Half Your Ads Don't Work, So Here's How to Know Which Half Will
In this Retail Technology Spotlight episode, Armen Mkrtchyan, CEO and co-founder of Extuitive, joins Omni Talk to tackle one of the oldest problems in advertising and to show how AI is finally cracking it.
John Wanamaker famously said, "Half of my ads don't work. I just don't know which half." Nearly 200 years later, that problem hasn't gone away. It's actually gotten worse. Armen breaks down how Extuitive's AD Intelligence Engine uses a fusion of real consumer panel data (150,000 people, complete with purchase receipts) and brand-specific platform history to predict which ads will perform before you spend a single dollar launching them.
If you're a retailer or brand marketer trying to make your ad spend work harder in a world drowning in AI-generated content, this episode is for you.
🔑 Topics covered:
Why AI-generated personas push everyone toward the mean, and why that's a problem
How Extuitive's fusion model combines real consumer data with brand-specific ad history
The pre-validation approach: submit 200 ads, launch only the ones that will actually work
How to optimize for awareness vs. conversion depending on your campaign goals
What you need (6 months of ad history, ~250 ads) to get started
🎧 Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more retail tech insights!
#retailtech #digitaladvertising #retailmarketing #adspend #predictiveanalytics #omnitalk #retailai #contentmarketing #ROAS #retailpodcast #brandmarketing #Extuitive #metatiktokads #retailtechnology
Music by hooksounds.com
*Sponsored Content*
00:00 - Untitled
00:13 - The Challenge of Advertising Effectiveness
02:46 - Navigating the Digital Content Landscape
10:33 - Understanding Predictive Modeling in Advertising
19:33 - The Role of AI in Advertising Optimization
29:51 - Transitioning to a New Approach in Advertising
This Retail Technology Spotlight series podcast is brought to you by the Omnitalk retail Podcast network.
Speaker BHalf of my ads don't work.
Speaker BI just don't know which half.
Speaker BMany of the platforms today push advertisers to just create a whole bunch of content.
Speaker BIt only helps probably one stakeholder, the platform itself.
Speaker BWe say, listen, put your 200 ads through the platform.
Speaker BThese are the 65 that you should launch.
Speaker BAnd out of 65, probably 50 will do very well.
Speaker AHello, everyone.
Speaker AI am Chris Walton, your host for today's interview.
Speaker AAn interview in which we will explore the question, how should retailers and brands plan for a world in which we will all be fighting for eyeballs amid a plethora of AI driven content?
Speaker AThat question is particularly interesting to me because as you all likely know, I too, make my living producing authentic content.
Speaker AAnd this question really honestly keeps me up at night.
Speaker ASo I brought in an expert who has some really interesting ideas on how to stand out in this coming future.
Speaker AArmin McCurchin, the CEO and co founder of Xtuitive.
Speaker AThank you for joining me today, Armin.
Speaker AHow you doing?
Speaker BChris?
Speaker BAwesome being with you.
Speaker BThanks for pronouncing my last name as I.
Speaker BAs I told you earlier, sometimes I'm not able to do it either.
Speaker BIt's awesome being with you.
Speaker BLook forward to our conversation.
Speaker AYeah, it's great.
Speaker AIt's great to have you too.
Speaker AYeah, no, I was joking with you before.
Speaker ALike, you.
Speaker AYou definitely win the Continent award with one vowel in that entire last name.
Speaker AThat's a new one.
Speaker AIt's always the toughest part of the job, too.
Speaker ASo thank you for calling that out when I get it right.
Speaker ABecause, you know, it is the toughest part of the job sometimes getting everyone's names correct.
Speaker ABut.
Speaker ABut.
Speaker AYeah, so.
Speaker ASo you've got an interesting background.
Speaker AWe were joking around before we got started.
Speaker AYou actually went to school in North Dakota, Armin.
Speaker ATell us about that.
Speaker BI did.
Speaker BI went to University of North Dakota.
Speaker BStarted for three years engineering, electrical engineering, mostly.
Speaker BI loved it.
Speaker BI. I ended up in North Dakota directly from Armenia, where I grew up was a bit of a culture shock, but I met some of the nicest people in my life, I bet.
Speaker BAnd.
Speaker AAnd did you take to flying like everyone else that goes to school in North Dakota?
Speaker BI. I didn't study flying, but I had so many friends who are flying that I actually went with them and started flying.
Speaker BThey allowed me.
Speaker BAnd then eventually I actually started working towards my private pilot license as well.
Speaker AWow, that's awesome.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker AFor those that are listening to the Podcast like for those that are maybe not from the Midwest, North Dakota is a known pilot school.
Speaker ASo I was joking with Arvin beforehand, I was like, oh, you're not an actual airline pilot.
Speaker ASo that's the, that's the origin of that conversation.
Speaker ABut, but.
Speaker AAll right, Armand, so your company, you know, it's built on the idea, it's really built on the idea that there is a right and a wrong way to answer the question that I, that I posed at the outset of this podcast.
Speaker AAnd so set the landscape for us 30,000 foot view.
Speaker AWhat are the issues facing retailers and brands when it comes to promoting the right content?
Speaker AWhat are the issues that they're having to tackle right now?
Speaker BIn a way, the issue is probably millennia old, at least centuries old.
Speaker BIn fact, if we go back to about 200 years, a guy named John Wanamaker who literally pioneered the concept of the department store in the U.S. i think he had this saying where he said half of my ads don't work, I just don't know which half.
Speaker BAnd this was in like 1800s basically.
Speaker BSo in a way that problem has not disappeared.
Speaker BIn fact, if anything, I think it has been exacerbated, especially in the digital world by the amount of content that people see every day and trying to actually get attention of your user, of your potentially subscriber, of your buyer.
Speaker BSo what extuitive is arguing is that there is potentially a way of figuring out what's going to work before you push content, especially in our case digital ads out there in the wild and letting people see it.
Speaker BSo that's almost like a 40, 50,000ft view.
Speaker BNow if I come a bit lower, what happens daily is all of us make if we're launching content and we do also launch content for extuitive as well.
Speaker BWe every day make gut based decisions.
Speaker BYou and I will look at a content and say, you know what, this feels right or this doesn't feel right or I kind of like this.
Speaker BMaybe orangish color is the background.
Speaker BLet me launch that a bit more.
Speaker BSome of it we kind of have a gut feeling from what has worked in the past.
Speaker BSo we'll say let's go launch this and let's not go launch this for example.
Speaker BBut that's kind of what we do.
Speaker BLike if you think about it or what we will do a lot of the time is we'll, we'll launch and we'll say listen, let, let the kind of large platforms optimize it.
Speaker BWe are going to launch whole bunch of content, maybe 50100 ads for some, for some, for some brands we work with.
Speaker BIn fact, some probably per week launch several hundred.
Speaker BAnd they'll say we're going to let our, our platform partner can be meta, for example, optimize which ones are going to work and they are basically going to kind of increase the spend on those and they are not going to increase the spend on the ones that don't work.
Speaker BThe challenge with that is you are basically spending most importantly time in figuring out what's going to work before it works.
Speaker BSecond, you are spending money in testing things that actually aren't going to work.
Speaker BBut you are at least, you have to give them at least an equal shot in the beginning.
Speaker BSo what extuitive is saying, can we make that process whole bunch easier?
Speaker BSo when you are launching something, we are almost pre guaranteeing that that content is going to work and it's going to be in your top quartile, top 15 percentile of, of all the content that you've ever launched before you even launch anything.
Speaker AFirst of all, I love, I love the retail historian in you.
Speaker AI didn't know, I didn't know you had that in your background too.
Speaker AFirst North Dakota, now retail history.
Speaker ASo that's great.
Speaker AIt's great reference point.
Speaker AYou know, I love that whenever we get that on the show.
Speaker ABut, but yeah, I mean what you're saying, what you're saying makes sense.
Speaker AI mean I even, I think about it for myself, like I was looking at it yesterday.
Speaker AI think I produce 450 pieces of content in the last month for LinkedIn, you know, and it's really just my gut feel on what I think is going to work.
Speaker AYou know, me and a couple other, you know, a few other people on my team trying to decide what that is.
Speaker ABut the, the question I have too is like no, put it and put it in like the, you know, the 20 so now.
Speaker ABut you know, you went back 200 years.
Speaker AWe're in 2026, you know, with, you know, just, just all this AI content too.
Speaker AWhich does that also mean there's going to be just a premium placed on getting it right?
Speaker ABecause it's just going to be.
Speaker ASo it's going to become prohibitively expensive to do this, you know, in a way that, you know, is if you don't know, if you don't know what you're doing, it's going to be difficult for you to succeed.
Speaker BI mean we kind of are seeing it already.
Speaker BChris, what's happening is many of the platforms today are not naming any, but they would push you, they would push advertisers to just create whole bunch of content.
Speaker BThey would say create diversity, just launch more and more and more and more and more.
Speaker BAnd if you think about it, it only helps probably mostly one stakeholder, one player, which is the platform itself, because you have to pay for all of the content that you are launching for the user who is consuming it.
Speaker BThey just basically get bombarded by all kinds of messages and all kinds of content.
Speaker BSo they got to make a decision on what is more appealing.
Speaker BAs we are scrolling through their feedback and for the advertiser, for the merchant, for the retailer, they are trying to figure out, it's like, how much should I even create to start with?
Speaker BHow what is diversity mean?
Speaker BLiterally, it's like, does it mean like I just go and create for the same product, 50 different ads?
Speaker BDo I go create five different ads?
Speaker BDo I change the Personas that I'm using in my ads?
Speaker BSo that has, in fact, if you look at that, and we have done a whole bunch of experiments ourselves, and if you look at the CPA for, for many of the ads over time, they keep creeping up and that is not generally sustainable.
Speaker BSo there is a, we got to figure out a way of understanding how do you at least bring some predictive power of knowing what type of diversity you should create and what type of ads you should even launch before you for per ad spend the type of CPA amounts that you are generally going to be spending.
Speaker ARight.
Speaker AYeah, that's really interesting, especially when you bring in the advertising element into it too.
Speaker ALike that content I'm putting out is not typically, you know, I don't typically advertise it.
Speaker AAnd so, yeah, if you're advertising that content too.
Speaker AYeah.
Speaker AThen there are potentially some, I never thought about that before.
Speaker ASome potentially misaligned incentives with the platforms on which you're advertising who want to get you to put out as much content for that reason, because they know you're going to advertise it or put.
Speaker BWell, I'll give you another, I'll give you another data point, Chris.
Speaker BWe have, again, this is kind of our internal analysis, but we have looked at, for some of the larger platforms, at the type of ads that get promoted to basically be the top ad for money to be put behind.
Speaker BAnd what we have found very consistently is that the very top one or two ads aren't the ones that get promoted by the large platforms.
Speaker BIt's generally the ones that are from, again, from our analysis, it's generally are the ones that are in Your maybe second quartile that get promoted.
Speaker BAnd that kind of makes sense if you look at the incentive of the platform.
Speaker BThe incentive of a platform is to basically figure out what is going to work, potentially work well, not necessarily extra, extra well, but work well enough that if you launch an ad, they'll generate the returns, but they'll also generate the inflow of, of cash for themselves as well.
Speaker AThat's kind of a mic drop right in the beginning here.
Speaker AArmin.
Speaker ASo, okay, so basically, so if I recap, you know, everything we just talked about, we said like, you know, there's a, there's a, there's a cost of producing ads, like there just is.
Speaker AAnd so you want to be thoughtful about how many that you're or they're producing content, I should say, whether you advertise it or not.
Speaker ABut there's a cost of producing content that you want to get right and you know, everyone wants to control their costs.
Speaker AAnd, and then there's also some information asymmetry that's going on through this process in terms of how that content goes out into the world.
Speaker ASo, so you're, and your theory is that you can be more predictive about what content is going to work well.
Speaker ASo, you know, so I get that theory is one thing, I've heard this theory before.
Speaker ABut how do you, if I put your feet to the fire, how do you actually increase the probability of being right?
Speaker BIt's a great question.
Speaker BWe built what we call at extuitive an ad intelligence engine, which is our predictive engine in figuring out what's going to work, what's not going to work.
Speaker BBut probably even as importantly, it also helps you figure out who is it going to work for and who is it not going to work for.
Speaker BIt's both the probability of working, but also the audience who it may work for and may not work for the way we do it.
Speaker BChris, to get to your question, we started about a couple years ago collecting Data from about 150,000 people, mostly in the U.S. demographic data, very detailed, where they leave, obviously no names, so everything is deanonymized but where they live, how old they are, how many kids they have potentially, what kind of car they drive.
Speaker BAnd we asked them for about 30 minutes all kinds of questions and showing different ads and seeing their preference on what they like, what they don't like.
Speaker BAt the same time, we collected also receipts from these people in figuring out what they buy daily, what are they gravitating towards?
Speaker BThey can tell you and me that they like a certain yogurt brand.
Speaker BBut if they go and buy something else every day that you can see on their receipts, then it's a data point at the very least that I need to use when we're doing modeling.
Speaker BSo what we did was we took the data from this 150,000 people, we created digital Personas modeled after these people.
Speaker BAgain, we don't know generally who these people are in a very specific way.
Speaker BWe don't have their names, but we can call them Chris and Armin and Joe and Bob Armin living in Boston now, Chris lives in Minnesota.
Speaker BAnd we've covered all of the states with the same way.
Speaker BThe U.S. census basically would cover very representative census data.
Speaker BAnd we created these agents that Personas that represent US population.
Speaker BSo we can ask them questions, we can show them ads and say how would you react to this?
Speaker BWe can also give them different messages that would go with the ad and say, hey, if the ad had this text versus this other text, how would the Personas react?
Speaker BAnd we can cut them any way we want to.
Speaker BWe can say let's test only moms in Minnesota, for example, for a very specific product that we are targeting.
Speaker BOr we can test bikers in Massachusetts for another product that we are targeting, for example.
Speaker BSo that's one part of the model that we use.
Speaker BThe other part of the model is very brand specific data that we get from large platforms.
Speaker BWhen people work with us and connect their account to extuitive, we get very specific brand level information that we analyze in terms of what people had clicked before, how they had clicked, what are all of the metrics from top of the funnel, from all the way from ctr, CVR all the way down to potential CPA and roas.
Speaker BWe take the collection of the Persona based model, the brand specific model, and we create a bespoke fusion model for every single brand that we work with.
Speaker BSo it's a fusion model that combines the two parts and every single time it's bespoke, it's custom created for every brand.
Speaker BAnd that's what we will roll out to brand that we are working with.
Speaker ASo to increase the probability of getting, getting your content right more often.
Speaker AYou're saying there's foundationally two building blocks.
Speaker AI heard of one is, one is you've got to have a database of real people that you can understand their inclinations, their proclivities in terms of how they view advertising, how they view products, how they actually go about making purchases.
Speaker AAnd then you also integrate then the other key piece, the second step that I heard is that you also integrate with the brand or the advertisers or the retailers, you know, social media data to understand how their past performance of what they've advertised has actually performed in the marketplace.
Speaker AAnd you're fusing those two things together as the foundational building blocks of kind of creating a predictive modeling exercise, so to speak, to help the brands be right more often.
Speaker ADid I summarize that correctly?
Speaker BArmin, you recap it much better than I could.
Speaker BChris?
Speaker AWell, no, no.
Speaker AWell, thank you for that.
Speaker ANo, thank you for that.
Speaker ABut, but you know, the curious, the question I have is okay, because I've seen a lot of, especially in AI.
Speaker AThat's why, that's why I made the point of saying 2026 at the outset.
Speaker ALike, you know, let's put this in a 2026 context.
Speaker AI've seen a lot of pitches on stages, at a lot of conferences where they're, they're trying to use, you know, kind of AI Personas to approximate step one of that or foundation pillar number one of what you described.
Speaker AWhat is, what is right or wrong about that approach relative to using real people.
Speaker BSo in a way, if just not to get too technical, but it's what, what you and I can do today, or anyone, any, any of your listeners can go to any large language model provider.
Speaker BLet's, let's assume ChatGPT or OpenAI and prompt ChatGPT and say, hey, create me a Persona that represents Chris.
Speaker BAnd Chris is this person who lives in the zip code, does the following things, for example, and it'll create something for you and then you can say now ask this Persona whatever you are going to like, a specific cup that I'm trying to sell, for example, and it'll give you a ranking.
Speaker BAnd we have done that exercise as well.
Speaker BAnd what have we found out?
Speaker BWhat we have found out is that these models tend to predict basically mostly the mean, the average of what a Persona would do.
Speaker BSo every single time it's a, yeah, it's like you have a middle aged person living here, that's probably, this is what they're gonna like generally, although you are on the younger side, Chris.
Speaker BAnd it'll basically give you an answer to the question and every time generally the same answer.
Speaker BSo what you lose is the diversity of views that you want to capture.
Speaker BAnd that's what the real data allows us to do.
Speaker BThat's one thing.
Speaker BThe second, because of our real data is also very much infused with almost receipt level information, what we are able to do is not just Figure out what is the person's intent, meaning what are they going to say they are going to do but also what they really have done in the real world.
Speaker BWhich is a much better signal to use to capture whether a person is going to buy something.
Speaker BBecause ultimately most of the retailers, most of your listeners, when they are launching a product, when they are putting up an ad, they don't just want clicks, they want conversions, they want sales at the end of the day.
Speaker BAnd that's what we are trying to predict with the real data that we are collecting from folks as well.
Speaker ARight, right.
Speaker AYeah, that's, that's funny.
Speaker AFlattery will get you everywhere too, Arvin.
Speaker AI'm also, I'm always amazed at how people, young people sometimes think I am but I'm like I'm pushing 50.
Speaker ABut, but you know that which is, which is.
Speaker ASo thank you for that.
Speaker ABut.
Speaker ABut you know, that's interesting point too because like that's actually, you know, I think what a lot.
Speaker AI'm not the only one that thinks this too.
Speaker ABut like to hear you say like the, the AI just kind of pushes everyone towards the mean.
Speaker AI feel like that's actually what's happening in the AI generated content sphere too.
Speaker ASo.
Speaker ASo it makes sense.
Speaker AAnd yet you're right to do this.
Speaker AWell, in theory you would need some correlation with actual purchase behavior and data which you're not going to get through strictly using AI models.
Speaker AYou have to use traditional sampling and researching.
Speaker BAnd the other thing that happens is, and the reason we have also we have expanded to include brand level data is even if two brands are selling very similar, let's just make it up.
Speaker BPotato chips.
Speaker BThere are enough differences between the brands generally that unless we capture very brand specific information, the much larger Persona based model that we have will give you good recommendations, but it's not going to be as great as we would want it to be.
Speaker BHence our push to also incorporate as much brand specific data as we can to create this kind of fusion model that we call to be able to say for your specific brand, your demographic, even though it still might be middle aged men, but you are actually grab.
Speaker BThese are the types of people that are gravitating towards your brand a lot more than this other type of people.
Speaker ARight.
Speaker AThen you probably even know, right?
Speaker AYeah, yeah.
Speaker AI'm going back to business school.
Speaker AI'm thinking like there's like massive conjoint analysis going on in the background.
Speaker ABut you know, but yeah, the actual, the inclusion of the real data in terms of how the past ads have Performed has got to be a key ingredient in this.
Speaker AOkay, so then, so if those are the foundational building blocks, what happens?
Speaker ALike what happens next?
Speaker ALike does.
Speaker ASo are you bringing generative AI into the equation to predict and test, like how you think the ads that the retailers or the brands are thinking about putting into the space are going to perform?
Speaker ALike, how do you actually help them in that regard?
Speaker BSo we help them in two main ways.
Speaker BSo one is figuring out who to launch products for or who to target.
Speaker BSo that's almost figuring out the right Persona to go after in a very, very specific way.
Speaker BLike I said, gave an example of saying moms in Minnesota.
Speaker BIt can be also extremely specific.
Speaker BYou can say moms in Minnesota who are driving the X types of cars, for example, because you may actually need to target them with very specific product for that car.
Speaker BBecause they are buying car seat, for example, for their babies, like very soon, for example, as they are growing up, like a different car seat, for example.
Speaker AOh, right, okay.
Speaker AYeah.
Speaker BAnd so one is just kind of figuring out what is, what is the right Persona.
Speaker BOnce we figure that out, then we can help them create the content as well with generative AI.
Speaker BNow, in this case, when content is created, the content is created exactly to match the Persona that you are targeting.
Speaker BTo your earlier point that a lot of the AI generated content, there is no way to get around it.
Speaker BIt's kind of AI slop.
Speaker BYou just create a whole bunch of stuff and a lot of it is towards the mean.
Speaker BBut if we know who we are targeting, we can very specifically create the content for that specific Persona.
Speaker BSo that's one thing that we do.
Speaker BAnd then we basically help our partners that work with us to launch this content on their accounts.
Speaker BThe second way that we help folks is to help them literally pre validate before they launch and pre validate.
Speaker BExactly.
Speaker BSo if someone is launching hundreds of ads per week, so making exclusive part of their stack, so before they go and put it up on a platform and spend a few days to figure out what's going to work, what's not going to work, we say, listen, put your, let's say 200 ads through the platform.
Speaker BThese are the 65 that you should launch, for example.
Speaker BAnd they go ahead and launch the 65, they don't launch the other 135, for example.
Speaker BThe 65 is only the ones that they launch.
Speaker BAnd out of 65, probably 50 will do very well.
Speaker BRather than launching 200 and hoping that still the same 50 are going to do well.
Speaker AThat's where the Rubber meets the road, then is the predictive side of this, because that's what's going to increase your return on your ad spend, right?
Speaker ABecause you're, you're saying like, yeah, you might have created these, but you know, you're telling, you're basically telling the brand saying, based on your modeling, saying, look, this is these, these 35.
Speaker AI think you said these 35.
Speaker AI wouldn't advertise these because they're not going to, they're not going to make the grade for you in the way that the other 65 would.
Speaker AAnd therefore you're going to get a bigger return on it.
Speaker AThat's, that's the sauce, right?
Speaker AThat's the secret sauce.
Speaker BIt exactly is.
Speaker BAnd you could, you could use that to try to optimize for different things.
Speaker BOne, you could optimize for top of the funnel.
Speaker BIf there are brands that want to generate more awareness, so they are more interested in just people initially getting to know their brand.
Speaker BSo you can optimize your content and your predictive power towards figuring out what is the content that will generate more eyeballs.
Speaker BOr you can optimize for.
Speaker BWhich is mostly what our partners would do, or optimize for sales.
Speaker BAnd in that case, folks will probably optimize for lower cpa, partly because we are spending money to try to get the product to convert basically to get sales.
Speaker BSo that's up to almost the objective of the campaign that the retailer wants to launch, and we can optimize for any.
Speaker AGot it.
Speaker ASo if you're a marketer listening to this, there's really two things you should be thinking about if you're going to try to take a similar approach to this, whether it's with you guys or anybody else, which is like, okay, you should be able to predict which of the ads that you have in your stable are going to perform the best.
Speaker AAnd then the other part of it, too, which you also said, which I want to come back to, is you can also help them refine that to some degree, using analytics to say, like, you know, okay, you know, this image may need to change or this, I'm guessing this color might need to change or something to make it better.
Speaker AWhere does, where does the, where does the, the change or the adaptation to the ads begin and end?
Speaker AArmen, like, are you going into the AI video creat?
Speaker AIs it static?
Speaker ALike, how do you, how all.
Speaker AWhat all do you, how do you think about that question?
Speaker BYeah, yeah, I'll answer that in a second, Chris.
Speaker BAnd I'll also mention there's a third part as well, which is figuring out who are the people, potentially a new group of people that you have never targeted that actually you should be targeting through the product because you maybe you never thought that they're actually your right customers, except they probably are.
Speaker BSo that's the third part of the platform as well that helps marketers.
Speaker BNow to your question, in terms of where we start, we do static images in terms of creation, optimization and pre validation.
Speaker BAgain, doesn't have to be in the net sequence.
Speaker BIf someone has enough creatives that they already have a team developing them, we can just do pre validation, basically saying don't launch this and launch this.
Speaker BBut if folks don't have it, we can also just create for the right audience and then rank them, pre validate them before they launch.
Speaker BOn the video side, we do pre validation, we do the scoring, but we don't do creation yet.
Speaker BThat will come to the platform in probably about three or four weeks, but we wouldn't do creation yet.
Speaker BWe will tell you, if you run your video through our platform, we'll tell you how well it's going to do before you launch it.
Speaker AGot it, Got it.
Speaker AYeah.
Speaker AAnd given all the, given all the recent smoke in the, you know, the AI video space, particularly with Aries announcement this past week of, you know, just refusing to use AI generated models in any of their advertising, like I would, I think actually as a marketer I'd probably be leaning more into the static imagery in terms of taking the value of generative AI and what it can do, you know, to, to the point that we're having in this conversation, which is just like if your goal is to make your ad spend more productive, you know, that's probably where I would start.
Speaker AAll right, so Armin, I've, you know, I've, I've been doing this for eight years.
Speaker AI've seen a lot of people pitch this, but is there a pitch, you know, something similar in vain?
Speaker AIs there an example you can share in practice of, you know, how this works, where you can put your money where your mouth is?
Speaker BYeah, I'll give you, in fact, let me start with a more recent example of a well known supplements brand that we have been working with without necessarily mentioning their name.
Speaker BSo I'll tell you the situation.
Speaker BBefore extuitive and after extuitive just to kind of make that contrast perfect.
Speaker BBefore extuitive, they're launching dozens of ads per week.
Speaker BLet's again, I'll change the numbers just a bit.
Speaker BBut they're spending.
Speaker BThe order is still Very accurate.
Speaker BFrom what I've mentioned, they're spending in the order of about $50,000 per week on ads, which is not insignificant.
Speaker BThere are partners that we have to spend a lot more, but that's a significant number to spend per week for many brands.
Speaker BAnd this is on a very specific platform.
Speaker BAnd after three or four days, they find out that from about 50 to 70 ads that they launch per week, Chris, probably about seven or eight perform very well.
Speaker BThe rest don't.
Speaker BBut at that point, they've already spent probably half of their $50,000 budget.
Speaker BAnd about 20% of the half of their budget went on ads that didn't perform at all.
Speaker BMaybe they actually resulted in almost either no conversions or extremely low conversion.
Speaker BSo let's just say that's the baseline to start with.
Speaker BSo what we did first with them, we said, let's figure out who we are launching these ads for.
Speaker BSo in fact, we went and explored with our agents the whole space of different Personas that would be buying their products.
Speaker BAnd we came up with two new Personas that we said they had never tried it before.
Speaker BWe said, listen, let's go and target these folks on some of the major platforms.
Speaker BWe went and created the images as well.
Speaker BWe launched the campaign.
Speaker BI'll give you the stats.
Speaker BThere is about 2x of the AOVA that we accomplished.
Speaker BRuas increased by about 2.7, 2.7 x CTR by about 70%, CVR by about 60%.
Speaker BAnd that's for just this specific brand.
Speaker BNow, we may not see the very same numbers, obviously every single campaign, but we have run now multiple campaigns with them and consistently both in figuring out what audiences to launch campaigns and ad sets and ads for, and figuring out how do you bring the CPA down and increase the.
Speaker BWe have been able to do it compared to the baseline that they started with.
Speaker BSo that's a, that's a very specific example of a, of a, of a partner we work with today.
Speaker AThe thing I love about this conversation, Armen, is, you know, you've provided a really good framework for.
Speaker AIf I'm a marketer sitting here listening to this, like, okay, these are the types of questions I need to be asking myself in terms of how am I going to do this better?
Speaker ASo before I let you go, like, one thing I want to ask you is, like, how hard is this to do?
Speaker ALike, what, what, what?
Speaker ALike, how long does it take you to set this up if there's a retailer brand interested, like, what does that process look like?
Speaker ALike, is it complicated?
Speaker AIs it Simple, Is it straightforward?
Speaker AWhat does it look like?
Speaker BSo the process, the technical process in the background is pretty sophisticated.
Speaker BWe spent probably more than a year trying to refine it to actually get to a point where we are.
Speaker BBut the process for a partner to work with us, we have made it as simple as we could.
Speaker BIn fact, that's probably half of our research went into focusing on making it a seamless process for our partners.
Speaker BSo the way we start, Chris, when a partner wants to work with us, generally we'll actually work with the right partners and say that there is whether people want to call it a 30 day trial period or I call it calibration period, partly because I want the partner to calibrate with us what we do and recalibrate their process as well.
Speaker BAnd we wouldn't charge anyone if they are working with us for the 30 days for them to actually see the value before they decide to continue.
Speaker BThey connect their Meta or TikTok account with us to our platform.
Speaker BIt takes probably a day for us to build the bespoke model once.
Speaker BYeah, exactly.
Speaker BSo that's, we went down, Chris, from about close to two weeks down to a day now where we build the model in a day, we spend the next day doing the quality assurance to make sure that the model is going to perform.
Speaker BAnd basically after 48 hours that's rolled out to the partner where we'll walk them through how it works, we'll walk them through the metrics and we'll continue using that platform with them and observing for the, for the, at least for a month, almost every day to make sure that it delivers.
Speaker ASo if I'm contemplating taking this approach, like does it matter how big I am to get the benefit of this?
Speaker AThat's kind of my, my final question in closing out Armin is like, you know, does this is, does this approach work for everyone or who does it work best for?
Speaker BIt's in terms of the size of the company, what we work with, folks who are and kind of top line revenue are 5 million up to several hundred million, for example, and some that we are now in conversations with that are in tens of billions.
Speaker BSo it doesn't really matter.
Speaker BChris There are features that matter though, and those features are the partner has to be launching enough ads per week for us to be able to actually make predictions that are substantial for them.
Speaker BAnd if a partner is launching one or two ads per week, even if you guessed it right or didn't guess it right, that probably wasn't going to make that much of a difference.
Speaker BSo what we require our partners to have is about six months of history, whether it's on Meta or TikTok.
Speaker BThose are two platforms that we support these days.
Speaker BSix months of ad history and generally about 250 ads that they have launched in the lifetime of their account.
Speaker BThat's the requirement basically, to get started.
Speaker AYeah, I mean, that makes sense.
Speaker AYeah, fundamentally, like, yeah, because there's probably some brands that are listening to this, being, getting really excited.
Speaker ABut you've got to also make sure that you've got the sample size of data ready and ready to fit the modeling that you're going to put everything through, essentially, is what you're saying.
Speaker BExactly.
Speaker BBecause, I mean, it's like, again, some of the partners we work with, they launch 250 ads per week.
Speaker BSo for some brands, that number would be just so low.
Speaker BBut there might be also brands that are just growing and they are just trying to figure out how to even launch on Meta or TikTok.
Speaker BAnd those may not be the right partners for us or we may not be the right partners for them at this stage, partly because they need to get enough traction so we can also figure out who gravitates more towards their brands to build this fusion custom model in a way that also performs pretty well.
Speaker AYeah, yeah.
Speaker AAnd for all the big guys listening, you know, this is, I mean, this has been a roadmap for exactly how you need to think about this and the types of thought process you need to put into it, you know, in the long run, particularly as we come back TO it's now 2026, you know, it's not 200 years ago with Wanamaker.
Speaker AYou know, there's a lot of new things that people can put towards this and your competition is going to, going to take this approach or similar approaches to beat you to the market in the advertising game with technology, you know, at the technology like we have today at their fingertips.
Speaker ASo, man, Armin, this was great.
Speaker AI really, I, I really enjoyed.
Speaker AI love how you laid it out too.
Speaker ALike I said, like, anytime I can have a conversation where I come away with, you know, a framework for the building blocks of how to think about something and then the, the, the steps I need to take to execute it correctly.
Speaker AI know it's been a really successful podcast conversations, so thank you for that.
Speaker AIf people want to get in touch with you, what's, what's the best way for them to do that, you or anyone at extuitive.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker BFirst of all, Chris, been such a pleasure, so thanks for having me on would love to continue the conversation in the months and years to come.
Speaker BIf people are interested, I would encourage them to go to ext.com which is with ex.
Speaker BThen Twitter.
Speaker BOr they can go there, find, find the team, reach out to us.
Speaker BBut you can also email me directly at armen armenextuitive.com as well.
Speaker AAwesome.
Speaker AWell, Armin, again, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker AThat wraps up today's conversation.
Speaker AThis podcast was produced, of course, with the help and support of our fabulous producer, Ella Sirjord, and on behalf of Ella, myself and everyone at Omnitalk Retail.
Speaker AAs always, be careful out there.