Behind the Media Buy: Incrementality and Lifecycle Marketing with Chris Rigas, VP, Media at Markacy

Tim Rowe: Chris, I think the thing that I'm maybe most excited about is to kind of unpack, you'd said something in the lead up about how brands nurture existing customers and whether or not they're doing that with media or how they're effectively communicating throughout the life cycle. And it just kind of was like one of those. blow me back moments, but we're going to talk about a lot of things marketing today. We're going to talk about e-commerce. Maybe we even talk to some Black Friday, Cyber Monday, tis the season. But Chris Regas, thank you so much for being here.
Chris Rigas: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Tim.

Tim Rowe: Definitely. So you've got an exciting background coming from the Vayner pedigree and an agency now called Markacy and really guys take like a, a consulting first principles driven approach to marketing and advertising. Maybe just holistically, if you could give me a little bit of background on kind of you, the Chris Regas 60 second commercial and, and, and what Markacy does and the types of brands that you work with.

Chris Rigas: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, like you said, my background, I first job kind of out of college was at VaynerMedia in the media department, back when it was a bit smaller, and, you know, learned a ton there and met a lot of really great people. So it was a great a great kind of first stop. And then since kind of 2019, I've been at Markecy, like you said, which is kind of a boutique marketing agency. And I think, like you were saying, it was founded by Chris Jones and Tucker Matheson, who kind of have a consulting background. And yeah, like I was saying, we kind of take a you know, sort of a consulting approach, or I like to call it like a first principles approach where we think through, you know, everything that a brand that we're working with is doing in marketing holistically and try and, you know, help them from a quantitative lens determine like where they can do better and stretch their budget further and you know, just improve overall. So some of the things, you know, I'm obviously focused on media buying, but I think as a group, some of the things we push them on or push our clients on are like, you know, not just how are you spending your media budget, but how are you spending your creative budget? You know, are you kind of optimizing that in a way where you're getting the right assets for all your channels, you know, from website to media and CRM and so on? And then how are you spending your own team's time? A lot of the brands we work with are fairly early stage and have more limited in-house resources. So you want to make sure that you're maximizing those in-house resources in terms of spending their time on the things that are most likely to drive results. So I think you know, definitely taking like that pretty intensive and holistic approach to clients is where we've seen the most success. And yeah, I would say it's the last piece is it's, you know, we really try and be quantitative. So like, you know, when we're doing that holistic review, we want to have like a data point that we can point to as far as like why we're doing something or not doing something and that we can track over time to make sure we're moving the needle in the right direction.

Tim Rowe: Let me ask you a question around that how do you how do you balance that you talked about managing spend and the balance between how much money goes to creative and how much goes to the actual media itself what goes to production but still being quantitative data driven. focused on outcomes and how this impacts the bottom line, ultimately, how do you how do you balance that the alchemy of kind of art and science, as it were, the quantitative and the qualitative aspects of building a campaign? How do you think about those two things?

Chris Rigas: Yeah. And I think probably take eCommerce as an example because it's a good starting point. But I think people say a lot now that creative is the targeting. It's especially true for Facebook and Instagram. And it's definitely the most important variable in your performance and You know, even, you know, just targeting as far as like what the media buyer is doing in the meta backend is just much, much less important than it was, you know, seven years ago or whatever. So I think that, you know, just making sure that you're making the right and enough investment in creative is really important to driving improved performance. And I think, you know, what we tend to do is, a couple types of analysis. One, we'll just look at a time series data and see when we do launch new creative, what type of improvement are you able to drive? So sometimes we'll… And I think this is a lot of what I do as a media buyer is I'll put new creative in and I'll refresh the next day and see what difference you can make. understand in CPC or what difference you can see in your CPA. Oftentimes, I'll see if the right creative, a 20% or 30% boost, which is obviously huge for a business. And so just… That's obviously not infinite, right? You can't just introduce new creative and see… Sure.

Tim Rowe: But if you catch lightning in a bottle… Hey, there's an opportunity here. This creative popped. Let's invest more. Let's expand to a new market. Let's, selfishly, let's parlay. Let's, let's activate on some out of home. Let's, let's do some additional things. If this creative's resonating, obviously that seems like an opportunity. And especially in such a, a resource restricted environment where we are so cost conscious. How are brands kind of thinking and responding to maybe the current economic state as it were? How is today different than three years ago?

Chris Rigas: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, a lot of the brands that we see saw pretty explosive growth during COVID. And it's not as much the case now, especially for eCommerce. So they're thinking about what they can do to continue growing and continue reaching new customers with ideally less marketing budget, right?

Tim Rowe: Sure.

Chris Rigas: And I think what we've really seen brands focus on and we've tried to focus on is incrementality. So assessing across the board, like which of your channels is really moving the needle as far as new customers. Because I think you see a lot of, especially within digital, over-attribution where you can look at a ROAS number for a retargeting campaign or for a brand search campaign, and it's just pretty high, but it doesn't reflect the underlying reality where those people are likely to convert regardless of seeing the app.

Tim Rowe: What does that mean? Unpack that. Why is that the case? Why could that be a false positive?

Chris Rigas: Yeah. So just imagine someone does a search for out-of-home insider, right? And they've heard about it from somewhere else. But if you're looking at, say, visits to your site or whatever, that's going to get credited to Google, the brand search campaign. In reality, it was you know, however, they had heard about in the first place, whether it's on LinkedIn or referral or so on. And so I think, you know, you just you end up over attributing to the last channel that drove the site visit or the conversion. And right, a lot of times we see that's, you know, brand search or retargeting on Facebook or another channel.

Tim Rowe: So and I'm ultimately kind of cannibalizing what you would have had otherwise, but you're spending against yourself to get it. And that, yeah, the math on that can't work really well for for two super long. Or really a big monster scale. Obviously, we have to do something to drive said branded search. So thinking about that, maybe where do brands start? Where do most e-commerce brands, the brands that you're working with, where are they starting in their kind of marketing journey? And ultimately, you know, when do they start to experiment with offline media and channel diversification, really thinking about how to allocate to unlock new, new optimization?

Chris Rigas: Yeah, absolutely. And so I think, um, You know, a lot of people will sort of say like Facebook isn't as effective as it was in the past. And I mean, there's some truth to that. But I think for us, the reality is like when you when you first launch a brand like, you know, Facebook and also Google are really going to be your bread and butter and that they're going to be the most effective channels for reaching new customers. And I mean, you know, there's all sorts of reasons for that. But I think a lot of it comes down to you know, the fact that they reach everyone, right? Like everyone is in those places and the data that they have on users for who is likely to be in market for your product. So we, you know, if we're launching a brand, working with a brand as they launch, we'll always start in those places. And I think when we see the importance of channel expansion come in and especially out of home and some of the other traditional channels is when brands have become somewhat more established. And I think that that's when you start to see some of what I was talking about. I kind of call it overtargeting kick in where you You know, you're established in the market, people know who you are. And so, you know, when you think about the algorithm for a Facebook, like it's going to try and find people who know who you are, because those are the people who are most likely to purchase. Whereas previously it was, and it's still to a certain extent is finding new customers, but previously it was looking at people's online behavior and finding the ones who are most likely to be good new customers. Now it's saying, I want to get as many conversions as I can. I'm going to serve to the people who are familiar with the brand.

Tim Rowe: And that's that over-optimization piece.

Chris Rigas: Exactly. Right. And, you know, you can exclude your site visitors, you can exclude previous purchasers, but I think that, you know, your match rate is not always going to be great. And, you know, you're kind of fighting an uphill battle because Facebook or Google or whoever is always going to be, you know, the algorithm is always going to be trying to find the people who are familiar with the brand because they're most likely to convert. So it's, you know, it's a challenge. And I think that, you know, that's where we see the traditional media really work well because it's less algorithmically based. So it can really be sort of truly incremental to what you're doing with Facebook or Google. So you're, you know, you're using different tactics that rely more on just like what you know about your audience, you know, where they over index as far as location, what their demographics are and so on. And you can kind of hit them in that way. Because I think what we often see is that brands will start Facebook and Google, and then they'll expand to like a programmatic display or Pinterest. And the reality is like the targeting on a programmatic display or Pinterest is going to be very similar to what it is on Facebook or Google. And so you're not, I think, truly like finding a good pool of net new users and traditional channels tend to do a better job of that.

Tim Rowe: Interesting so how how then okay so so we can kind of get hypothetical here as walled gardens get taller. How does, how does that over-optimization start to play out? It would seem like now I'm just, now I have a series of false positives and I really don't know how to gauge directionally where, where am I making money? I'm just spending in all of these places and sometimes I'm selling stuff and sometimes I'm selling more and sometimes maybe I'm selling a little bit less. How do you, I guess, how do you start to decouple and get back to like more of a holistic approach?

Chris Rigas: Yeah. Well, so I think that just a good incrementality test, there's not a really great substitute for that. So I think just looking at… I think match market is usually the best, just doing a match market test with each of your core channels and seeing how you do… I do in terms of overall sales, when you're running on Facebook, or you're not running on Facebook, or when you're running on, you know, when you're sending a mail piece, or you're not sending a mail piece, I think that's kind of the best and most fundamental place to start. And then I do think there's just like general principles that you can take in your media buying that help you be more incremental. So I mentioned, You know, like, like doing less retargeting right like trying to maximize your digital spend as much as you can't be 100% sure, but trying to maximize as much of your digital spend on on new customers as you can. And then I do think like, not. Like, I think having a good mix of traditional and digital is good. And then, like, you're saying, like. trying to limit your digital channels in some cases, like really what's working the best and what you can feel confident in. Because I think you do get this effect of like, your over-attribution is going to be more concerning when you have more platforms because they can all end up taking credit for the same order. And so, you know, If you're hitting someone with a retargeting ad on Facebook on display, and then they're doing a brand search and coming in through Google, it's like now you have three conversions that you reported. Maybe none of them were the reason that the person was converting. So I think you want to limit your channels to the ones that you can really feel confident are incremental.

Tim Rowe: Something you mentioned there, the match market test, can you explain what that is and maybe give us an example of how that works or how to do that?

Chris Rigas: Yeah, definitely. So it's kind of. Basically, just if you have a media mix that you have already in place, like varying it in or selecting a couple markets that are similar in a lot of ways. So you want it to be similar in terms of population and demographics and previous purchasing behavior for your brand. And then basically saying in one market, I'm going to take, you know, approach A, so it might be pausing your Facebook spend. And in another market, you'll take approach B, you know, you keep your Facebook spend on. And then, you know, you do that for a period of probably four to six weeks. And then you look at the… I think what we do is you just basically compare the Change for this 4 to 6 week period to the to the 4 to 6 week period before in both markets and say like. What was that delta in for approach A versus approach B? And then, you know, that delta is, is your true incremental revenue from Facebook. And that's, you know, you put that over your spend and that's your, that's your true ROAS. And, you know, often it's different than what the platform reports, as you can imagine.

Tim Rowe: As one would imagine. And a theme that I've heard you mention a couple of times, Chris, is the idea of incrementality. When you're, when you're looking for incrementality, how do you, I guess, maybe, how do you know that you're at a point where I've maxed out or I'm close to maxing out and I need to start looking for that next channel or, you know, the next, the next thing, how do you, how do you identify that as a brand, as a founder? How do you know?

Chris Rigas: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's just generally a sense of kind of increasing your media spend and you're not getting a lot more coming back in terms of revenue. You know, I think the other way we probably look at it is, you know, we like to work with brands on like, what's your kind of needed CAC in order to break even, right? So if you're making this much margin on your product, you can interpolate that you need to drive a certain CAC in order for it to be profitable. And so I think often when we start looking at another channels is when you get your core channel spend to the point where it's no longer profitable when you look at your product margin and your CAC.

Tim Rowe: Fascinating. Maybe land us home here on kind of where we started with the percentage of our budget. We talked about media versus creative and kind of being able to identify these inflection points in the next moment and where to look. We talked a little bit about in the lead up the use of media money to nurture the customer lifecycle and how that's not really a good use of obviously the money that you've got and how there might be other ways to more effectively communicate with a customer once you've won them and how to think about that. I think that was the really aha moment for me was how to think about the money that you're spending and how you communicate with the customers, you've already won.

Chris Rigas: Explain that to us. Yeah. So a couple of key points. One is just similar to the incrementality point, which is that if you're looking at someone who's already purchased, your reported ROAS is going to be much higher than your actual or incremental ROAS because that person is already likely to buy again, and they're getting a lot of emails from you and so on. there's a pretty good chance they bought because of an email they got rather than an ad they got. So that's one point. And I think that's just… We feel like it's just better for brands to be focusing more of their marketing on net new customers. Because if you think about your interactions with brands, Once you have converted, just so much of the interaction is going to be through email. And that's how you are often going to interpret what's going on with the brand. So I think making sure that your email and SMS programs are in a really good spot and your website is in a really good spot, to me, are the best ways to maximize your lifetime value and your customer retention. And then You know, not to say that there's no room for media spend on existing customers, but I think kind of the status quo is too high, right? Like most brands spend too much on it. And then the other thing I kind of wanted to hit on Sorry, I'm kind of blanking. No, no, you're good, you're good. Maybe take a second if I can take a second.

Tim Rowe: You're totally good. I've got a next question for you, too, if you want to just jump on to the next thing. If you've got a next point, we could totally just pause right here.

Chris Rigas: Yeah, sorry, one sec. Yeah, yeah. Oh, right. I think what I was going to say is that I think you often see marketers or brands think that there's a really… There's a need to have really, really tailored creative for your existing customers and have that be different than what you're doing for acquisition. And I think that's just not what we see in the data a lot. So I think especially with your paid social platforms like People are scrolling through a feed and they're responding to each individual post as a post on its own. And I think that just as often, it's a similar response, whether you've seen the brand or not. And the type of content that is engaging to someone who's a prospect also tends to be engaging to someone who who is familiar with the brand. So I think that like, when we're talking about like, you know, time and resources spent, I think there's just there's often too much time put into like, you know, a really detailed funnel approach where you're doing different things with your with your media creative throughout the funnel when what you really want to do is spend the most time like distilling your product and your brand in a way that is universal and communicates well to people in general. Because I think people often or brands often read more into the difference between acquisition and retargeting in that way than there really is.

Tim Rowe: Spitting some truth, Chris Regas. Thank you for dropping that bomb. A question for you. We're in the season. It's Black Friday, Cyber Monday. You work with a lot of e-commerce brands. What are like the top three mistakes you see from e-commerce brands in the Black Friday, Cyber Monday season?

Chris Rigas: Yeah, definitely. So one that we see is, I think, brand not being kind of clear in their messaging around what the sale is, or kind of trying to, I don't know if I'd say trick, but kind of… Be a little bit cheeky, tease what it is we're actually up to, be intriguing. Right. And then I think what you often get is you get people who purchase and then feel like, you know, the discount went up, and so they didn't get the best offer. And I think that's not the dynamic that you want to encourage because that person is obviously going to be less likely to come back and even doesn't feel like they had a good experience with the brand. So I think where we see success is where brands are more transparent. And we've even seen A lot of digital brands have a lot of inventory at this point, given some of the overall sales trends the last couple of years. So I think we've seen where brands are just honest about that and say, we bought a lot of inventory, we've got some really great sales. You know, people latch onto that and they appreciate it.

Tim Rowe: Yeah. Like that's relatable. Like, all right, cool. Yeah. You screwed up at your job. I've, I've, I've made a, you know, a bonehead move here or there. Exactly. Cool. And if I could get a, you know, two for one with free shipping, I'll take it. Right. How about missed opportunities? What, what things do you think there are that, that you're like, oh my gosh, I can't believe. We didn't do this or, you know, I can't believe they didn't do that. What things do you think are just like obvious missed opportunities?

Chris Rigas: Yeah. So one, maybe I'll shout out a brand that we're working with, cause I think I do a nice job of this. So, so digs Pat is, um, a pet company, and I think their hero products are kind of the rebel and evolved dog crates, which are, you know, just kind of really nice and advanced as far as features dog crates. But so one thing that they've done is They're organic socially every time they run a sale like we'll do it's kind of like a meme video or it's I think the most recent one is is like Mariah Carey like over a just over like a a static image of the crate. And so it's basically like something you post to TikTok, right? Sure. And it just does really well. Even if you look at Facebook and Instagram, because that's the type of content people are interested in. So I think doing more UGC around sales that just talks about the sale and announces it is, I think, something that brands could do more of.

Tim Rowe: Like really… And you know, it, we, we talked about over-optimization from like an algorithmic standpoint, but like, there's also an over-optimization sometimes from like a, a content standpoint. And you know what, Hey, maybe just be consumers, like make the things that like regular people want to watch. Cause it's entertaining. Cause it's funny seeing, you know, this little gif dancing above the crate and I get it. You sell crates, but like, you're funny too. And I think that's relatable. And I own a dog and my dog's funny and. Right? Like now I've created this story, this dialogue from what would otherwise just be your ad. And I think that that's obviously, that's kind of the superpower that we love out of home so much for us. It connects to that very visceral, it's a very visceral, you know, connection that, that it creates and, and using things like that, tap into the zeitgeist and, and, and really think about how that looks on your brand. I think that that's, that's kind of a fun exercise in itself is just like, what could it look like if our brand was a little bit more fun, a little bit more relatable.

Chris Rigas: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's something similar with out of home and the paid social where you're really just asking people to take a second look and like, you know, for out of home, like, go, you know, do a search and like, look up the brand or for Facebook, like give a click and look a little bit more into it. And yeah, I think there's, right, it's really trying to appeal to some more like, universal things about what people think are funny or engaging or what catches people's eyes than like really being, you know, as in the weeds with your brand and like, you know, your story. You know, it can be more of the, you know, not gimmicky things, but things that people just engage with well.

Tim Rowe: Chris, maybe just to close this out, give us a, give us a peek inside the day in the life of a media buyer. There's a lot of folks listening. It's like a global business development, media owners, marketers. For folks that don't know your kind of behind the scenes world, what is it that you're thinking about when you're ultimately not just including out of home in a plan, but like the literal, like pulling levers, working with partners, what are the things that you look for? Is it, is it speed to market? Is it a partner who's easy to work with? Is it the best pricing? Like. what things make your life easier and put someone forward in the conversation of consideration for you and your planning and buying process?

Chris Rigas: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think obviously speed to market and responsiveness is, is important and helpful. I think we try, I probably try and like, um, not weight those like overly heavily and think about like just, you know, what do I think is the best inventory and like the, you know, the best placement that's going to drive results. And maybe one thing is like, I mean, I said it, but like creative is just such an important variable. So I think to the extent that like, When I've worked with out-of-home partners or even TV partners or direct mail partners who will give a lot of input, because, you know, obviously I have a sense for what's going to work, but I think it's helpful to get the expert's view. So if I work with someone who has a really good grip on what type of creative should be going in and isn't afraid to give that input, I think that's really valuable and maybe sets people apart.

Tim Rowe: That's awesome. That's great feedback. Chris, you've shared so much with us today. Thank you for that. Where can folks connect with you? Learn more about Marcuse? Give us kind of the Latin long. Where should we go next?

Chris Rigas: Yeah, can go to markeseed.com, I guess, and check us out there. Definitely connect with any of us on LinkedIn. We have a pretty good presence there and post a lot.

Tim Rowe: Cool. And we've got a great out-of-home case study that we're going to make available. If you've listened to the episode, I'll probably go back and add, I'll definitely add it in the open that there's an awesome out-of-home case study that comes along with this episode. You can download it from the website. Make sure to check the show notes. We'll link to all of that stuff below. Chris, thank you so much again for being here.

Chris Rigas: Yeah. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. This was a great time.

Tim Rowe: Absolutely. We'll have to do it again sometime. If you found this episode to be helpful, please share it with someone who could benefit as always make sure to smash that subscribe button and we'll see you all next time.