You're listening to Cubicle to CEO episode 240. To close out Women's History Month, we're chatting with two trailblazing women disrupting the publishing industry. Lauren Kleinman and Lee Joselowitz are the co founders of The Quality Edit, a modern media company at the intersection of content curation and conversion. After working with big name publishers like BuzzFeed in their previous marketing roles at the vitamin company Ritual, Lauren and Lee realized that the way these traditional publications were advertising their brand partners was stale and uninspired.
They saw an opportunity to change the way publishers collaborate with their brand partners. And after four years of executing campaigns, it's clear that they're onto something. In today's case study, we explore what performance publishing looks like, and how their storytelling strategy combined with simple ad creative has acquired more than 300,000 new customers for their brand partners.
Welcome to Cubicle to CEO, the podcast where we ask successful founders and CEOs the business questions you can't google. I'm your host, Ellen Yin. Every Monday go behind the business in a case study style interview with the leading entrepreneur who shares one specific growth strategy they've tested in their own business, exactly how they implemented it, and what the results and revenue were. You'll also hear financially transparent insights from my own journey bootstrapping our media company from a $300 freelance project into millions in revenue.
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Hey, everyone, welcome back to the show. I am super excited to be joined by dynamic duo today we have Lee and Lauren here with us from The Quality Edit. And we're going to be diving into a case study on how they have driven more than $10 million in revenue, and over 60,000 new customers for just one of the many brands that they represent on their site as a media company. In fact, overall, if we're zooming out, they've driven more than $50 million in sales for the brands they partner with and over 300,000 customers which is absolutely wild. So welcome the two of you to our show.
I want you to intro us all the time.
I know isn't always so much nicer when someone else toots our horn than when we have to humble brag on ourselves. Right? Well, I am gonna put you in the hot seat for just a sec to humble brag on yourself. I would love to hear for both of you your Cubicle to CEO story. What was that catalyst that led you to jumping into entrepreneurship? I believe both of you prior to starting The Quality Edit, had both previously worked at another very well known cult classic brand Ritual. They're really well known for their multivitamins, prenatal vitamins. So anyways, Lee, do you want to kick us off?
Yeah, I'd love to. I grew up in South Africa. I immigrated to the states, went to college in Miami got my first job at a marketing agency in LA and then took an in house role at Ritual women's health and multivitamin brand where I head up growth, marketing and help take the company from the ground floor to over 100 million in annual revenue. I also there met Lauren who's on the call now my now co-founder and Lauren and I partnered on some very interesting and bespoke partnerships with top tier publications that drove record breaking performance for the company. But we realized through that experience that the publishing industry wasn't moving nearly as quickly as the direct to consumer industry. And it was very ripe for disruption.
So in COVID hit, Lauren and I looked at each other and basically said, Let's start a publication that we ourselves would actually want to read. And that monetizes in a way that actually helps Brand Partners drive success. And so we were in lockdown. And what else are we going to do? We started the quality edit, as a side hustle slash passion project. While I was still working full time at Ritual, where I actually really loved working, I absolutely loved my job. I loved the team leadership comp was great. I was resting equity. And so it was a really challenging decision to make in leaving that job.
But really, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur was always my dream. And thankfully, the quality of it was growing faster than we expected. And enough for me to really leave my job and Warren's leaving my job. So made the leap about two and a half years ago. And since then, we've grown the quality at it to eight figure revenue.
Incredible. Congratulations. And I'm so glad it's that that kind of, if not now, when mentality, right? Like there's never a perfect time to leave one chapter behind and go to the next. And I've said this before on the podcast, but sometimes I feel it's even harder to leave a great job than it is to leave a bad one, right? You really kind of get stuck in those golden handcuffs where you're like, Ooh, this is I have a pretty sweet gig. And so I commend you for your bravery and seeing the potential for yourself somewhere else, even though you had a good thing going already. So thank you for sharing that. Lee. Lauren, what about you? What, what gave you that nudge to to jump into entrepreneurship with Lee?
Yeah, it's funny, I suppose I've been extremely blessed. And I know this is very privileged to say this, but similarly, I've never had a bad job.
That's great.
Every job has been extremely hard to leave, especially, you know, because I've been such enjoyable places to work. And I've just learned so much from all of my mentors and former bosses. My journey to entrepreneurship is a long one. When I was 11, I converted my garage into a classroom and I started teaching every kid in our neighborhood. You know, whatever subjects it was basically like tutoring them, I would go to the actual like teacher's store and get the actual teacher materials and use my mom's copy machine to like, copy all the materials and make my own little booklets and whatever she was like bossiest teacher ever back in the day as a ripe 11 year old.
My uncle was also in the import export business. And at the time, I don't know if you remember sharper image, but all the Sharper Image Razor scooters were sold out. You could not get them anywhere, and everyone wanted a Razor scooter at the time. So I worked with my uncle to import knockoff Razor scooters, which was quite ah, quite a feat. I also imported Tamagotchis I imported inflatable sofas. I had my own business cards made. And I even advertised the scooters myself, I would like ride to the mall with my scooter. Go talk every honestly everyone would be like where did you get that scooter?
Gorilla marketing I love that.
Bells and whistles and lights and whatever. And everyone wanted my business card. So I was like, you know, doing that it was probably like 12 or so then. And you know, everyone in my family was an entrepreneur, my my parents, my aunts and uncles. So for me, it was all I ever really knew. And all I ever really imagined doing. I always, you know, looked up to Steve Jobs in particular and was like reading Wired, you know, when I was 13. And it just like I had it kind of in my bones I suppose. And so I did a million other things like that, that I won't get into because we don't have time, it'd be a long story.
But um, I after college, I was part of a startup accelerator. I was the first employee there was an amazing opportunity. I kind of got to see everything that happens for very young companies from inception to what they would call demo day and then presenting in front of investors. I was there for a year I got recruited by actually one of the mentors. That was one of the mentors to that accelerator, who was the co founder and CEO of a company called Scopely. It was there for almost four years. Speaking of you know, amazing jobs that were hard to leave. It was such an incredible opportunity. I learned so much from the CEO Walter Driver taught me everything about what it means to create an incredible culture and it was really hard to leave. You know, that opportunity, as I said, but I had known Caterina Schneider, then Katarina Markov through kind of this startup LA community.
And, you know, she shared that she was building this new company and that it was in women's health. And I didn't mention this, but Scopely is a mobile gaming company. And while I really, I didn't love mobile games, and I played all the Scopely games myself, like, I was much more passionate about women's health.
Right.
But at the time, it was a risk for me because she had raised like a little bit of money, but there wasn't really like a brand there, she had a really compelling story. She had an incredible track record and background. But you know, I was making a good paycheck at Scopely, I had equity in the business, that business actually sold last year for $5 billion. So like, they had a potential and a huge exit. Pretty, like, monumental in the LA space. But um, yeah, I took the leap, and my husband was the one I have to give him a little shout out. Like he was the one that pushed me along. I think if it weren't for him, I would like, you know, probably still be stuck in my first job, like being really secure and comfy. And many of the people that I recruited at Scopely are like still there, which is like incredible testament to Scopely.
But took the leap joined Ritual. As we mentioned, that is where we met, I always thought Lee was like such a brilliant mind, I would always make excuses to like, do any sort of project that I could with her. And we just really, like hit it off, not only as like colleagues, but as friends. As we mentioned, we brokered the most lucrative partnerships there at the business. Most notably, we did a partnership with BuzzFeed, where we're basically leveraging editorial content that they created through our paid social advertising channels, we spent millions of dollars behind those ads. And like I said, they propelled kind of our acquisition channels to new heights.
Once we started trying to replicate that strategy with other publishers, we were basically I mean, I was I remember one call, when we were kind of starting the quality, I remember one call where I was talking to someone very high up at Yahoo, and kind of like telling them how to do it. And I was like, What am I at one point, it dawned on me, like, what are we doing? Why am I like trying to educate all these publishers on how to create, you know, high performing strategies that actually back out for brands, when I believe that we could, you know, do it ourselves. And so, as we mentioned, what started as a passion project, you know, we started making money kind of on day one, and we we bootstrapped it, but we were able to quickly prove that there was a meaningful, you know, monetization model there. And what was a passion project turned into a real business where, you know, Lee eventually left ritual a year later. And, you know, we have taken to where it is today.
That's incredible.
After leaving ritual, I also started a PR and affiliate agency called Dream Day. And like I said, basically, it was a year into building that business that, you know, we had this idea around what was this passion project. But, you know, now, four or five years later, I'm helping, you know, run both of those businesses. And there's a lot of amazing synergies between both both kind of dealing and commerce and content and publishing and media at large. So yeah, that gets us to where we are today?
Well, I'm so impressed with your enterprising middle school self. I mean, wow, just just the fact that you had your family member, look up how to like source these sold out products, and you rode your scooter to the mall to like showcase for your own first and best customer. Like, that's so funny to hear that and then and to see the correlation now, between what you did then and the work you do now to help you know, consumers discover the best brands out there through the quality edit.
And I have to ask, because one thing, I guess that you both mentioned in your Cubicle to CEO stories that we actually haven't heard come up on the show before. So I feel like I'd be remiss not to dig a little bit further into this. You both mentioned that at the previous companies you worked at. So Lee, you mentioned like at Ritual, you had equity in the business, Lauren, I'm assuming you did, too. But you also had equity at Scopely when it sold and like you said $5 billion. That's a huge exit. I don't know if you know how much you can disclose. But assuming you both still had equity, when either or both of those companies exited. And you were able to recoup a significant payout for your contributions to that company.
Has there ever been any part of you where you're like, you know, I'm good, like financially that kind of, you know, just set me up and like, it kind of makes one wonder like, what is the driving force? If that were this case, like if you were able to be financially independent off of just those exits, what is the driving force now to go through all of the turmoil of building a business because as we all know, it is not easy to do and to sustain. So anyway, if either of you want to share any insight, I'd be curious to hear what your thoughts are there.
Yeah, I can share. First of all, I would just say I'm not that type of person. I don't think I feel like when you have like entrepreneurship like in your blood, and you don't want to stop, but I think secondly, it's not, you know, financially, like viable for our family for me not to work or for us not to work. And more importantly, maybe even just like I enjoy it.
Yeah.
But I would say and you know, the ritual case, like, just because you have equity in a business, you're not typically able to sell those shares or cash out until the company sells, right. So I will speak for Lee and I, when I say like, we, you don't make money until the company sells.
So you're still waiting for that liquidation event down the line? Potentially.
Yep, we are still waiting.
Playing the long game. I like it. No, but that that makes a lot of sense. Lauren, what you're saying about, you know, the the drive to work isn't always tied to financial incentives. Although, of course, on some level, we all work to be able to pay for our lives. But I do understand that so much of that purpose is built into just the excitement of solving new problems and challenges. And, you know, creating service to the world, honestly, through the work that you do. Lee, was there something else you wanted to add?
Yeah, it's such an interesting question. And I think about it all the time, even just for for future reference. But I think that, as entrepreneurs, you're so goal oriented and goal driven, that I think there's a way you can always push the goalpost out, there's always gonna be another goal to strive for. And my mom, actually, wise words has shared that when you no longer have goals, you may as well be dead. And I think that there's truth to that.
Your mom's not wrong, there's been so many stories, I'm sure you guys have read before to have these, you know, famous athletes or coaches who like the moment they stop coaching, they die within months, and, you know, seemingly unexpectedly. So I do think that we as humans are very much wired for purpose. And so, you know, for some of us, that purpose is found in work for others, it's in family, or hobbies or other things. So, anyways, thank you for thank you for entertaining that question.
I want to get now into the actual case study. So like we previewed at the beginning, you guys have driven immense impact for the brands that you feature on the quality edit, but I think it'd be helpful for our listeners to first understand your actual business model. Performance publishing, I think is not a term that all of us, including myself are necessarily super familiar with. So I kind of wanted you to just kind of break down, what is performance publishing? And what does it mean to be a one stop shop for publisher whitelisting ad, creative landing pages, editorial development?
How does it differ from just being a normal, quote unquote, media company and creating editorial content that can be sponsored, let's say?
Yeah, so as I mentioned back at Ritual, we worked with all the top publications in this space. And we found that many of them were very old school. I mean, obviously, some of these publications are ones that had been around, you know, 20-25 years, they're, you know, stuck in their ways and their ways of monetizing. And we found that as we were coming from the brand perspective, they didn't really know how to create performance marketing partnerships that would actually back out for brands. And so like we said, we decided to build a new publication and kind of a performance agency out of that ourselves.
We coined this term around performance publishing, really to help brands arbitrage success on paid social by combining all the things we saw work well at Ritual, and more things that we've seen, you know, just develop naturally in the landscape over the last five, six years. And those things include things like third party validation, high quality editorial, which will rank really high for SEO and helps get the brand's story told in a really compelling way. We also do conversion, optimized landing page development and testing. So these are like landing pages that are for the sole purpose of driving paid social traffic to and have larger CTAs and really highlight the brand's key unique selling propositions.
We also create ad creative. That's typically influencer driven. We have over 60 different creators on in house kind of ad and our creative roster. So we help pair brands to the right creatives that can help get their story across and with creators that are authentically excited about the different brands that they're promoting. We on that point, do a lot of that influencer casting and management and then on top of that, we're a paid social agencies so we can do full service paid social management and strategy and then also we can manage paid social strategy and media buying on behalf of just the quality edit campaigns.
So we combine all of those things that like I said, we basically help brands find additional paid, scale and efficiency on paid social and to one synergistic strategy. And in many ways, this approach combines the best of storytelling with performance, I think what we saw at ritual two was when you hire a traditional performance agency, a lot of times, they can actually hurt the brand equity. But with our approach to performance publishing, we actually help the brand because we're introducing the brand to customers in a way that comes with an automatic layer of credibility and validation, as well as education while being performance driven and driving new customer acquisition. So, you know, I think in many ways, we're causing ripples in the larger publishing ecosystem, and really paving the way for a lot of publishers to you know, follow suit and monetize their content.
And, you know, like you shared at the beginning of the podcast, with this kind of pioneering approach, we've driven over 50 million and incremental revenue for our clients. And, you know, I think I truly do believe that this is the future of publishing, if traditional publishers, you know, kind of understood it or got on board.
Yeah, I mean, hearing you talk about it, it really sounds like it does combine, it's like an intersection of all the ways that consumers today discover brands, right through stories through their favorite creators through, you know, and people resonating with UGC content content that feels more authentic to real users who look like them using the products. So just to help wrap my brain around this and our listeners to by the way, if you're listening to this episode, and you're listening on your phone, like hop over to your laptop real quick, and just pull up the quality edit, we'll make sure the link is below in the show notes. I think it'll help you visualize what we're talking about as you're listening to this. But just so I understand-
By the way when you when you go to our site, you'll likely start being served some of our advertisers ads on your Instagram-
Fair warning.
Not only you see all of our amazing content. And I would caveat that 95% of the content you read is not sponsored, and it is just editorially driven. And we very much, you know, maintain editorial integrity and creating an authentically amazing publication, like Lee said that we ourselves would want to read is our first and foremost objective. But as part of that, like I said, you'll also likely get some ads as well.
Yeah, I mean, more more than fair. And thank you, by the way, for the heads up for the disclaimer there. You actually took the next question right out of my mouth, which was just clarifying, like when I go when I'm, you know, seeing all of these article pieces, introducing consumers to different brands and your favorite picks for like different uses, or different holidays, or whatever it may be. So you're saying about 95% of that editorial content on your site is organic, just you guys going out curating the best brands writing stories about them?
For the ones that are actually sponsored? How does the storytelling or the writing differ in sponsored pieces? Is it exactly the same? And it's just the disclaimer that it is sponsored? Or how do you, like walk us through how you would actually approach let's say, even using this one case study that we're kind of breaking down, we can't name the brand there in the cookware space? That's all we can say. But let's just take them as an example. So this cookware brand comes to you they say, Okay, we want to do, you know, paid editorial with you? What does that storytelling process look like?
You know, I think that the trust from the audience is really the key here. And is was one of the most important factors to actually driving that performance. And we, through the majority of our content being organic, we were excited to run a survey and find that we have abandoned 90% trust reading with our readers. And so I think when brands approach us, they know that they're approaching a trustworthy publication, and they know that we're going to want to have as much editorial freedom as possible. And so typically, if you know, the brand approaches us, we then go to our editorial director, and really, that's church and state, which I think is the one thing that traditional publications have done really well is that they ensure that there's an organic department, there's a sponsor, department, and that there is a level of church and state between those two things.
But coming back to this example, our editorial team will then go and pen an article, they will, they'll get the product, they'll try the product, you know, they'll put their really their own spin on it and what they think resonates with them, and we'll take that the client and typically there's really not a lot of edits even though the writer is saying what they do like what they don't like the pros and the cons, the brand and we it's our job also to educate the brand that it really is most important for it to be authentic and it's actually helpful for consumers to know maybe what the what the cons are, maybe it's not the cheapest option on the market. You know, it's good to educate consumers because that's how you're going to get trustworthy and that's how you're going to drive the success for the for the brand itself.
Got it-
And I don't know if you mentioned this Lee, but we don't tell editors what sponsored content or not. So that also, you know, helpful that they don't initially have that distinction as their authoring the piece.
Kind of helping them to stay more unbiased right to share what they truly feel about a product.
Exactly.
Would you-
Say smart they can tell you know when right feels like you put something in the chat GPT versus like, okay, this is an editor that like, authentically, you know, had this experience with this brand and product and here are their honest thoughts.
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And would you say that, you know, to Lee's point most of your content pieces are more structured as a review like hey, here's this product I tried. Here's the good parts and bad parts. Here's what you might consider when you're thinking about purchasing it. Or do you also take different types of storytelling angles? Like do you ever for example and an editorial piece focus on the founder and their mission and their why for the ideation or creation of the product? Do you ever go out and interview consumers who have tried this product and why they love it? Like what different approaches have you used for storytelling and which ones have you found to be most effective in driving consumer clicks and conversions?
Yeah, we have a lot of different editorial columns in addition to the reviews, which are our bread and butter. Our third co founder is our editorial director and oversees over 50 different freelance editors who all come from top tier publications like Vogue and Business Insider and Forbes. So we have one column, for example called quality makers, where we highlight incredible entrepreneurs and their journey to becoming founders.
We have another column called Launch digests where we highlight all of the coolest products and brands that are you know, launching that week. We have another one called this sweep, which highlights all the different deals that we're highlighting for that week. We also have kind of dabbled with like travel content, and cover different experiences and events. So you know, really like running the gamut like outside of just you know, reviews, we try to think about what else is our reader interested in and what type of interesting content can we serve up to them that is going to help them make better purchasing decisions or help you know, influence the different things that they should be doing in their lives on a daily basis.
Thank you for walking us through that. I love the quality maker by the way. I'm assuming that's like a play off the word tastemaker or whatnot. So great branding there. Excellent.
Interview you for our next quality maker. So-
Oh my gosh, I would be honored. Yes, please count me in whatever you need for me. Well, that's okay. So that's really interesting to hear. I know earlier, you mentioned that. You know, the whole inspiration of this was that when you were working at ritual, and you had that really awesome partnership with BuzzFeed where that editorial piece you basically repurposed it and like drove paid traffic to that. So is that kind of the same process like with this case study with this client that you were able to drive $10 million in Salesforce 60,000 customers to, did you create some editorial content kind of see which ones resonated well with readers organically and then utilize like your best performing editorial pieces as essentially ads and running social ads to drive new readers to that article, or was it a different approach? Walk me through that.
Yeah, that's that's pretty spot on. Honestly, we started doing some testing around articles that resonate with readers and really wanted to prove out this theory that we continue to see at Ritual, which is that consumers are going to resonate more with educational content with third party validation than they are with the more standard, you know, by now, ad. And so really, we wanted to learn what happens if we use our ad dollars to promote content and storytelling, rather than using our ad dollars to just, you know, yell, buy my product. And I think that we really quickly proved out that that was really performative.
In the first year of testing with his cookware brand, we had already spent about a million dollars on paid ads, and was seeing on average 30%, higher row ads, in some cases up to 50%, higher row as then ads that were just more direct, you know, DR ads. So it's really been a great breakthrough. And I think there's so much to play around with when it comes to content marketing, because there's so many different reasons that a different person might be interested in any one product.
And so really being able to tell those stories from these different personas from various editors on our editorial team really makes for a very impactful way to acquire customers. So we started running those articles through Facebook and Instagram and to this day have actually expanded across channels like Tic Tok and Pinterest and YouTube, really always leveraging storytelling to acquire the customer and have continued to see really strong success.
That's awesome. By the way, for our listeners who are not as familiar with paid advertising row, as is ROA S stands for return on adspend. And then DR, direct response ad. So Lee is referencing like, if you were to just you know, like, for instance, with this cookware brand, if it was like, Oh, here's like an image of our product, and like some copy about why this product is awesome, go straight to you know that product page to add it to your cart, that would be like an example of direct response, versus you know, what they're doing here driving to an editorial piece.
That makes complete sense, by the way, just as a consumer myself thinking through how I make purchasing decisions, wanting to read and understand a little bit more about a product before and to your point, also getting that that like third party validation that this is a quality product, and there's some reviews on it and whatnot. You mentioned that in the first year alone, you guys spent a million dollars in paid traffic for this one client. I think when you submitted your case study for today's interview, you said that this particular client has spent $2.5 million, potentially even more at the time of this recording on campaigns with you over the last three years is all of that money? I mean, obviously minus any of your your actual service fees, you know, for them to work with you. But is the majority of that money spent on paid traffic? Or how are you deploying this capital outside of pay traffic, if at all?
It's really focused on paid traffic. So it's about getting as many eyeballs as possible that are the right eyeballs to the piece of content. So and I think that this is kind of goes back to one of your earlier questions like how our pub- how performance publishing differs from more traditional publishing. And I think that the simple answer to that is really what the ultimate goal is, I think, with traditional publishing, the ultimate goal is awareness, brand awareness, reach. And coming from the brand side, when we were on the ritual side, we would go to these publications, and they would promise us millions of impressions.
And we would be like, great, that's awesome, how many sales? How much revenue because we really got to see the dollars coming in with the dollars coming out. And so anything that we wanted to find an approach that we knew could could leverage the content, but in a way that was really optimizing towards getting the right consumers that have maybe had higher intent that we're going to read this article and be likely to purchase so that we can ultimately report back to the client. Yes, we put x dollars behind getting more eyeballs to these content pieces, but you know, we've we're seeing a 5x return so-
Right, and when a reader hops onto one of your content pieces on the quality edit and they're reading through, I'm assuming how they're ending up making a purchase is that there are hyperlinked product links right throughout the articles that they click on it goes to the actual brands page where they can purchase. Are any of those links on your end, are there any affiliate links? Do you get to monetize in that way as well, I may be remembering incorrectly.
So please feel free to correct me if that is the case. But I seem to have some sort of memory of you guys saying that. Another reason you were able to acquire some of these, like bigger clients is that you're paid on performance. So if that is true, when you in there is no upfront service fee, and it's only based on, you know, your back end performance, can you walk us through that rev share model a little bit more deeply?
Yeah, definitely. And we, because Lauren and I came from the brand side, we do know that different brands are going to want to work with us in different models. So you know, some are going to be open to a flat fee, some are going to really just say, we're not going to pay you unless you drive performance. And you know, if it's a brand that we're passionate about, that we think we believe in, we're pretty confident that we can drive the success. So we do have multiple models. But coming back to your question on affiliate, we do actually have an affiliate division and portion of our revenue as well.
That's purely from the organic editorial that's being paid on a daily basis. So like we mentioned, only 5% of all of the editorial on our site is actually sponsored in alignment with a brand partner. Whereas the majority of it 95% of it is really our editorial team, pitching and just finding vetting and creating new products and writing about those on the site. So when that is the case, and there's no partnership with a brand, it is a just normal affiliate deal, where we do get Commission's on any purchases through those affiliate links. And then that ultimately ends up being a business development strategy for us as well, where right potential brands might see Wow, the quality of it is driving a lot of affiliate revenue first and they'll reach out to us.
And yeah, from there, we can really expand introduce the ad spend, start doing more of the performance publishing model, getting an additional landing pages creatives, and really helping ramp the partnership to a new level.
Amazing. And I think that's so smart. By the way, I mean, we obviously do brand partnerships as a large part of our revenue model as well. And we've also found great success and being able to prove out kind of on a small scope, the data that a brand is looking for in terms of audience receptiveness and action. And then you can leverage that right to go ask for a bigger a bigger deal. So I think that's so so smart. And if any of you are listening, regardless of you know, how you monetize your content, just thinking through anytime you are going out and pitching a client for, you know, an opportunity or a service thinking, how can I prove this out in some way and show the effectiveness of my work? Great tip there.
Obviously, you guys have done incredibly well with your clients and your brands that you work with. But is there anything that you've ever tried in your campaigns before that actually didn't pan out how you had hoped? I would love to hear what you would advise against doing now that you've had some hindsight?
Yes, I mean, every week
What's most top of mind for you recently, especially in 2024, you know, like what's not performing well, this year that you would like to pass on to our listeners?
I think there's a level of of trying too hard that backfires. That's like when you you become overly salesy and and kind of lose the authenticity within the content. I think consumers sniff that out immediately. And we have noticed that on certain landing pages that are just you know, very sponsored content, like have no voice or like, you know, really rushed out the door. And that's, I think we learned our lesson pretty quickly to not go that route.
But it really did shine a light on how important the quality and authenticity and voice of the content itself is. And there's no way to, you know, just kind of fake it. And I think consumers pick up on that really quickly.
Lauren, I'll flip that question to the opposite end for you. So this particular client 60,000 new customers driven to their ecosystem from their work with you. What one strategy over the last three years. And when I say strategy, I mean obviously the the bigger arching strategy is the performance publishing, but I guess maybe a particular creative idea implemented in a campaign or a particular story angle or just something that is more specific and granular if you can recall, what one really comes front of mind that you feel drove the majority of those new customer acquisitions.
A couple of things came to mind. One was for a different client to funny kind of stories. There's one client that we've had for over three years a different client and He created kind of a piece of editorial, but also like a screenshot of that editorial ad. And, you know, for three years, and actually, this plays into what Lee was saying last on kind of, you know, forcing products or brands down consumers throats, and then being able to, like snipped that out. It's just a simple screenshot, you know, creative and they've never been able to beat that creative in any other advertising to date.
Interesting.
You know, know that performance marketing world, you know, that creatives typically fatigue, and you have to constantly be creating new creatives on a consistent basis for them to perform. But there are sometimes anomalies like that that's not the first time or the last time we've seen that happen, where it's just like, there's something about the algorithm about the creative about the positioning about the way that it hits, that is just like unbeatable. So while those things are fewer and further in between, they do happen. And they are just like, you know, amazing kind of just testament to like it, I guess it's kind of like capturing lightning in a bottle, just like all the different things align. And, you know, I don't know if we should be sharing this. But for you know,
We love an exclusive.
No, but I mean, for one of the creatives that for our case study client has performed really well, like it was a creative that Lee, who was on this podcast, created herself. And you know, also was kind of like a screenshot situation, we have kind of been harping on our team about like, static ads actually, like having a huge comeback right now. Like, I think especially we have so many agencies leaning into high production videos and getting super complicated. We've seen that static ads are like a secret, like magic, you know, key to performance right now. And, you know, I think to Lee's point actually, just sometimes the things that are like simplest, but that have really clear messaging, resonate best and end up performing best versus like, you know, the the overproduction. So those are two things that come to mind.
That I just want to clarify, it's a screenshot of the article. So it's like, it's literally just a static ad that shows the article headline and sort of introduces the fact you're going to be landing on the article just in case there was any confusion on what one screenshot ad.
But I think, yeah, to that point like this, the trust that we built with our audience, and the trust that we've built in the quality of it brand goes very far and that that third party credibility and validation and the education that we're providing for customers is what ultimately helps them you know, convert versus what a brand can say about themselves. Typically, our you know, creatives are much more complicated and we, you know, do extensive, brief briefing with all of our influencers, and we do everything from like, testimonial videos, to hero explainer videos to like gifts and statics and yes, sometimes screenshots and provide a really diverse creative mix for us to test with and see what's resonating best for that brand in terms of performance. But yeah, I actually think the examples that I shared play well, and to Lee's point on, you know, sometimes overproduces, most of the time, overproduced is way worse than just understanding what the customer wants from the brand and being able to deliver that from a creative and positioning standpoint.
That's a super helpful tip. And it's funny that you bring that up as the example of like what has been most effective in driving customer acquisitions.
It's interesting, because as a consumer who has fed ads all the time, I've been noticing lately that especially on Facebook, the majority of the ads I've been seeing lately have actually ironically, with the timing of our conversation been to editorial pieces so like I used to get a lot more like short form, like product based videos and now I'm getting a ton of just articles for all sorts of publications and I don't actually think I have seen one yet where it's just a screenshot of like the beginning of the article so I will be looking out for that specifically now but the the ones that I've been seeing that have totally gotten me to click have been is something as simple as like like, you know, those advice columns like the dear Abby's or like, whatever, it's like a juicy question. And then it's literally just the face of the columnist or, like, I remember there was like an interesting story and like The New Yorker or something, and it was just like a cartoon drawing of kind of this like, abstract concept.
And like, it was very vague, I guess, outside of like an alluring headline, but it got me to click and so that's a great reminder to just be looking through your own marketing. For those of you listening and thinking, Is there a more simplified angle that I could try regardless of whether you're driving paid traffic to it or not, but is there just something eye catching that I could test that maybe I have been thought to do because it almost seemed too simple. So thank you so much for your insights on this side of media as a fellow media company, I'll be a very, you know, very different types.
It's so fascinating to hear how you think through promoting brands, storytelling, what's working well, and then also how you're structuring your own business deals, because obviously, that's what our listeners come to this podcast for is understanding those behind the business insights. So thank you so, so much for your time today, where can our listeners connect with both of you personally, as well as check out all the things you have going on at the quality edit?
Yeah, I'm Lauren Kleinman on Instagram and Twitter and my company is Our Dream Day on Instagram and Twitter as well. And then on Instagram, also, we have TheQualityEdit, obviously, where we're building an amazing cult following. And Lee I don't know if you want to share your personal handle.
Now we just love it. I'm not a public social person, but you can find me at at TheQualityEdit.com or on LinkedIn, leejustitlove it's working with the quality at it. And I would love to be in touch.
Amazing will include all of those links below. And by the way, Lauren, I just have to it made me smile when I just love how collectively as a society, we've decided we're going to ignore the ex rebrand and we're just all going to still call it Twitter.
I refuse to say X I'm not going there, I feel like when we rebranded it was around the same time there was a lot going on in the world where I was like, I don't really need this anymore, do I? So I shouldn't even be telling anyone to contact me there because I likely won't respond. On Instagram and yeah.
You know what one of my friends it's one of my favorite things that she's done. She literally her Twitter, I'm gonna say Twitter, her Twitter bio says I am not here, follow me. And then she like links like her most active channels. So why not keep her profile up? Just redirect or redirect the traffic it's fine.
I'll like go on desktop sometimes and I like just see if there's anything interesting. I don't miss it really much.
That's, that's more than fair. Well, again, thank you so much-
For your thoughtful questions. You are such like an insider and you have such an amazing understanding of this space. So it's been really lovely speaking to you and thank you for all the though.t
I receive your words. Thank you so much. That's so so kind of you it means the world. And thank you both for your time and also for being listeners of the show. Lee I know before we all hopped on and we're in the green room. I was I was telling me I was so impressed with her preparation she already came to the table knowing that I was going to ask that Cubicle to CEO question to kick off so anyways, you guys have been an absolute joy.
Thank you.
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