and I can get to that late, but more importantly, because the story is so good. So I'm hope I don't get in trouble for saying this, but I'm not actually a golf fan, and it's not something I watch, but the stories are so interesting, it's relatable. So Phil Mickelson is apparently one of the best golfers in the world, number two to Tiger Woods. So I hear, and I know I'm probably getting a lot of cringes right now. 

Samir Balwani 2:05

I love this. I think this is my favorite.

Eleah Portillo 2:08

I actually had a Google after my first call, but the story is and it's 100% true and factual, which is why I was like, absolutely yes, let's freaking do this. Is he woke up, I think after his 40th ish birthday, we'll go with but he had this really painful shoretta arthritis, right? And he is a professional athlete for his sport, so obviously that's not great, and my understanding is that it was truly crippling for him. Now, being the golf guy that he was, he has a lot of health and wellness golf bro, friends that are that like, live and breathe this up. And one of them is this guy named Dave Phillips, who grew up in South Africa, and now he's, uh, he's a professional performance coach. Why am I get into this? Loves coffee because he's from South Africa, and he grew up, I, you know, in that, in that world. But two, he's always tinkering like a scientist with the, you know, with L theanine in your coffee to help with the jitters, or with collagen for joint pain. And so Phil was his friend, and he made this formula literally for Phil in his kitchen. And it worked so well, Phil actually won the P let's just call it the PGA Tour, something big. Again, I'm going to get in trouble for this, but he won it as the oldest he wanted, like, significantly older than anyone else. So this is something that works so well. And after that, they're like, We need to actually do something with this. And so what I like about this story is, it's not that I'm a male golf enthusiast. It's because I've been there, right? I'm 41 I've been at Barry's and looking at everyone else's sprint thinking, holy crap. Like, what happened to me? I can't keep up like I used to. So we've all been to where we've we've gone home, and we thought, gosh, if I could just be a if there was just a little incremental improvement in how I used to bounce back, or, yeah, you know. And so that story really resonated with me. And also, as a consultant, you have the luxury of working with brands that you that you get to choose, right? And I want to work for companies that that that absolutely work. The efficacy is phenomenal, and all of their products are really amazing. And so I think that there's a great story to tell there. I know there is, and that's why I work For Wellness, and that's why I'm as a little bit about i

Samir Balwani 4:36

So here's the one thing I will say, and I love this, because there's so many celebrity brands out there. They're coming up every day, and beauty and fashion and wellness as a whole too. I love that you didn't really know who Phil Mickelson is, because then you could align on the product. Yeah, that is actually a really key. So like when we look at beauty brands or celebrity brands, we really try and remove the celebrity element of it. And I. Actually look at the product, because what you don't want to have and what will always fail is any brand that has a bad product. It doesn't matter how much star product power you put behind it, it's going to fail. And so I love that you not knowing who Phil Mills is forced you to have to look at the product

Eleah Portillo 5:19

well. And you know, they sent me a they sent me a box, and it was all really great stuff. And I'm a supplement junkie. I'm like, I won't even tell you, because I've worked in VMs for so long, for really good companies like smarty pants vitamins and the Unilever Health Wellness collective. I am a bit of a vitamin snob and a VMs category snob, and they have really good stuff. So And to your point, like, there's celebrity brands launching, like, especially in beauty, wellness, every minute. And I think that, yeah, I mean, I love the pop of organic. I'm not gonna lie, whenever he plays golf, for sure. Yeah, thanks, sir. But it's, it's, do you actually have a good product that actually solves their problem, and can you relate to their problem? And is it a problem that that most of us struggle with, whether that is, you know, whatever age you're at, or whatever that means to you. You don't have to be a professional athlete to think about, Gosh, I wish I could just recover a little bit faster than I used to.

Samir Balwani 6:22

Yeah, that's interesting too, because it's authentic. It's authentic too, right? Like he didn't come out with a beauty brand. He came out with a with athletics wellness, right? So authenticity

Eleah Portillo 6:31

is such like it sounds so simplistic, especially on like a podcast, you want all these secrets, right? But the the answer is smart, creative that's built on psychological thought and authenticity. That's it. That's really it.

Samir Balwani 6:45

It's so funny. You say that because I feel like people listen to the podcast, and if they've listened to my podcast for a while, they'll know, they will be very disappointed if they assume a tactic is going to work, because it's that's I think growth hacking is the worst thing that you can do for a brand, and I think that this, especially in the media world, right, there's this, there's this underbelly of people that are constantly going, Oh, well, I created all of these ad structures and this ad, and this is how we tested and we got our CPM to this, and I'm like, great, that worked for a week, yeah? Help me build a brand that's gonna work for 30 years,

Eleah Portillo 7:17

yeah? Like, this niche, like, What do you mean? Yeah? Or, you know, maybe a creative is work. Maybe this creative is working for this brand, but, like, just to copy paste it without understanding why it's working,

Samir Balwani 7:29

yeah, well, and then to not take all the variables into account. So, like, things like, hey, maybe it was because it was July, and that ad is going to stop working in December, and you're going to keep trying to hit your head against the wall, trying to figure out how to get that to work again. But you to work again, but it was June or a competitor had fallen out of the market and had actually nothing to do with your ad, and it was just like, it's so yeah. I mean, we're big proponents. I know you and I have talked about this a lot around it starts with the brand, the community around the brand, the reasons to believe, and performance marketing just gets kind of the halo

Eleah Portillo 8:02

of that. Now, you reminded me of something. So a couple months ago, I was working on a personal product with a product marketer named Fulton Monson, who is the CEO of rethink labs. And, you know, she's from, you know, the tech world, so she thinks about product in that classic product way. And I they think about, what is the emotional state that somebody's in when they are coming using a service, and what is the emotional state you want them to be afterwards? And so you talked about July, right? So not just, is it is there seasonality? Like update your photography behind the key model right? Maybe swap out an ice for a warm coffee. But it's also like, what is what is going on in July? Are they on vacation? Are they stressed because their kids are home like and how that relates to your product? I think it's, it's actually so fun, I think in our jobs to try to come up with these hypotheses a little bit deeper than just the obvious,

Samir Balwani 9:01

yeah, and it's, it's the stuff that we like to that's the stuff we like to test. Like, I don't really care about the button color, I don't care about this font weight. Like, great, awesome, sure. But what is the reason that somebody is actually engaging with the brand in that moment? And what, what is the offer? What's the message, what's the differentiator? The thing that will move mountains is the stuff that I really want to understand and learn. I don't, yeah, but that's the thing that makes it more interesting.

Eleah Portillo 9:30

Those are the bigger swings, the button color, like, I mean, again, I'm not, I don't know. I'm using a sports analogy, but that's like the bunt, but, like, you don't want a big swing. That's, that's, what is the post state emotional feeling that we want this consumer to feel after taking our product for 30 days? And like, is it a sense of accomplishment? What did that accomplishment do? Or, you know, maybe there's a different angle. Maybe you could look at, like, what are all your negative reviews? And how can you flip that in a way like, AG, one? And crushes it. They're so expensive. I mean, they're, they're phenomenal product, but price, I am assuming, is one of their biggest negative reviews. But they just, they put that forward. They rip up the band aid right away. They put that front and center in their ad copy. We're more expensive, and here's why. And I bet you that was a really bigger level or angle that they uncovered. Yeah, yeah. So

Samir Balwani 10:22

I love it, because, alright, so I supposed to have a whole host of questions here, but I already told you at the beginning of this that we are going to end up just chatting, and it's just so I love that you brought up price, because I think that that's also another one where people, a lot of brands, make that mistake of, okay, I'm going to become a luxury brand. Okay, great. Like just saying you're a luxury brand doesn't make you a luxury brand. And so this idea of being able to actually follow it up with a quality product that actually people want, and the the people want is the hardest part about it, because that doesn't mean you just fulfill their need. It doesn't mean you solve the problem. It's you created a community and that people talked about it, and it was something that they had built demand around and and so I love that idea about how aging one went out and said, like, we're expensive because of but I also hate it because they quantified why they're expensive, and they created this like feature benefit feel to their cost versus, hey, we're expensive because we're good. And good is everyone that uses it, is an athlete. Everyone that uses it, everyone just uses it, and you're going to pay for it, and we don't really care, you're gonna pay for it. So

Eleah Portillo 11:44

there's no single purchase. It's subscribed only. Yeah, exactly.

Samir Balwani 11:47

So, so I saw that, and I had this, like, two part reaction to it.

Eleah Portillo 11:54

I love, you know, you said something interesting, and I'd love to chat about it a little bit more the concept of, I think all brands, including including myself, right? Like we're so guilty of, oh, problem solution, right? Because we know marketers, we should be solving their problems, not just talking about us, but when you're so obvious with problem solution, we're still making it about us as the brand, right? We need to make our customers the hero, and we make them the hero. That's when they build. That's when they're like talking about it over cocktails and brunch with their friends, right? And that's when the community gets built. Yeah, we

Samir Balwani 12:32

talked about it. We used to talk about this all the time in that no one goes all right, when's the last time you talked about, when's the last time you bought a tool and talked about it like, Oh, I got this awesome hammer. You never talk about the hammer. You talk about what you built with the what did you build? Yeah, make

Eleah Portillo 12:49

them the hero. Make them feel what is us? I'm going to pronounce his name incorrectly and just get laughed at. But Simon Sinek, right? The Golden Circle, I love that. It's a little I love how dated the video looks. But side note, it still works. This key message about like, people don't remember what you say. They remember how you made them feel, right? So going back into that post date feels, or like, in your example, they're they're proud. They're proud to show their friend. I don't know, the birdhouse they built, right? Or whatever it

Samir Balwani 13:21

is, the thing they fixed, because you're like, Oh, I didn't have to get a handyman. I fixed this. So I put this painting up, right? It wasn't the hammer. It's the thing that they accomplished and that it made them feel like that. So how

Eleah Portillo 13:31

do you breathe that into your language, right? And then once you have that, I imagine it's really fun to collaborate on the media buying side, right? Because there's just endless fodder of keywords and brainstorming. And you know, I'd love to hear from you actually, like, when, when you work with really creative forward brand, like, who are your favorite types of brands to work with? Because I know a lot of times we can come in and we could say, This is what I want to spend, and these are my expected KPIs, and then we would just check out. But like, what is, what is an amazing partner look like for you. So we can actually tease all those learnings and postate fields into the media plan and measure. It's

Samir Balwani 14:15

actually really easy, and this is the it's super easy, but almost no one does it, and I've

Eleah Portillo 14:21

been a client for a long time too. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Samir Balwani 14:25

It's really understanding your customer. I think that that is the one thing. So there's two pieces. There's really understanding your customer and actually understanding your customer. Too many brands go out there and say, This is who my customer is, and that's not who their customer is. It's who they want their customer to be 1,000% that is the biggest Miss for brands. And honestly, I would say nine out of 10 times, if your media is networking, it's because you don't understand who your customer is. And I'll say this for almost all media agencies out there, you know, the reality of situation is we can help you in. Mentally better than another media agency. We're not going to suddenly have this like new tool or system that's going to suddenly change your campaigns all of a sudden, but we can help you and force you to think about them in a different way, and that's what we do. We will sit down with you and say, Hey, who's your customer? Do you actually know who your customer is? Do you know what they want? Do you know what they want to feel, how they want to purchase from you? Do they want to do it in store? Do they want to do it online? Or do they want to ask a friend before they purchase from you? How long does it take them to purchase? These are all questions that you really need to understand, because if my purchase cycle is a day, I don't really need to do too much brand awareness. You're a pretty high commodity. I can just show a consideration to to a conversion ad. We're good. If you're a considered purchase, it's going to take three months. Our buying cycle is three to six months. That's a lot of brand awareness. It's also a long investment. I'm going to make you wait six months before you start to see a return, because we're going to be building brand brand equity for a while. So those are the things that people just don't do properly, and so I don't I don't blame the client for that. I blame both the client and the media agency. Yeah, as a media agency, you should be holding your client accountable to those things, and as a client, you should be open to looking at who your customer actually is and not who you want it to be. I

Eleah Portillo 16:20

have so much I want to talk to you about this because so I will say, like, I have been guilty of this, and I think my clients and people and like, when I was the client, I can understand it's like, you have this bad it. Here's what I like about what you're saying. It's almost like you have this understanding that's the sweet spot between big brand let's just be honest. I worked at Unilever for two years. They are very much brand penetration awareness only those are their KPIs. That's what they care about.

Samir Balwani 16:58

And there's percentage market share, right? Like that's all I care about.

Eleah Portillo 17:01

And let me be honest, at that scale, it really works for retail, right? But then there's the other end of the spectrum of, like, the pure play. They started out as d to c, or maybe Amazon, and they are just, like, very performance first marketers, and they only get convert and conversion, you know, conversion, and then, like, yes, retention, but there's no nothing feeding that funnel. And they scaled a certain point. Like, Well, hey, why can't I build a brand, right? Well, this because, like, like, CP, CPAs are, like, optimizing for conversion. That's actually the easier part, right? So much easier. It's so much easier, and it's so much more satisfying. And let's be honest, it's, I think it's fun and sexy, right? Yeah, yeah. You get a lot of, like, quick gratification. Like, we're, you know, a common complaint is like, oh gosh, it's taking weeks to get this point. Guys, we're talking about weeks, okay, like, when we look at Brand we're looking at six to 12 month increments. Now, on the flip side, again, my biggest issue with the larger conglomerates is, you know, how are you going to understand who your customer is? If you're not keeping adults on the DTC in the lower funnel, you need, okay, I'm a CPG, CPG junkie. So if you know that's literally at this point, that's the category I'll be saying is helpful in the CPG. I love that. So if, if you're listening and that's not your category, I hope this still helps you. But my philosophy is, especially if you're in retail, and omni channel is, do you see? This is where you learn who your customer is, right? This is where you understand what messaging really works. This is who's our persona. And you know, you could also be looking at it by like, by LTV, right? They can you jump on that predicted LTV, to these personas, to the messaging, to the hooks, to the emotional triggers, whatever it is you want to apply it to great, because you can only do that in DTC, and it's freaking awesome and amazing, but then you got to make money. So let's, you know, let's be real profitability, even with the best agencies, even with the best agencies you know, do you to see that possibility. It's it's a schlob, it's hard, it's possible. It's absolutely possible, but it's hard. So you take those learnings, you you replicate as much as you can in Amazon, right? Amazon's a little bit more black box. You don't fully get that tribution, but you can make correlation lifts, blah, blah, blah, but Amazon is for scale, right? And you use that, that Amazon top line revenue, that's what gets you selling to retail, and retails where you make your margin, right? Find me a CFO that doesn't want multi million dollar POS every Monday, every PO is profitable, right? You want, and you just, you need that cycle to feed each other again and again. So, like, you can't, you can't drop one for the other. And I think an issue with, like the mid to larger size brands is to get to this point because, you know, again, those POS are really addicted. They feel really, feels really good to be in retail, but it's six to 12 months. You. If you're not hitting your velocities because you lost traffic for your customers, you're off the show. That's

Samir Balwani 20:04

the thing. That's the piece that people always forget. And this is actually one of our frustrations, for a lot of our brands, is why is brand media falling in e com now? And this becomes a huge conversation point, and pretty consistently, becomes a huge conversation point. Because the problem is, is that E comm is the only area where brand spend directly equates to scale, yes. And so CFOs are like, great, you get it, and you got to hit your numbers, and you got to maintain profitability. Well, then brand gets cut first, right? And so and then you see downstream impacts. So we work with a lot of brands that have almost all of our brands are true omnichannel. They have E Comm, they've got a retail location, and they're in wholesale, and yet most of the brand spend still comes out of E comm. And when we get asked to cut brand spend by clockwork about three to four weeks later. Yeah, hey, our retail numbers are really down. Hey, our wholesale velocities,

Eleah Portillo 21:08

where is our secret? And

Samir Balwani 21:12

it's just and it's like a never ending conversation, then we gotta go back. And so you said something really interesting. You said performance marketing can be easier than brand can be harder at times, and it's true. So performance marketing, I think, is easier because you've got a hand handful of channels. You already know who the customer is, you are activating against those, and now it's a matter of putting spend where it makes the most sense, and getting the right creative in place. And so you're doing a lot of testing, but the answer in terms of, why is our performance not there? It's, well, we're spending too much, and we have to move into brand. Well, okay, great. Move it back to performance, and then you're fine, great. Now we scale down, and it's easy, because a CFO understands that a CEO understands that it's very straightforward. Brand on the media side is really easy, reach and frequency all day long, right? Gets really hard when we then have to see their members cool now, justifying it to the CEO and CFO and showing downstream impact. That's where it's hard. And so I think media as a whole has its ease and hard parts. And so that's where, that's why we like managing both, where we can manage brand and performance, because then I can go into a CFOs office and say, Hey, like here you you want to cut brand, but when we run brand, look at what happens to your CPM. When we cut brand, look at what happens to your CPM, your CPAs.

Eleah Portillo 22:39

I think you guys may be some of the few I've had the privilege of working with really dope, scrappy, small agencies and big name brand agencies thanks to my time at Unilever, right? And so I've worked with a lot of great and not so great partners. It is really, really rare to hear what you just said. It always feels like we're pulling her hair out to say, Hey, show me the impact. And it sounds like you just made it really simple to show the downstream impact and the different scenarios. Why do you think that? Is it? Because there's just different types of media buyers and media agencies and misaligned incentives. Maybe with how people make their money, there's

Samir Balwani 23:18

a lot of misaligned incentives. I also think there's a lot of performance media agencies and a lot of brand agencies, and there's not a lot of agencies that do both. Well, there's a lot of performance media agencies that are saying, Hey, we can do brand, and brand is just awareness on meta. I just update the against some interest level targeting and call it a day. But, like, yeah, exactly. But to actually, like, think about the impacts of it, to actually have a measurement strategy around it so you can qualify it and quantify it at the end of the day is, I mean, that's, that's where I think brand marketers need to go. And it's become really hard because it does, I talk about media has become this really difficult place where you need to be both creative and data driven at the same time, and not creative, so creative that you're actually creating, you know, photography and assets and design, but creative in the sense of you have to be able to think beyond Facebook and Google and data metrics all day long, and being able to have a really good sense between behind the art of media, because there is still a science around it, and we get a lot of data around it, and so we can, you know, you get a process, but there is so Much of hey, I intrinsically know if someone sees my ad, they will probably come and purchase. But where are they going to purchase from? How are they going to purchase? What does the next step in that journey need to be? How do I talk to people to find that out? Right? Like I would talk to golfers and be like guys. Have you heard about this? What do you think. About it. When would you use it? Would you have it before you go golfing? Would you have it when you come back? Is this like a morning thing? Great. Now my media buys are going to change. It's a morning thing. I want to hit you in while you're drinking your cup of coffee. So it just having those having that perspective, which is is hard for performance marketers because they're so I got my I got my dashboard, I got my Excel spreadsheet, I got my pivot table. Let's go, let's then go to, I gotta talk to people. That's like a whole different world. So, so that I think that that's the new age of media buying.

Eleah Portillo 25:36

Well, the there's a couple things there, right? Like, for a little bit. Meta made it so meta. Google made it so easy. You did need to do that, and that's why we got, let's just call it bloat. You know, it was like, and a lot of VC funding that we were burning. Let's be real. It was, it was an era. That era is gone. Now. We have to be real marketers, right? And so that's really saying is, we can't just be like, Okay, this is what I do. I'm really great at optimizing, but like, if you don't understand the bigger picture or the ramifications, and I will say to the other media and buyers and agencies listening, I've been client and I represent client side. And so I do want to share a frustration is that sometimes you have to remember, we're trying to build not just a brand, but a business. It has to be profit. You know, the subscription retention has to be there. I can't lose my subscription percentage so far, or the LTV so far off just to get the CPA. You know, it's, it's a bigger than just a one optimization point. But where was there with this? Oh, but the good, other good news is there's so many ways now to do that customer research. Yeah, yeah, obviously, like, one to one, surveys and interviews and all that. But like, I mean, taking your reviews, taking your competitors reviews, taking a category reviews, throwing that in your chat, GPT of choice, and starting to, like, pull out that and then organize that by emotional states, or, like, how are we different than our competitors? Like, leverage, like, it is so easy, so much easier is what

Samir Balwani 27:12

it's so much easier now than it was before, where you just had, like, I still remember we used to call customers after they purchased. And

Eleah Portillo 27:20

you know what your brand still should be calling it customers. Yeah. I

Samir Balwani 27:23

mean, you should still call your customers and but, like, I remember that was our only source of information at a time. Or you were, like, we go to trade shows. We don't really care if we sell anything. We just want to talk to people. Yeah, great. Like you that used to be the case, and now, between social listening, between reviews, between feedback cards, post, purchase surveys. Oh, there's so much threads. It's like one of our first things that we do. Because, like to your point earlier on, the beauty of being an agency, the beauty of being Consultants is you get to work with the clients that you want to work with, right? So I think the thing that a lot of brands forget is when we are pitching you, we are also vetting you. So like, we do not, I think we say yes to less brands than Yeah. So we were very thoughtful around it, because for us, we really do want to scale you. Like for us, if we put together a strategy and we're like, like, brand is a piece, big piece of that strategy. And you're like, Yeah, we're never going to do this. Well, then it wasn't a huge it wasn't a win. We're not a good fit. And so we need to make sure that there's a good fit in terms of both our media philosophy, in terms of what we think about, from an advertising standpoint, your business fundamentals. Like, I actually, like, will you continue to stay in business? Never thought

Eleah Portillo 28:39

about that. Actually, that's a great point. Yeah, and

Samir Balwani 28:43

then, just like your future vision for the business, and then, and then it comes down to relationship, which we actually like working together. So I think that it's really important for brands to really be thinking about that too, because all the stuff that we look for is what makes a brand a good brand that is likely to scam. And we do it a lot, so we get to see it a lot.

Eleah Portillo 29:01

I want to say one little tip and again. Now this is for all the let's say you're a newer on the marketing side, brand side, client side, DTC, whatever, whatever you are, if you're like a coordinator, manager level. Cool. Here's something you should think about, is people. Agencies are humans, right? So not only like you don't have to be nice for the sake of nice, but let's be good humans to each other. Let's not there's no need to like flex to see who's the smarter marketer or be rude. I You want your My insider tip is you want your agency humans on the other side of the Zoom screen to like you, because, guess what, when shit hits the fan and there's a fire and you need it, you need a homie hookup. You want to be you want to be able to have them be like, sorry, I have to wait till Monday. Ver, or would you prefer that they're like, You know what? This is a pain in my ass, but I got you, girl, right? Yeah. And honestly, girl. Real communication. I think we get by we, I mean, in my past life, in particular, at the larger corporate it's everyone's so scared of either making the call that backfires or breaking protocol and standing out in a negative way that we never get to. It's so corporate speak that with our, you know, every every call is recorded, and you're there's, like, this fear that maybe someone listened to it and I didn't represent the brand properly, or something. If you're my agency, I need to make sure that we're on the same page, not personality and actually personality, but but really, like, do you understand what my boss is grilling me about right now, and why? Because you may have a way better you oversee so many other clients, you may have a different solution, even in a different category, that's the same problem I'm facing that I wouldn't even know if I didn't, if I weren't more transparent with you, if anyone's listening, and the

Samir Balwani 30:53

Oh, I think that that is probably one of the most valuable things I you know, I think managing agencies is probably one of the hardest yet most important thing a marketing person does in terms of making sure that they understand the goals, making sure that they're aligned, making sure they're excited. Because you know when you feel like your agency is phoning it in at one point. Just take a second and look around. Be like was part of the problem that I lead to this. Did we say no too many times? Did we not give them the right context enough and look, I don't think it's the brand. I'd say it's the agency 90% of the time and the brand 10% of the time. But I think that the best clients that we've worked for and worked with have been the ones that got excited with us. Got us excited. We're open to new ideas, and even if they couldn't do it now, they said, You know what, we're on the budget for it right now. It's a great idea. Let's table. Let's revisit it in our next year's plan, I'm going to try and figure out how to do it things like that, being organized. God, if you can be organized on the brand side and just like, not have a fire every day. Well, I'm going

Eleah Portillo 32:11

to be honest, it's not my strongest suit, actually. Thankfully, there's some tools that keep me in line. But just even

Samir Balwani 32:17

having a marketing calendar that we're working towards right like, I think one of the biggest misnomers a lot of brands have is, oh, it's media. Just turn it on and off and it's like, no. If you want to increase spend, we can increase spend X percentage every day until we hit your goal, which may be 30 days from now. You want to cut down spend, great, we can decrease spend X percent over a certain period of time to get you to where you need to, unless you're comfortable destroying your outcomes. Like,

Eleah Portillo 32:44

I can't. I'm gonna even an anecdote, and I'm not gonna, it's such a simplistic one. So everyone who's already listening to this is like, yeah, dime a dozen. But I think we've all been there where you are under pressure to test so much at once that beyond what your budget can sustain and give you right? And so you are just swapping landing pages and testing creatives. And it's like you never get out of the learning phase, or, you know, and how that looks on the other channels outside of meta. And it's just you don't get to learn anything because you never you change gears so much you're just stalling out. So I love, I love what you said about, hey, about, hey, we can't do it this year, but let's put this in this wish list, and maybe we can budget for it next year. Look, I'll be the first to tell you, it's super annoying. Sometimes we have to forecast. I mean, we forecast a year out, and so much changes in a year. The way we consume media changes trends, right? But being able to to have a safe place with your agency, with your in house team, or whatever partners you have, where you can be like, hey, budgets aside, what what is like an amazing what can we do? What would be amazing? And then you can either be like, Look, are there some that we could kind of pare down and play with now? Are there some that we should table for later. But what I like that you said was we will be partners next year, because you're building a long term relationship. And so I think that's so important to have with your media, media agencies. And I

Samir Balwani 34:14

mean, I think the other piece of it, too is just the the best clients tell us everything. They don't silo, yeah, and they don't silo stuff out. So like the best agency, we just did a agency roundtable with another one of our clients, where they brought all of our agencies together. We did afta with them, and every agency presented their plan for the next half Marsh. That's like my dream. I love that. It's, it's great. I mean, that's, that's what Unilever does really well. I was at Amex before. That's what Amex does for Amex does really well, is that they bring everyone to the table, and they say, we've got experts, but it's only helpful if they all talk to each other. Well, great. We did that part. We did that second half program. Realized that they're going to do a Direct Mail catalog. My team came back and said, You know what? I think we can do a lift campaign against that catalog around the time periods that they're doing that catalog. It, we did it huge results, right, like but that wouldn't happen unless we were all talking together. And so it's not always realistic to get all your agencies together, but as the marketing manager on the brand side, it's your job to make sure those communication lines are open and it's Hey, we got a monthly report from our media agency. Let me send it to my affiliate team. Let's see what's going on. Like, let me know what's going on. So yeah,

Eleah Portillo 35:26

even if you're small and you don't have the privilege of being Unilever, where they are willing to sit down together. But to your point, yeah, that is, it's not just being organized. It's being from like a organizing your creative brand assets perspective, it's being organized from a, okay, let's consolidate the key learnings from the past quarter. Like, let's do an internal QBR, right, yeah, and make sure all of our stakeholders have are given the tools to succeed. Yeah, exactly.

Samir Balwani 35:54

And just, and that's where, like, the wins come from. Otherwise, everyone just gets into the Okay, we did this and we did that and we did this, but everyone's just like, kind of going through the motions, and the big ideas don't come out until you say, hey. Another example of this is we had a client of ours and they're like, hey, our organic search is really just hurting. And like, Great, yeah. Like, we can take a look at that from a paid media perspective and see what's going on. The paid search side did a deep dive and realized their brand demand, because their brand search volume had been atrophying over the last three years, so for every year, they kept going down. And so that gave us the ammunition to go to the client say, hey, look, it's not only us, your SEO agency, saying the same thing. Yeah, I think it's time for a brand investment. Here's what that investment could look like. Here's what we want to test. Here's where it's going to come. We ran it, and they turned around their brand search volume, and then, since first time, year over year, they're up against last year. And so it's just those kinds of situations, those kind of conversations, that lead to meaningful results. If we stuck to AB testing, landing pages and creative, we still would have had downward brand demand, but we would have been really efficient. All the ship was sinking. It's just, like,

Eleah Portillo 37:06

a really tight Titanic,

Samir Balwani 37:09

exactly, very efficient. But, yeah, I mean, like, that's those, those are, like the, I think that that, you know, if I, if I were to kind of take apart some of the, we've had a lot of fun in this conversation. But I think some of the the key takeaways for people is just, we are definitely entering an age of marketing basics. And I love that you're a professor teaching this at for people too, it's just like there is core elements of, how do you persuade someone to buy your product? Because at the end of the day, that's, what the end goal is. Right? The path to get there may be, I need to build a brand. And what does it build a brand, right? Is your brand safety and security? Like, you know, Tylenol needs to make sure that people trust it. No, it's safe, is it? I'm building a community. A lot of fashion brands have to say, like, when you wear this, you are part of this community, or is it around features and benefits? I have a product that actually allows you to do things. You can build a brand around different elements. It's just a question of where are you going to go with it? So I think that that's like a really great part. But then also, there's this transition of what the marketing manager, the marketing person on the brand side, needs to be doing, and it's going from tactical all day long, just like I'm doing, doing, doing to I'm also going to think and lean on my teams and think about what, how I kind of connect everything together, and what does the long term vision look like. What do you think on that? Well, obviously, I

Eleah Portillo 38:36

agree with you 1,000% I just want to give a shout out to the marketing managers who are feeling very siloed and their heads against the wall. So if I could give one last tip in relation to this, is, if you're at a larger company, especially if it's and it seems to be a little bit more siloed. And by larger, I just mean, like, more than 20. You know, when you 20 to 25 is like, so fun, everyone's still friends, and then all of a sudden, after, you know, from that to 100 it's just a different culture, right? Yeah, so that's where the silos start to pop in. And you know, this is where people are less friendly, I guess. But the what I would say is, do a re take the time to advocate for your business internally. And if that was a mistake that I like that is a mistake that I for sure made, was I just thought, Look, I'm going to focus on what I'm getting paid to do because I love it and I want to crush it. Well, you can't crush it in digital if retail sales are going to, you know, make choices that they don't understand the downstream impact, because you are choosing not to communicate, right? So to ensure that you can have that beautiful flywheel that you were just describing, I would I advocate to all everyone in that seat, because I've been in that seat. It is worth the time. It's almost like brand awareness. You need to do your own brand awareness so that when you turn on your conversion,

Samir Balwani 39:56

it converts. It's like advocating. It's. Almost education, right? Because it's like educating

Eleah Portillo 40:01

the company. Ops, okay, it's important retail

Samir Balwani 40:06

doesn't understand that when they make pricing and sale decisions, it impacts ecom that

Eleah Portillo 40:10

Amazon will price match or price match, and then all of a sudden, everything's below map,

Samir Balwani 40:17

well, and the crazy part is, there are strategies to work through that, right? So if people communicate, there are ways to do that. You can do create different SKUs, you can create bundles. You can do things to make sure that doesn't happen, but you just have to be and this is where I say it's the best brands that we worked with communicate and have a vision. And it really boils down to that, if you can do those two things really, really well, you know, it's then, then you are, you are miles ahead of a lot of other people. And just this, like natural curiosity and wanting to learn more and wanting to work together really helps. And finding people that can do that is really key. I love that Well, I

Eleah Portillo 40:58

would hope that all of us still have a glimmer of that desire to be good communicators, if we've raised our hands to say that we want to be marketers. So yeah, I guess that's my CTA to everyone listening, is, let's be better marketers for our brand and company. As a steward, be stewards to our brand and better marketers internally so that we can equip our partners with this information that they need for us to be successful.

Samir Balwani 41:20

Oh, I love it. This was I'm gonna close us on that. Thank you so much for joining us. If someone wants to find you online, where can they go to find out more

Eleah Portillo 41:29

about you? I'm pretty sure I'm the only Eleah Portillo, so E, L, E, A, h, p O, R t, I, L, L O, on LinkedIn. I look forward to, hopefully, some new friends, amazing. Thank

Samir Balwani 41:40

you so much for joining us.

Eleah Portillo 41:42

Thank you. Have a great day, guys.

Outro 41:52

Thanks for joining us. If you liked it, remember to subscribe, so you'll be notified of new episodes, and if you know someone who would enjoy this show, don't forget to share and leave a review. It all helps us impact more brands. If you're looking to improve your paid media, go to weareqry.com, and schedule a consultation. We're always happy to chat, see you for the next one you.

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