AI Marketing Operations at True Classic with Bryan Cano

Introduction and Setting the Stage

0:00talking to your team about what are the wins having these sort of town halls 15 minutes once a week or a sort of a win slack channel some mechanism where people can share and collaborate and demonstrate [music] these wins that's going to be tremendous impact because it's going to inspire that's where you create this culture of leveraging these tools and partners when you think about all these new tools and all these partners and every like AI tool that's [music] out there think about what is the business challenge what's the job to be done for that tool how is it actually helping your business and think about the real business problems and talk to your teams like is this a real [music] problem for you or is this a distraction? And if it's a distraction, if they're not getting jazzed about it, if they're like, "Wow, this is actually going to save me like 10 hours a week so I can do this instead." Then put it on your tracker, but put it as an idea and

0:42like maybe make it a lower priority. When partners like them are able to like grow their business, their scrappy teams, and you give [music] kind of these unsolicited shoutouts, it lets them provide more resources, more tools. Awesome, guys. I feel like after Taylor's

Empowering Teams with AI and Tools

1:02presentation, I should change the title to doing more with less, but really I'm going to be talking about empowering your teams, getting your teams to actually use tools, using AI, finding ways to reduce that opex. now, as Shaq said, I'm the head of marketing at True Classic. Before I went brand side, I used to lead measurement and media strategy for an agency. I was one of 300 people at at this agency and I led a team of 50 people. So I had every resource imaginable. got a little bit bored and decided, you know what, I need to go brand side. So that's when I left.

1:36I joined Nude and with Nude, I only had I was like the first marketer in the entire company. I hired two people and I was like, yeah, this is enough. And we grew from 100,000 TTM to 60 million in less than two years. 20% IVITA profitable growth and just like accelerated growth. So it's awesome. ended up joining mentor path. I'm a mentor there helping different entrepreneurs solve challenges from scaling advertising setting up systems. a little bit of finance FPNA work as well. and then as Shaq said I'm the head of marketing at True Classic. Now,

Shifting Focus to Profitable Growth

2:13something that resonate resonated with me about what Taylor talked about is shifting that focus from growth at our cost to profitable growth. When I first joined the organization, we were losing about $34 in every new customer that we were acquiring. And this year, we said enough's enough. Look, it's going to be a a rough year-over-year comparison because I'm competing against a 30 negative $34 acquisition and we need to just start seeking first order profitability. And now we're actually profitable on first order and we're making $14 on every on every purchase, every new customer that we acquire, which is impressive. It's it completely changes the business and the cash flow of the business. And that's not the only thing that we're we're we're we're doing. We're also launching women's line. We're focused on products. We're checking off a lot of the boxes that Taylor talked about, but being able to sustain profitable growth year-over-year, being able to grow that as an omni channel global brand. you would think that we have this massive

3:13team, right? A 50 person organization doing everything focused on on each facet of the org and growing the business, but the reality is my marketing team is less than 10 people. And so, we've been able to do a lot more using tools, using AI. it's come with a lot of pain, right? You have some people that have been with the organization for an extremely long time that we've unfortunately had us part way part ways with and that necessity that that lack of resource it breeds innovation. And it lets us kind of step take a step back and go what wait a second where can we find ways of creating more efficiency with these teams training them better reimagining a system a process and getting people that were a bit of independent contributors to actually have perspective and be able to shape the strategy as well. So again, we have a lean team that has an immense amount of output and we're using tools, AI, and we're using external partners as well to give us the scale and the

4:14resourcing that would traditionally require a lot of headcount.

Motivating Teams and Overcoming Fear of AI

4:18Now, in order to motivate your teams, I think the first step is four key principles. Number one is reframing fear. I've talked to there there's like three or two sides of a coin. There are people that I've talked to that actually look at AI as like cheating for some reason. they see AI as something that they should feel ashamed of using. Like it's like, oh, if if I'm using AI, if I'm dependent on it, I'm not good at my job. the other group that is fearful of AI are the ones that see it as a replacement for their job. and look, both of those things are true. I think you as leaders have to take a step with your a sit down with your team and explain to them that this is the shift.

5:02This is where like technology and culture and where business is heading. So you either get on the chain and you find ways of leveraging AI, you find ways of bringing more value, delivering impact, creating more leverage, using it as a force multiplier or unfortunately you get left behind. And it's a real conversation that I had with my team back in Q1. And I I could very clearly see the distinction of the people that took that advice and said, you know what, I'm going to be leaning in and the people that kind of stuck to the old ways of doing things being slow and unfortunately the business needed to to move with the the crew that is ready to adopt AI and be and was using it as a force multiplier. Secondly is has to be voluntary. If you mandate AI use, you're going to get a check the box execution.

5:52And so what I found to be very successful is again just kind of providing examples of where different people are using AI, having a champion, having someone that uses a tool, a resource, having them champion and educate the team. And that should then be the sort of infectious culture where people celebrate those wins. and you're using those real examples of how you're solving real business challenges that then inspires creativity and inspires the rest of the team to use more more of these tools. And then lastly, career growth. This is this is a a monumental period, a pivotal period in brands where you're going to have a lot of people that are going to become incredible at leveraging these tools.

6:34And I don't we're not many years away from finding the first brand. and it's going to be a fully AI native business with probably a headcount of two people. I actually have this like secret passion of mine of one day starting a $100 million business with one person and just using all tools, all external partners and keeping that headcount. So, I don't think we're very far away from that future, but you have to educate your teams and inspire them to see it as a career opportunity because then they're going to be more sought after in the job market. Now, when you take those

Implementing AI in Business Operations

7:04principles and you put them into practice for True Classic, it starts with a resource adoption tracker. Look, there's especially for us, I get hit up with vendors and partners all the time coming at me from eight different directions. I'm on Twitter or X, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm always discovering new tools and my team is my team is as well. And you have to organize that thoughts. There's in your organization, you're probably taking a screenshot. you're probably sending a link to someone and you're like, "Hey, check this out." But if you don't have a way of actually organizing these resources and putting them into a tracker where you have what's the name of the partner, is it something that's an idea? Is it being tested, is it active, is it paused, what's the job to be done here, what is the business challenge, what's the the the problem that we're solving, assigning an owner, a champion to that resource or technology, and then giving creating some impact metrics, right?

7:55Like are we saving time? Are we generating revenue? Is this affecting the top line or the bottom line the P&L? and then just labeling all that. But having that organization changes it organizes all of your thoughts. It organizes everything from this chaotic work stream of just every tool coming at your team in every different direction. You have this shiny object syndrome to something that's more methodical where we can prioritize it. You can make sure that there's an owner assigned to it. If that owner ever leaves the organization or gets promoted to a different role, you can see where you might have a gap in this resource. And it does a few things. One, again, it gives it makes it more manageable for your team. they can look at that tracker. They can get inspired. They can see where one department might be saving a lot of time or they might be making more impact in the business. And then secondly, it lets you understand the actual ROI of all these tools, right? One of the

8:46challenges that we face at True Classic is because we work with so many partners. It's a lot to look at and then see are we actually generating ROI here or is this just a detriment to the P&L. The second thing that is is bringing this principle into practice is having those sort of win showcases. So talking to your team about what are the wins having these sort of town halls 15 minutes once a week or a sort of a win slack channel some mechanism where people can share and collaborate and demonstrate these wins that's going to be tremendous impact because it's going to inspire that's where you create this culture of leveraging these tools and partners. And then the third one is using real business examples. So when I first started to get the creative team to use AI, I used to, you know, come up with these like different sort of workshops that didn't really tie into the business. And what I found is like in a moment it's it becomes this check

9:47the box. People do it, they're kind of excited, and then the weekend comes around and they come in Monday morning and they completely forget about what we talked about last week. And it's like, why are why are we still doing things the old way? where I found it to be significantly more impactful for the business and you actually sit down and use a real business example and you show them show you screen share show me how you brief ads show me how you create the brief and then as they're doing it you stop them and you say wait hold on a second instead go to chatgpt.com let's use this GPT that I built for you and then you start to sort of hold their hand ac al along the process and you show them you demonstrate the real business examples that they can actually be using these tools Now I'm going to shift over to what are

Streamlining Creative and Ad Operations

10:34sort of the pillars and how we think about tools, how we think about AI to solve the business challenges. For me, I always think about AI in three parts. You have generative which is how a lot of us think about AI, right? Ad creation. I think you saw a lot of that yesterday and today where people are using AI to build ads to develop briefs. That's all generative. You've got operational which is AI doing the work.

10:57AI actually making budget changes, AI uploading the ads for you, changing file names, changing naming conventions, and then you have insights, which is AI putting putting forward whites, identifying whites space and opportunities for you that you can then execute on. And so when you reframe those into well what are the business challenges that those three pillars are solving for it's bandwidth it's being data rich and insights poor and it being resource constraint and so I would guarantee that every single person in this room has some semblance of those challenges people are always going to be telling you hey I have a bandwidth constraint I have a lot of data and I don't really know what to do or I may maybe prioritizing the wrong thing or we just don't have the right resource to develop that landing page, to develop that funnel. We can't do everything all at once, right? If we could, we'd all be nine figure brands all in this room or 10 figure brands on everyone in this room because we'd be able to do

11:57everything all at once. And so what we try to do is we break down all of the tools, all the resources, all the AIs, the external partners to one of those three pillars. Which one does it solve for? And what that ends up looking like is this this this vision right where you have creation deployment and optimization. Creation is the generative piece. So using chat GBT using VO using midjourney to develop the ads using lovable AI to develop the landing page and that can all be done by your designer and editor that can be one person that's able to do all of those moving pieces. Then you have deployment and truthfully that should just be automation. So ad uploading is something that's very timeconuming. Anyone that's a media buyer here, you know that how much time uploading ads takes. And the evolution of this across brands has been you have the media buyer that you're paying the 40 hours a week probably very expensive salary to upload the ads. Then you probably went to some

12:56sort of offshore talent, right, to save money. And the next step of this is just having a machine do it, having an automation do it. And so one tool that I started to use is kitchen kitchen AI or I believe it's kitchen IO actually. basically you connect it to your Google Drive, you do your naming conventions correctly, and then it automatically uploads everything for you in a couple minutes. We've actually started to build our own in-house tool. So we've connected Figma to this in-house tool that that we're designing that then downloads the files from Figma to the Google Drive and then it goes from the Google Drive to Meta with the right naming conventions. is the copy and then it sends a Slack notification saying, "Hey, the ads are ready to upload." So, we're automating all that. The next thing that we're trying to tackle is budget management. So, okay, great. The ads are uploaded. They're turned on. How do we change the budget? Media buying is very black and white. If the number in

13:49this column is bigger than your target, increase more spend. And if it's less than it, decrease the spend. Right? So, it's something that's very systematic. It's something you can automate. And once you have the data, you have what's working and not, you can switch over to optimization, which you can have a growth lead do that. And they'll use chat, they'll use claude, getting those performance insights, understand your clickthrough rate, understand your your CPMs, your cost per 10,000 reach, that's the new metric that all the DTOC people on on Twitter are stuck on understanding your row as your cost per your cost per cart, etc. and then that can then feed scripts, concepts, development and that goes back to the designer who then creates the whole flywheel again. So to give a bit of a story earlier in the year I had a massive creative team. I had two creative strategists at the organization. I had a set of four designers. I had five media buyers. I had two ad operations people. My ad off

14:52people were the people that were in charge of just their only job was to download the files on Figma, change the names, upload the file, check the UTMs, check the naming conventions, and then just send a Slack notification and say, "Hey, everything's ready to go." That was Q1. This exhaust this massive team. But what that did is it created so many points of failure where you had this creative strategist, two of them, right? that would then send everything to the designer who would then design send it back to the creative strategist that would then go to the ad operations person that would then go to the media buyer and then the media buyer would have to connect with this creative strategist again to try to say hey this is working this is not this is why I'm scaling it and that entire process with all those points of failure just created a very very slow and expensive framework for how we did our ad testing right that's kind of like that we're chasing we were chasing that pink dot

15:45that Taylor was showing earlier And when you look at like the supply chain of your creative and how much it costs to develop these assets, when you have all those people, a lot of people think about it from like, oh, what's the cost of the UGC and what's the cost of the ad spend, but when you also start to take into consideration the cost of people's time in doing all those steps, it it just becomes very detrimental to the P&L. I'm flip my slides here, but what we did is we we basically shrunk that team down from all those steps to what you're seeing here in the vision. So we have now two designers. The designers are being treated like in-house agencies that are now in charge of understanding performance. They don't need to know everything the ins and outs of the ad account, but they need to know that if the number is bigger than the target that it's good. And if the number is less than that, then it's bad. That's as

16:38as as clear as they they need to know it. They can screenshot the data. They can download the performance. They can feed it into a GPT that we built that then gives them the new script, the new angles, the new concepts. That designer can then generate the ads using AI, feed it off to the ad upload, ad uploader. We still have media buyers, but we've essentially shrunk down this massive team of creative strategists, four designers, ad up ad operations to basically two people. And now those two people are solely responsible for the wins and losses of their campaigns, of their of their ads. they have a tighter feedback loop to what's working, what's not working. They actually understand the performance. They're actually in the dashboards now. They're in the ad account. They're checking their ads and they compete with each other, right? And they're constantly looking to to find those new ads that do have a higher clickthrough rate, that do have a higher or a higher row as a lower cost per cart, etc. So, those are

17:38some some ways where this sort of lack of resourcing does breed innovation where you think you have to think outside the box and you say, "Well, wait a second. Why does it have to be this way? How can we make this more efficient?" I'm going to quickly go

Leveraging External Partners and Tools

17:49over some partners that create leverage, right? I think at at True Classic, everybody's always asking me like, "Who do you work with? Who are the people that genuinely feel like an extension of your team?" And I have to give a massive shout out to these folks. Like, I'm not getting paid for any of these names, but these are the people that I absolutely am just grateful to work on my business because it allows us to maintain a small headcount, being able to lean on these partners. So, and by the way, I see some people taking photos. I'm going to have a QR code at the end where you can get a copy of these slides as well. So definitely you definitely get a copy of this now with tools right it it can it's a fine balance between tools that create leverage and tools and partners that are actually a massive burden and I have three principles of how I look at this and in the litmus test I'll start with the

18:40litmus test for me if it doesn't save time or money if it doesn't make if it doesn't save time or it doesn't make money in 30 days it's gone we cut it and that is very provocative especially for some agency folks here and some partners here who are like, "Hey, we got to get a 12-month contract. We got to three get a three-month contract." I get it. Sometimes you need to ramp up, but you can feel impact. You know, when a partner requires a lot of your attention, and if you don't feel like you're getting time back or if you don't see the impact in your topline, I hate to say it, we're not working together.

19:13And I'm not going to get locked into a 12-month contract, and I'm not going to get locked into a six-month or three-month contract. We want to be in business with partners that generally provide impact to the business that are actually accreative to the business that are accreative to the P&L. And so that's just the principle that we live by, right? but the other things are blackbox attribution. If you're not able to measure, if you're not able to split test or you're not able to give me a very clear black and white picture of this is your business without our tool, this is your business with our tool, we're not working together. That's low trust. That's low adoption. I'm going to be sitting here trying to figure out, wait, is it ROI positive? I don't know.

19:54That's an $80,000 a year contract. Does it actually make sense for us? Shiny object syndrome. Focus on solving real business challenges. So, that's where that tracker comes in handy. and thinking about the three pillars of bandwidth resource and insights data rich insights poor those when when you think about all these new tools and all these partners and every like the new shiny AI tool that's out there think about what is the business challenge what's the job to be done for that tool how is it actually helping your business and think about the real business problems and talk to your teams like is this a real problem for you or is this a distraction and if it's a distraction if they're not getting jazzed about it if they're like wow this is actually going to save me like 10 hours a week so I can do this instead. Then put it on your tracker, but put it as an idea and like maybe make it a lower priority. and then lastly, expensive SAS contracts. It's

20:45got to be month-to-month. Again, we're in the business of working with partners that are going to be accreative to the P&L, not partners that are going to lock us into a contract. And again, you have to find that balance. You have to find what works with works with your business. we're very fortunate that for us we we're we're we have enough of a a sort of a framework and a system now where if we don't have this tool it's not a detriment. We can find ways of of working with partners in in outside the box ways. So to move into a

Case Study and Practical Applications

21:14case study and I kind of spoke about it a little bit right at the beginning of the year I had this massive team it created so many bottlenecks because there was just in handoff process and so due to you know kind of shrinking that team down trying to find ways of saving on our opex I said well how do I how do I produce output of creative with just two designers also as a head of marketing I can't go in there and like be the creative strategist. I have all of these other things I have to worry about. So, well, one step is I I can empower this team. I can train them. So, I I went through and built this massive SOP for them. sat down with them on on 30-minute calls once a week to basically just go through how are they using AI currently. And it turned out none of the designers were using AI. The designers were just sitting there waiting for the creative strategist to

22:09give them the brief and then they would go and execute. a halfbaked version of what the brief said and then they would give it back to to the creative strategist and then the whole like convoluted flywheel kicked off. But I said that's that's done. You need you need to be responsible for the wins and losses of your creative moving forward. So let's build a GPT. We're going to take all of our post-purchase survey data. We're going to take all of our reviews. We're going to take what Reddit's saying. We basically did this massive analysis. and then I have a a GPT prompt which I think you guys will find interesting. But I also took all my sales data by zip code between new and repeat customers with AOV and I used that to develop all these personas and I use all that data to build a GPT. It's very similar to what Alex Cooper was talking about, right? Where he has a GPT for headlines, for scripts, for UGC, for static images. You definitely want to

22:58train it on your data. We built all those things and we basically handed it off to the creative strategic to the creative designers and we said your job is to build 50 ads a week and you're going to get bonuses if your ads are able to scale very much how you would treat an agency. And so they took that information we started to see okay where's the next bottleneck? Oh well we built all these ads but no one's here to upload it. Great. Well how do we do that? let's let's look at what tools are out there to solve that challenge of just uploading ads because the media buyers were spending 10 hours a week uploading ads you know so we needed to find an alternative to that so that's when we went out into the market we found kitchen we're like well this is quite simple to build ourselves so we we you know built it ourselves internally but we started to break all these things down and just started to in a modular

23:44way build each sort of handoff process each part of the operations into into a unique tool And now we've got this flywheel where the designers are basically developing their concepts, getting the ads uploaded, seeing the performance, and then using that data to then repeat the the loop. so this is just kind of how it works. But again, I'm going to give you guys the Chad GBT prompt that you can use to build these personas and build out these this this tracker. But it's been it's been a a massive win for us. Now we have designers that are, you know, competing with each other that are actually interested and thinking about what are the ad, what's the message of the ads.

24:28They're going into the website. They're learning about the product. They are looking at reviews. They're no longer just waiting for that to be told what to do, but they're going out of the way to develop new ads, new concepts. And when you have that resource that's doing all of that, it it it does create the sense of empowerment in your team. and you're we've been able to actually essentially elevate this team. And here's kind of like the the you know sort of secret sauce of this. Our designers are global talent. Our designers are not very expensive for for the business. we don't have this, you know, US-based inoff team of designers. We took this crew that was very much independent contributor kind of like a doer. you just told them what to do and they would go and do it. And now we've given them the tools and the training and the education for them to actually have perspective and to develop new concepts for the business. So I had this little slide here. I'd

25:29love to, you know, I kind of shared the tools that I'm using. if anyone wants to share the tools that you're using for for for creating leverage in your business, I'll read some of them as we go through the Q&A if we have some time with Shaq. But we do feel free to take a scan there and then toss them in and I'll share with the team. So great way to give a shout out to some of the partners. look, when partners like I I'll give an example to my email agency don't they're called email donut. when partners like them are able to like grow their business, their scrappy teams and and you give kind of these these unsolicited shoutouts, it lets them provide more resources, more tools. So, I'm always big on the ecosystem sharing with each other. If you have partners that share, please do communicate that. So, there's a few in here coming in that I'll read in a second. And then while I

26:21read those, we do have a the resources QR code here. So, feel free to snap a picture of that or scan it. And then you can make a copy of the word document which has the chatbt prompt. It has ways to connect with me and it also has some of the slides as well. So,

Q&A and Final Thoughts

26:36>> well, first off, Brian, thank you. Laugh it out. Thank you. Go back to the slido one real quick. Go back to just in case. Go back to the slido one real quick, guys. One back. There we go. Throw throw this one up there when you guys get a chance. Any questions, comments, concerns? Alex, I know you had incredible AI talk yesterday. Do you have any questions or anything that you want to double click on with him right now? I'll come back to you as you're thinking. Anybody else? I have I have a three selfishly. First one is when you introduce hey guys I really want us to be AI forward or had this at your forefront of thinking about your processes that you do on a day-to-day basis was there like push back was there like is this taking my job because this is something we have some resistance amongst everybody not just creative but like from the op side and to the media buying side how did you address that >> immense push back immense push back so

27:31we got really fortunate that we were able to identify by two people in the organization that are true AI champions. And what we did is we actually created a position, the director of AI. So the director of AI now has a team of two people. They have an engineer and they have a developer and data analyst engineer and a developer. And this director of AI, what he does is he goes around the organization and he's basically sits down with them, different people at the organization and says, "Okay, show me show me what your day looks like. just just talk to me through it. And this person basically reframes AI from, oh, we're here to like replace you, but more so what's the thing that's annoying? What's the thing that takes up so much of your time? Sits down and and basically finds a new automation, finds a new way of and are you and I don't know if they're going to get you that.

28:25Are you gonna say like, "Hey, you're going to cut back the team this lean and they're going to say, are you gonna double this? Are you gonna grow this? or are you going to try to get to a an incrementality next year with a smaller team? Are they talking about that with you just yet or is it a little too soon? >> It's a little bit too soon. We have I mean and Taylor quite frankly hit it on the head where we took a step back this year and we said we can't operate this way. We need to we need to tighten the belt. Opex has inflated. there's unnecessary waste that's happening both from the partners tools side as well as in-house unfortunately and so we have you know we went through a P90X diet we're a lot leaner now but we are now looking at like okay now that we know that this is achievable and we are able to maintain growth how do we start to build business use cases to 10x that

29:19growth or accelerate it but it's no longer like a necessity it's not like we need this to grow. We're growing with as is. Now it's okay. Well, could we grow a little bit faster? Could we add in like 5% points in growth if we have this tool or if we have this resource? One thing I'm looking at is international. For example, right now I have one person that manages my entire international business. >> Oh my goodness.

29:41>> Super brilliant guy using AI. He's identifying trends. He's managing the entire work stream. But I'm looking at that, I'm like, well, what if I hired regional growth leads for every country? And so I'm basically like Shark Tank. I'm going to my finance and my CEO and I'm like, okay, give me a $50,000 investment. I'm going to take those $50,000. I'm going to hire five people across these five markets. And over the span of two months, their goal is to accelerate and amplify growth in these markets by this much. they have to create a stepwise change to the already trajectory that we have to pay for themselves and to so that's sort of how we're approaching it and that's that's yeah that's the approach now >> I appreciate that show me some of the maybe they shouted it out from the slide >> yeah wrap on that >> of course so we've got phospha >> what's what's phospha who put phospha and can you tell me what it is do you know what it is

30:39>> I do know what phospha is now I've heard it. I'm going to learn from you wherever you are. Okay. >> And I'll I'll put these in the the word document as well. Vmake Bolds, Channable. >> Okay. >> Sand Sandstorm AI video and workflows. Oo, >> that sounds that sounds intense. >> That sounds good. Tai Revenue Roll >> foreplay, of course. Revo M19 >> foreplay bolds. >> Big GPT. GBT. >> Big Chad GPT. a lot of JGBT which that is the other thing I'll say is if all if all else fails rather than getting shiny object syndrome and trying to like understand this tool that tool and like getting your teams to learn everything all at once just get your teams to learn how to use chat GPT effectively and even yourself like build GPTs learn how to prompt learn how to use image generation learn how to use operator right now I have a we used to have this social listening tool and now we have this operator that's basically just scanning every single day looking for mentions

31:40and it's like scanning Reddit. Anytime True Classic is mentioned on Reddit, it sends an email right to us and that's through JBT. You can literally just prompt that like, "Hey, can you create a daily sk scheduled report sent to my email anytime someone mentions Reddit or True Classic on Reddit?" And you can set that up like right right now. And you'll start to get those reports, those insights, and then you can start to make it layer stuff on there like, "Give me ad angles, give me insights out of it, give me threats, risks, opportunities." you can it pretty much just your your imagination is the only limitation there. But if you get really good at chatbt, you're going to be able to solve for three of those issues that I talked about with regards to rent bandwidth, operational, and then data insights.

32:25>> Beautiful, Brian. Thank you very much, brother. >> Awesome, man. Take care.