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I've spoken to 200+ brands over the last year. Usually, on TikTok Shop. I've heard every theory and hypothesis imaginable. But I could fit them all into one of three buckets for why brands are considering TikTok Shop: 1) You Need to Build a New Customer Base Your current customer base is aging out; you see an obvious opportunity to innovate into younger audiences. 2) Diversifying Media Spend Perhaps the most common from D2C brands is an over reliance on current media channels. Whether it be FB, Amazon, or Google - you've got far too great a % of revenue stemming from just one ecosystem. 3) You're Launching New Products or Sub-Brands The most exciting of the bunch is the opportunity to test with new products or sub-brands in an awareness + conversion channel. Before you launch full force you see an opportunity to test in TikTok Shop. -- While TikTok Shop can become your primary revenue channel, its truly best suited as just another sales channel in your arsenal. As you consider here in Q3 what initiatives you'll explore before EOY, I couldn't recommend at least running a pilot in TikTok Shop enough. Simply carve a small percentage of your overall marketing spend and put it to work in a platform with potentially outsized returns. Do not be the person that puts this off to 2025...

The incentive will determine the outcome. A year ago we decided to tailor our business model for TikTok Shop. Moving away from set scopes and retainers to a cost + rev share model. Instead of baking our margin into retainers, we'd eliminate our margin entirely providing services at cost. With all of our profit as a company reliant on client rev share. For the first nine months, it was the dumbest financial decision imaginable. We were bleeding cash. I was having to support cash flow from my personal savings. But if we wanted to become the best TikTok Shop agency, our only chance would be allocating every last dollar toward it. So we followed the plan. Even when our rev shares were kicking, we continued to reinvest these into growth. It was a handful of enterprise clients (retainer only) that kept us afloat. We will close out Q1 and Q2 posting a -$50k+ loss on our TikTok Shop Retainers. But will net our highest profit total and % in company history thanks to our rev share deals. We bet on our great brand partners. We bet on ourselves. And it paid off. Our incentive wasn't to do good for clients for a cool case study. Our incentive was doing great or having our company go under. The plan for our TikTok Shop Division Q3 and Q4 is simple: - Invest 100% of Retainers into Services - Invest 50% of our Rev Shares into growth per client (so if clients nets us a $10k rev share, reinvest $5k back into that client) - Save the other 50% of our Rev Shares to drive EBITDA Put simply: If we do great for our clients, we will make plenty of money. If we do poor for our clients, we won't.

Meet Jake Levy The founder of “Jacob Bar” protein bars. What isn’t close yet, but what will be the best selling protein bar in TikTok shop by the end of the year. And this video summarizes exactly why: 1. Founder-First Content Here’s the brand founder literally in the content. Creating green-screen TikTok native videos; something you’ll never see from larger competitors. 2. Showing Production Do you have any idea what ingredients go into most protein bars? What those ingredients look like? Their facility? Jake shows it all here. 3. Transparency Throughout the video Jake shares all of the common production problems that take place. “This can go wrong and mess up the packaging!” When have you ever seen a brand highlight their production flaws? Assuming he can get the financing and production scaled, it’s just a matter of time before you see Jacob Bar at the top!

I value education more than anything else. But I dropped out of school before I got my marketing degree. So I built the best marketing education content in the world. "The CMO Podcast Series" I interviewed 100 marketing executives over the course of two years: The CMO of North Face. The CMO of Coca Cola. The CMO of Nissan. The CMO of ADT. The Head of Marketing at 3M. VP of Marketing at NASA. The CMO of Century Link. The Head of Marketing at One Brands. The CMO of FIS Global. The CEO of Red Robin. The VP of Marketing at Facebook. The Head of Strategy at Riot Games. I'd take the information in those interviews over any marketing program in the world. Education is everywhere and infinite in supply. It's your job to find it.

8.6 Billion Impressions. The reach we garnered for PACSUN in just four weeks of our TikTok campaign. All organic. The driving force behind it all: A custom audio track we produced with a music artist and TikTok influencer, Jay-O. Jay-O is the man. Within hours of his creative brief, he sent me five different audio tracks back. Even included voice memos explaining his thinking and strategy. Thinking we had a hit, we knew we needed to document it all. So we invited Jay-O over to our content house to film a “behind the lyrics” This is the never before seen breakdown of the most viewed brand audio in TikTok history:

This weekend's project was rescuing six abandoned kittens. They're all healthy, well-fed, and have found their homes! One of the six we'll be keeping of course. But as a long-time "dog only" guy I have to ask the cat folks: Why does the internet love cats? From nyan cat to a litany of memes, it's hard to argue anything is more internet popular than cats. Wikipedia describes cats as "the unofficial mascot of the Internet." New York Times describes cat images as "the essential building block of the Internet." In 2015, CNN estimated 6.5B cat pictures were on the internet. Researchers and psychologists have done legitimate research on this and from everything I can find: We really don't know. Did early internet users skew to people more likely to have cats? Then after its popularization, this created an acceleration effect? Are cats secretly an alien species that created and gave us the internet, thus owning it?

TikTok Shop is transforming influencer marketing. The affiliate marketing renaissance is here. So we sat down with Pearl Lamborn, a long-time content creator and top TikTok affiliate. We get Pearl’s perspective on: - The best way to partner with affiliates - Why she chooses her brand partners - What the best brands are doing in TikTok shop Listen up 👂🏻, class is in session!

My first marketing client paid me $100. It took weeks to execute, but I was thrilled. I was in business school on track for an MBA. I should’ve been focused on my studies. But I was far more excited over a mere $100. It wasn’t the money that mattered, but the validation. Getting the first customer is the hardest part. But if I could get one, why couldn’t I get hundreds? After my first project, the client introduced me to two more clients. The ripple effect started… That first client was just a local restaurant chain in Kansas City. Our next restaurant client two years later? McDonald’s. Today, we’re no longer a bunch of high school kids running around with cameras. We’ve got twenty US employees and another twenty in the Philippines. We’ve worked with 25+ in the Fortune 500. Our pricing has increase a bit to say the least. It’s important to know your worth, but you also have to start small. You can’t run a marathon until you take your first step.

Creative is the dependent variable. Decent Social Media + Bad Creative = Bad Performance Good Social Media + Bad Creative = Bad Performance Good Social Media + Decent Creative = Decent Performance But, Bad Social Media + Decent Creative = Decent Performance Bad Social Media + Good Creative = Good Performance Decent Social Media + Good Creative = Great Performance In all instances, it is creative that determines the outcome more than anything else. Any form of media will be more dependent on the creative quality than the actual media strategies and tactics. You can not out-strategize bad creative. But you can half-ass media with great creative.

We are #hiring. Is anyone interested?