September 15, 2015 while sitting in a conference room in Redwood City, California meeting with LIFX about starting a marketing consulting contract we were discussing a go to market plan for the second generation light bulb we were launching.
The problem, the video they shot that raised them all the money in a Kickstarter Campaign was heavily edited in post to provide the effects needed to show the product working in proper coloring.
What I would quickly discover was that Wi-Fi connected color changing led lights do not photograph well.
It’s why in the film industry everyone uses gels and filters over white lights.
The dirty little secret in the industry was that most every representation that was created by a brand was all photoshop.
Which meant properly leveraging social media ads and constantly creating creatives was going to cost a lot of money and a lot of UGC that we collected just didn’t come out well enough to be used.
This added a ton of design and editing time to every photo that was taken, submitted, etc. which further pushed video out of the picture.
What we did have though was the internet and email.
We sent out emails to every smart home brand out there because at the time smart home adoption was in its infancy and we were all going to be stronger together.
I might have been the only marketing leader that spent more time on the phone with other brand marketers than talking to my own team.
That was 2015 this is now
What we did back then was hard to scale, there wasn’t a ton of smart home companies in business and hardware is a tough space.
The same uphill battle we overcame back then is what every DTC brand is facing right now on the paid ads side and the paid ads reliance side.
Over the course of nearly 4 years working at LIFX we sent hundreds of co-marketing emails bolstering signups and driving sales both to and from our co-marketing partners.
We learned a lot along the way, the pitfalls, the struggle points, and everything in between.
So why this service, why now?
We’ve also been recommending this to brands that we’ve been working with for the last nearly 4 years and they all write it down but few of them ever actually implement it.
We followed up and the conversations have been the same, we don’t have the time to dedicate to it, we’re low on resources, we tried but the partnership fizzled.
Perfection is the antithesis of progress, most of the time brands overcomplicate this process which leads to nothing being done.
After having lived this for the last 8 years up close and personal, if most ecommerce brands are going to survive and ween off their reliance on paid media, they need a strategy that produces results.
Our goal is to close that gap by blending technology and personalized strategy.