Happy Sunday!

Well, depending on whether or not you caught the Meta Ads issue this morning on time, it may be a happy Sunday or a terrible one. In any case, I hope your day got better as it went on. I am currently on a flight back from Austin, where I spent a few days with family and eating Otherworld’s gluten-free pancakes (they’re so good). 

If you’ve opened this email, I hope you’ve got your phone in your right hand, a chilled beverage in your left hand, your feet up, and the room temperature at no more than 73 degrees Fahrenheit. Today’s newsletter is a bit shorter than the last couple weeks, but it should be good. Until we get to it, there are a couple of updates I want to make sure I share with you:

  • Season 4 of Limited Supply dropped this past week. We talked all about celebrity brands, Aesop’s $2.9B acquisition, and Stripe’s 2022 annual letter. It’s a BANGER. Click here to listen to the pod (or click here for Spotify).
  • You can also join our Limited Supply Slack group by clicking here. We have over 1,600 people and it’s BUZZING.
  • You know I love Jolie so much that I did a full story of Ryan Babenzien, the founder, on Twitter. Click here to check it out.
  • Keith Rabois, the founder of OpenStore, flew up to NYC to let me grill him about their new product, OpenStore Drive. You can click here to watch that interview on YouTube.
  • Do you know Greg Isenberg from Twitter? We did a podcast together, and it was one of my favorite podcasts I’ve recorded (outside of Limited Supply). Listen to the episode here. 
  • Wow… lots of content going out. I hope it’s valuable to you.

Today’s newsletter is all about a topic that I’ve been deeply passionate about since 2015, and still, to this date, it’s something that is still a “secret” in retail marketing and not really exercised much. It consistently works well and almost always delivers better results than what most brands are doing. I’m talking about whitelisting. No, this doesn’t mean you have to find your closest white friend and ask them to make a list… let me break it down.

If you’re in the tech or manufacturing world, you’ve likely heard the terms “White label” or “OEM”. In both cases, they refer to taking something produced by another person and relabeling it as your own. For example, when you think you’re buying something from a new skincare brand, there’s a good chance someone like Lady Burd has a set formula that you can buy, and white label with your own brand (i.e. put your own company logo on top of a pre-set formula and product). It makes it easy to get to market, these products tend to have all the necessary ingredients and testing already done, and you can condense your supply chain timeline from 6 months to 6 weeks.

Similarly, in the context of digital advertising, “whitelisting” is the idea of running content from another media property, that is not your own, but it’s promoting something of yours. For example, if you want to buy an Eight Sleep bed, you’ll see ads from a few sources. One of them is the Eight Sleep, the brand itself, and then the other ads will come from a network of internet publishers (which my company, 1180 Media, owns and operates). Why do we do this? Well, it’s a concept we call, Secondary Presence.

I’m gonna use the acronym “1P” to describe “first-party” and “3P” to describe “third party” to explain this in the easiest way possible. 

Secondary Presence is the idea of using 1P data, 1P customer insights, 1P learnings, 1P ad targeting, and 1P ad dollars, combined with 3P audiences, 3P trust, 3P social proof, and 3P content. If you think about it like a math equation, that is secondary presence.

Now, instead of Eight Sleep convincing you to buy a mattress with their own ad, which feels like a billboard, it’s a publisher site that has a full unboxing and review of the product, how it compares to what the editor used to sleep on previously, and what they value most out of the purchase. It’s no longer Eight Sleep telling you that they’re the best mattress on the market, but it’s not a 3P perspective and review.

Why does this work better? Well, people aren’t on social media to be sold to. You don’t turn your TV on to watch ads (ok, counterpoint, unless it’s Super Bowl). But, instead, you open social media to be entertained. That’s why ads like this Native ad from Raindrop did so well — it’s entertaining. Remember, just like when you’re on a date, if you can entertain, you will win. Plus, people want to buy or listen to other people who’ve been in similar situations before. So if I can have an editor who’s just moving into her apartment in New York City write about how the Buffy Breeze comforter made a huge difference when it started getting hot in the summer, you might relate to it too — and the end result is a lower overall customer acquisition cost. 

The predecessor of whitelisting is basically celebrity endorsements. Or a more recent predecessor is the PR trick of getting a celebrity to wear something specific, or have something in their hand, and then make sure the paparazzi are there to capture the shot. Obviously, not everyone can get their brand in the hands, or worn on, a celebrity and get that distributed online and in magazines… but instead, I’m going to tell you about 3 easy ways you can try whitelisting, and how to go about each one.

Oh, and all this works 10x better in B2B marketing, because B2B is like 10 years behind DTC.

Influencers & Creators

You’ve undoubtedly seen ads when you open Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or Pinterest where instead of an ad coming from a brand’s account, it comes from an influencer’s personal Instagram or Facebook page.

My two tricks before you start whitelisting influencers or creators are:

  1. Find someone who’s really good at speaking to you through the screen. It should feel like they’re talking to you, not just to a camera. This is one reason I really prefer working with YouTube vloggers, or good TikTok storytellers. They make you feel like they’re just talking directly to you.
  2. If you can, work with creators who have a blue checkmark; the CTR is higher. But don’t not work with creators who don’t have a blue check. 

When I did this in 2017, I had a few theories as to why it worked so well (which I still think are all true):

  • To work with verified influencers, to the average consumer, means you must be a legit brand. Though us industry people know that that may not be the case, it absolutely helps the trust/perception when someone’s never seen your brand name before.
  • If someone sees your ad, goes to your site, then a few days later sees an influencer or celebrity posting about it in their feed (as a whitelisted ad), it gives the thought of, “Huh, that’s funny, I just saw this the other day. I should look into this more.”
  • If someone is obviously a content creator, people can sense there might be good content behind the play button, and people will watch for a longer average watch time, than your brand-account videos.
  • Content creators and influencers ARE the media. They know HOW to create content that is actually thumb-stopping, entertaining, and understands the contextual setup of the platform. Their ads will get much higher engagement and CTR as a result.

All these still remain true. This does require building real relationships with content creators and influencers. You won’t find these people on an influencer marketplace… you might, but you want genuine and authentic creators to your brand and target audience, not just a content creator for hire by anyone. I usually find influencers and creators in a couple ways:

  • Just search on TikTok for the topic you’re looking to chase, and find the top voices in that category. The category might be organization, travel, cooking, etc.
  • On Instagram, look for an influencer you know is a perfect fit, and then start browsing around the comment section to see who their friends are. Usually on Instagram, like-minded influencers comment on each other’s stuff to juice the engagement and algorithm of their peers.
  • Ask the influencers you work with already who in their network or friend circle could be a good fit for content creation. The creator circles are tight and friendly. Everyone helps each other out, so if you’re basically asking who they can help get work, they will have someone for you.

Founder Account Whitelisting

For the years I worked at Hint Water, there was not a single day when I wasn’t running whitelisted ads to drive customer acquisition from our founder’s FB and IG accounts. It performed 2-3x more efficiently than ads from the brand account. And, while it was acquiring us thousands of customers, it was also building the founder’s personal brand at the same time.

Today, Jones Road Beauty does a similar thing. Many of their ads come from Bobbi Brown’s Instagram and TikTok handles. On Twitter, you’ll see ads from Matteo’s Twitter handle instead of just the Eight Sleep handle. There’s usually no one who can better explain a brand or a product, than the founder of the brand themself.

This is probably the cheapest, lowest-lift way to get started on whitelisting. Put your iPhone down in front of you, record a video, edit it in Capcut, and start running it as an ad. You can test different hooks by just spending 4 seconds to record a new hook. The barrier to try this is so low, it amazes me that people don’t try this more often.

Publishers and Internet Media Companies

Ok, let’s get into my favorite way to whitelist: publishers. I’ve been running whitelisted publisher ads since 2015 when I was first doing it with automotive eCommerce companies. The reason I love publisher whitelisting the most, is because it let’s you take a story line that’s relatable to millions of people, and craft a story that allows you the ability to earn the right to even talk about a product that you want to sell. You have to be incredibly creative when it comes to the storytelling aspect, otherwise you will fail at it. 

Most people can never get publisher whitelisting right because it requires the perfect mix of a good hook, an entertaining or edutaining story, perfect UX on the page, and knowing how to format the writing on the page itself. I should caveat, this is if you’re looking to do whitelisting in a performance marketing manner.

If you’re purely looking for brand awareness, you’ll see big companies spending their brand dollars on advertorials on PopSugar, Refinery29, BuzzFeed, etc. Unfortunately, the big publishers don’t know how to do this in a performance oriented manner.

When I worked at Hint, myself and my co-pilot, Scott Swanson, got so good at it, we had to stop working with outside publishers. We knew how to write and architect these articles better than they did, and they could never beat our CPAs. Now, we have an agency together called 1180 Media, where we do this for companies like Eight Sleep, Caraway, Buffy, Milk Bar and more. If you want to apply as a brand that we run like this, you can click “Get in touch” and fill out the form.

One key trick to this tactic is making sure you reply to every comment as the publisher account as well. Just like you’d never let comments go unanswered or unmonitored on your brand ads, you must do the same with publisher accounts.

Ok… I know this was shorter than normal, but I hope it was valuable. Now on to some fun stuff…

Vendor of the Week:

Bloomreach — The on-site search partner your website needs unless you hate generating revenue from your site traffic.

Bloomreach is known for enhancing the on-site experience for customers through personalization. Clients like Benefit Cosmetics and N Brown (UK brands hold co) use Bloomreach and see a 20% lift in onsite revenue due to on-site search.

For most DTC brands, search is an afterthought. I’d say it’s usually because the SKU count is low for a lot of brands, but for brands with more than 25+ SKUs, I highly recommend reading into on-site search.

Bloomreach’s team put together an amazing guide (it’s only a 5-minute read) around site search and what possibilities it opens for you as a merchant. I highly recommend taking 300 seconds to read it: click here to read the guide. 

If you’re interested in learning more, you can book a demo with them and see (tactically) how on-site search can improve your revenue per session.

LP of the Week:

Like Nori, this page instantly caught my eye because of how simple and elegant the branding and design were. On this page, our team built a custom BYOB bundle builder for customers that matched the branding, design, and AOV goals of Teema Towels.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE PAGE!

A lot of the BYOB pages we make see a higher conversion rates (2x their baseline) because customers see this as a more personalized purchasing experience than just buying one hero bundle, or a single product. This was something they had part in putting together. 2x CVR, means 50% lower CPA. That’s gamechanging — it could mean the difference between being in the red, or being profitable.


Whether or not you think you’re ready for a landing page, book a call with HOOX here, and let us help think through what types of pages would be best for your brand. Nori saw great results, let us do it for you too!

That's all for this week

I know today was a shorter newsletter than the last couple that has been sent out, but hopefully, there were a few nuggets within it. I’m on vacation in Austin with my family this weekend (well, technically, I’m on a flight back to NYC now), so I wanted to deliver something valuable and quick.

If you will be attending any events in the eCommerce world soon, maybe we can hang out? Here is where I’ll be speaking (as of now):

Until next Sunday, I hope you have an amazing week. Stay hydrated. Stay focused. Get that 9 hours of sleep (have you tried it before? It’s game-changing). If there’s anything I can be helpful with, just reply to this email or DM me on Twitter.

I’ll see you next Sunday!