#223 - Lauren Kleinman: The Performance PR & Affiliate Marketing Playbook

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What's up, Dtcpod? Today we're joined by Lauren Kleinman, who is the founder and CEO of Dream Day, as well as one of the co founders of the Quality Edit. So, Lauren, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and some of the projects that you've been involved in across the D to C landscape.

Yeah, sounds great. Thank you so much, Ramon and Blaine, for having me. So excited to be here and be chatting with you both. My background, I don't know how far you want to go back, but I kind of started out of college at a gaming company called Scopely. Tremendously successful company, but realized I wasn't really passionate about gaming. As much as I love to play, like Words With Friends and met the CEO of Ritual, the D to C consumer company, in the health space that was probably about nine or eight years ago and really was so passionate about kind of her mission. And I love the idea of being able to build a brand from the ground up that kind of combined a lot of things that I was passionate about, including design and science and branding and put that all into one amazing company. So prior to Dream Day and the quality edit, I was at Ritual and I was a founding team member and our VP of Marketing.

In the beginning, I oversaw everything from branding, packaging, positioning, and PR. And then towards the end of my tenure there, I started to really do some interesting and bespoke partnerships, specifically around content and top tier publishing or top tier publishers. So what we were doing was, one, just trying to get the best stories told from the best publications. And I think especially for an ingestible product, something that you put in or on your body, having that firsthand review is so impactful. So a lot of what we were doing was just feeding the product, getting people to try it. And what that resulted in was luckily, a lot of really great stories. And as one example, which I'll get into probably later, like, we sent product to a buzfeed editor. The editor tried it.

They were utilizing affiliate links. We thought it had a crazy high conversion rate. Like, 10% of people who were reading the article were then checking out and buying the product. And I was always really frustrated with PR, like how you have the greatest PR piece, but then there's no way to really keep the momentum going. So we started thinking about how do we really leverage this editorial through our paid acquisition and make sure that we're acquiring customers in a thoughtful way that comes with that storytelling, third party credibility, validation. And so we were the first brand to really do this, kind of like bespoke leveraging editorial content in our advertising with Buzfeed that changed the trajectory of the company at Ritual really opened my eyes to the magnitude and impact that content marketing could have. And that actually became the impetus of what me and my co founder Lee built at the Quality Edit, wherein we're creating this. We have this publisher that has credibility.

We do. The majority of our content is organic, but we allow D to C brands to amplify that content. We're also creating UGC ad assets. We create landing pages. Again, going back to Ritual, we'd have to hire an agency for each one of those facets. And so at the Quality that we're combining kind of all of those strategies to help our brands find scale and efficiency on Paid Social, which, as you guys know, it's pretty rough out there. So even after the iOS changes, we've actually seen brands lean and our clients lean further into us because we're like, this strategy is one thing that is working for them on Paid Social. So that is kind of like the inspiration behind the Quality Edit and kind of what we're doing there.

My other business is called Dream Day. It's a separate business. There are a lot of synergies around content, commerce, conversion between both businesses, but Dream Day is a separate business. Also inspired by a lot of my work at Ritual. I was managing PR agencies my entire career and felt that the lack of kind of data and insight driven analysis around the press that we were getting was pretty frustrating. It felt like PR agencies get you half of the way there in that they get you maybe a great story, but they're not really interested in how that's actually performing or how that's impacting the bottom line for your company. So I felt like PR agencies only get you half of the way there. I also managed affiliate agencies and knew that kind of the whole shtick was like, we're going to turn on deal sites, loyalty sites, and that's going to be like the majority of the affiliate program.

But for a brand like Ritual, that was highly cognizant about how and where we showed up as a brand, we didn't want to be associated with crappy deal sites. So essentially combined a lot of my learnings around what was broken with PR, what was broken with affiliate marketing into kind of this new term that we coined as like, performance PR. So what we do is we focus on commerce and consumer PR that can actually move the needle and drive revenue and traffic for the brands that we work with. And we focus on affiliate marketing but really focusing on top tier publishers. So kind of flipping the traditional model on its head, focusing on top tier content niche blogs like all of the kind of more brand aligned content we do recommend. Like a diversified strategy, but very much focused on leveraging. A lot of my relationships and our team's relationships that we've built over the last ten years, working with everyone from Conde Nas to BuzzFeed to Meredith. Business Insider.

Hearst POPSUGAR. Pure. Wow. Like all the mainstream publishers, and so I think for the first time, we're able to get a lot of the best hits for our clients because we're meeting publishers with where they're at now, right? Like, traditional print is dead. Unfortunately, a lot of teams have fired their editorial teams, but they've really staffed up on the commerce side. And so the way that publishers are staying in business is by affiliate and commerce sales. And so what we look to do on behalf of our clients is form those mutually beneficial relationships where we're not only sharing the most compelling and interesting D to C brands with the publishers, but we're also helping them size up the business opportunity of partnering with the brand. What's the brand's AOV? What's the commission rate? Has this sold very well for the publication in the past and being able to for the publishers, add in all of that data, but then obviously for the brands also say, okay, here's this prospect piece that we got you.

This is how much traffic and revenue it drove. And these are the steps that we're going to do moving forward to really continue to deepen that relationship with that publisher.

So, Lauren, one question that I have, or just so I'm understanding it correctly, it's almost like you had all this experience at Ritual and then you were building out the performance side of the PR in terms of forming all these relationships and everything. And you were also noticing at the same time that with all the value that you were providing to these publishers, you were like, oh, we could also create separately a publisher ourself. And is that what the quality edit is? It's like you kind of knew what they were looking for and you knew that you were the intermediary between the brands and the publishers themselves. And you're like, wait a minute, we can also spin up a purpose built publishing house ourselves?

I think I'm following the question. I think it was actually inspired by what at ritual buzfeed. I will say they're incredible, especially mila. Ali just left, but I feel like she's a real thought leader in this space. She was their SVP of commerce. I feel like she really understands kind of how to provide kind of bespoke marketing strategies again, for brands to kind of leverage editorial through performance marketing. But what I saw was like, I hate to say this out loud, but outside of Buzfeed, it was kind of like a steep cliff. And a lot of the publishers are very old school.

And so it really was inspired by kind of that and wanting to, one, create an amazing publication that was curating all the best direct to consumer brands and products. Especially like, we launched in the peak of the Pandemic when the barrier to entry to create a new brand has never been lower. And consumer goods were flourishing with everyone in COVID just buying stuff online. And so we ourselves were testing so many different brands and did not really have a resource that we would go to every day to go trust and kind of discover and find them. So that was kind of the idea on the consumer side is like, let's build a publication that we ourselves would want to read. And then on the business side, it's kind of more, how can we help brands kind of employ a lot of these strategies and almost like growth hack their growth marketing by the strategies that me and my co founders saw to work so well at Ritual. And again, if you go to even a Buzfeed, they're not creating ads for you, they're not creating landing pages for you. And so rolling up kind of all of those strategies or even we're sourcing influencers for our brands, we combine all these strategies.

Again, that's like helping with third party credibility, with validation. And I think as a consumer myself, being served an ad where it's someone else telling me whether that's an influencer, a publication editor, whatever, someone that comes with trust to say, I tried this. We reviewed this. This is like our honest thoughts. This is why you should believe us is so much more impactful than the brand saying, try our product. This is why we're so great.

And it's like, on the other hand, the affiliate model is just, yeah, they track the performance, but again, there's no landing page building, there's no brand messaging, controlling. Like, you have these affiliate networks that it's just very transactional. Here's my rev share. Go at it. Whereas PR has experience in driving that message that resonates with the audience and sort of controlling the brand side. So it seems like a good crossover there. I do have a question based on you're sort of defining this new way of measuring performance for PR. What is the traditional way that PR is measured? How did DTC brands really measure PR, say, three years ago or so before this model? What drove you to that?

I love this question because I think it's so archaic. But traditionally when I would receive the PR reports at Ritual or at Know, I think one metric is the amount of press hits, right? And that we still track for at Dream Day, we also track the quality of press hits. Like, is this a roundup? Is this a dedicated feature? If it's a roundup, what is your placement? Are you number one or you number 45? That, I would say is on the traditional side. But I think there's also this metric which is Uvpm or unique views per month that publishers will use. And so PR agencies will say, okay, we got you this story in CNN, and CNN has 40 million unique per month, and so therefore, we got you 40 million impressions. But as marketers, you know that just because a story went to CNN, it doesn't mean that you got all those views on your content, right? It matters what percentage of people that were coming to the CNN site actually clicked on the article and saw it and read it and click through and then click through to your site. But also, how was the publisher promoting that content? Was it promoted on newsletter? Was it promoted on it's? The Uvpm metric was the traditional kind of gold standard. Again, aside from how many press hits did we get in terms of measuring performance? And that always felt like the most useless metric to me.

I guess it was one of the only metrics that PR kind of had at the time. But I think now what we look for is, again, being able to tie specific pieces to we have links on each piece. 99% of the press hits that we get for our clients are utilizing an affiliate link that we ourself created and pitch that editor that publication. So it's extremely trackable and we can see, okay, what is the traffic increase month over month with that publication? Or obviously with the affiliate program at large, how much revenue did that drive? And then again, we look to kind of go a layer deeper with the publications and with our relationship. So we'll do things like commission rate bonuses if publishers hit a certain revenue target, or if you have a specific launch coming up, we can go back and say, who are the five best performing publishers over the last two quarters that we want to work with? And let's give them, like, an exclusive discount code, or let's give them an increased commission rate for this launch. So a lot of different kind of strategies around being able to first have those insights and then like, okay, how do you leverage them to really deepen that relationship?

And Lauren, what is the typical like, let's say you're working with a brand and you are able to place them into one of these sort of content pieces. What type of conversion are we talking? Because I know you said there's so many variables at play where they're mentioned what the story is about, but maybe if you could just take us through, like, for example, if it's like a feature piece in X publication, what type of initial conversion could we expect? And then maybe if it's like a mention as a part of a list. What kind of conversion could we see in those types of situations?

It's a great question and it's truly different for every brand, which is kind of an annoying response, right? So if you have like a $30 AOV, your conversion rate is going to be a lot higher than we work with a client that sells $10,000 couches, right? So conversion rate is going to be a lot different for those, too. And like you said, it kind of depends on like it depends on the publication, it depends on the story, depends on the placement. There are so many variables. So even sometimes when clients are like, can you predict for us how much this is going to drive? It's very difficult for us to do that. I think what we aim to do as an agency is kind of hit the four KPIs around. We're going to get you the most press pieces that we can per month. We're going to get you the highest quality press pieces that we can per month. We're going to drive increased traffic through the affiliate channel.

We're going to drive increased revenue through the affiliate channel kind of month over month. So those are kind of the metrics that we rally behind. But really, I would say it is unpredictable. There are trends that we can see. There are certain publications like Wirecutter or Strategist that just consistently drive really great revenue for our clients, usually whenever they are included. But then there's also like, sometimes you get your client in Yahoo and it does nothing, and sometimes you get your client in Yahoo and it drives $30,000 in sales in a day. So it's like, okay, we try to piece back what happened here. Did they promote it on the home page? Was it like a newsletter push? But we've also had gotten clients in the Strategist for specific, let's say, Gift of the Day features that have driven over $50,000 in sales, over maybe 70, over like a week long kind of campaign.

And Oprah's Favorite Things is like a whole nother ballgame, but it really just depends on kind of the publication, the placement, the story. And we have started to finesse. Like I said, if it's a dedicated, if it's an I tried it piece, if it's within certain publications, we've kind of identified top performing publications from there.

I was listening to a podcast the other day that was not our own, and they were talking about Oprah's List. Like, back in the day, it would take a brand from a million to like 10 million that year if it was on Oprah's List. So how do you guys think about scalability? Sometimes people talk about PR being this huge spike that then has a massive drop off. So as a brand, I'm wondering then how do you create this into a machine or a process that can be repeatedly used? Because I assume you can only be mentioned so many times in Buzfeed before the audience sort of sees the same thing over and over. So how do you drive a strategy over the long term for your clients?

Yeah, you would be surprised how many times you can see the same product in Buzfeed. Actually, we helped launch the brand Our Place and I think that's like an amazing example of they are in every single gift guide. And so actually at Dream Day we work with a lot of highly giftable brands. We have a lot of different filters. What we look for are highly giftable instagrammable, great photography, great brand story. Product has to sell itself. Like a lot of the things that before were almost nice to haves for us. Now when we're vetting new clients, they're like table stakes and I think that's representative of the broader D to C world.

But anyways, that's not answering your question. I think that your question was how do we kind of continue to build Hype over time? Is that right or is it more what is the impact of something like Oprah's favorite things?

Yeah, like how do you continue to ride the momentum from an initial PR release? Is it repurposing a lot of this stuff? Is it like, all right, we go organic, then we go advertorial. How do we continue to ride that wave?

Over absolutely. So, you know, I think part of our vetting is also like looking at brands that are always doing new and interesting things. That is, honestly, it starts on the brand side. Our job is to be amazing storytellers, but we're also not magicians. And if we are working with a brand that doesn't have a new launch or anything new coming up for the next two years, editors, there's only so many different angles that you can have and editors are going to get sick of you pitching that brand. So we specifically seek out brands that are excellent at marketing and excellent at launching new campaigns, launching new collaborations, working with new celebrities or influencers, launching new products, and do have something new for us to talk to. On a fairly regular cadence, I would say at least twice a year at a very bare minimum, four times a year better. But we have a lot of clients that are launching something new or doing a new collaboration like every couple of weeks.

And those are like our highest volume press clients. So I would say our approach is to really get, again, that really high volume by combining affiliate marketing and PR. So those are two separate lists. We pitch commerce editors. Our pitch again, that's kind of like highly editorialized, really serving up that story for editors on a silver plate. We have a separate list that we pitch all of the heads of affiliate kind of like the business opportunity for the brand. So I think, again, that dual pronged approach is what allows us to get really high volume of press. But again, going back to kind of like, how do we keep the brand relevant? I think it starts with the brand side again, having really interesting launches or campaigns or collaborations.

And then obviously we're looking at the editorial calendar. What are editors talking about? How can this fit in? Again, giftability is like a huge filter for us because there's always a gift guide, right? It's like Zodiac Gift Guide, which is every single month or Mother's Day or holiday or what have you. That also helps with getting that kind of high volume. There's also just so many gift guides for him, for her, and if you're giftable, people are going to be searching for those gift guides and therefore you're going to see more affiliate revenue than if you're not a giftable brand. I still don't know if I answered that question very well.

No, feel free to. You totally did. What really stood out to me is knowing and being tapped into what specific publishers are into at that moment. So, for example, a lot of people might say, oh, we'll just pitch the publications ourselves, but you guys have the insight into, hey, this publication right now is super into gift guides or whatever it is, and do a tailored pitch that you know will get your attention rather than like a mass spray and pray method.

Yes, we definitely don't do this spray and pray method. And I would say we form really close relationships with the editors that we work with. So beyond just knowing the editorial calendar, what does each publisher care about when it's like, what is this specific editor curious about now or really trying now? We're connected to all of their Instagrams. We follow them closely, we DM them on Instagram. They've also kind of gotten to know us as an agency as sending them a lot of the best direct to consumer brands. So a lot of time they'll just tap us for what's interesting. What do you have coming up that's within this theme that I'm curious about or that I'm writing a story on, but I think it is really being very diligent and understanding in and out. The media landscape.

Our team tracks to the second. Like, anytime an editor has moved from one publication to another publication or that that editor has expressed that they're working on, they're really curious about this topic versus that topic, really being obsessed with our contacts. And RVP has something that I really love that she always says, and she's like, clients, if we're doing this for the next 20 years, clients will come and go, but the relationships that we form with editors are forever. And that is so true of the media landscape. Editors remain editors usually for a pretty long time. And our RVP has been doing this for the last 20 years. So it's, I think, really relationship driven and really understanding kind of that editor's specific beat.

Lauren, one other question I have in regards to this that maybe is distinguishing for you guys versus other PR, even if a brand is trying to handle some of this themselves is like clearly with such a strong emphasis on the affiliate and being able to help out the publishers too as partners in this right. And developing that relationship is that a big component for the publishers and being able to take on the stories. Because not only are they knowing that A, you're filtering brands and you're able to give them good products, great brands, that they've already passed that level of trust, but B they're going to fit into the store they're giftable. They're things that people actually want to buy, and then C providing the infrastructure to help them generate revenue, versus a brand who may be just trying to reach out and be like, hey, I'm launching my brand and I've got this great store. I want to take it without any of the affiliate component, without any of the relationship established. Is that kind of really what sets you guys apart?

Yeah, I think you said that really well. I think in a way we make our lives easier on us because we know what publishers want to talk about, we know what's going to help make them money. That's the honest truth. And so yes, again we have like 100 question checklists that we go through for any new clients and kind of any new client has to hit a certain score for us to take them on because we only really want the best case studies. I think also in managing other agencies, I always felt like agencies are just like growing to grow and it's like more clients the better we'll take anyone. And because I have two companies, I want Dreamdave to be extremely curated with the best founders and brands and products that we work with. And I think to that point it's actually really worked to our advantage because A, there's economies of scale where we get a lot of the best inbound opportunities because they know that we work with this brand and then we can say, okay, yeah, we work with that brand but we also work with these great brands. So I think a lot of our clients kind of benefit from that.

But also I think it's really helped kind of form a really great relationship for Dream. Day one. I think we're really easy and great to work with on the editorial side. But yes, I think like I said earlier, we're meeting publishers where they're at. We understand that they have editorial teams. We understand that they have affiliate and commerce based teams. And so we try to kind of serve them exactly with what they're looking for. And yes, try to bring them brands that are going to be mutually beneficial, that are going to be able to be very giftable, that will have high AOVs, that are able to offer strong commission rates.

I think ultimately again, in owning a publication myself, we are going to pay extra attention to the brands that are organically making us the most money. So being able to identify what kind of brands those are for those publishers or are going to be, I think is like a little bit of our secret sauce.

I think it's also really funny that you mentioned about the whole giftability thing and I'm looking through your brands and I've received an Our Place pan as a gift and I use it all the time. So not only is it a good product, but I was literally gifted that. So anyway, I think that's really funny. But the next question that I kind of have is just in terms of the brands that work from you, because now you've seen this across not only your own brand when you were running Ritual, but now you've seen this across multiple brands who are like, they've got all the basics and like you said, all the giftability. They're doing cool stuff, they're growing, they have great branding. But can you just walk our audience or walk us through generally what the life cycle almost looks like for some of these brands? How old are they when they generally approach you? What stage are they at, whether it's in terms of revenue or in terms of team size? And then what is that kind of engagement and what does it kind of look like once you've got them some PR placements? What is that like for them as they start to grow? If you could just kind of characterize them.

You might have to repeat that back to me as we go because I'm thinking about the answers live. But I think that most brands we have launched a few brands, but most brands come to us when they're fairly established, when they have a true working budget. For PR and affiliate, we staff each client with about ten people, so it's pretty intensive on our end from just a resourcing perspective. And I think also part of our secret sauce is just like the horsepower that we put into every account and again, that less is more kind of philosophy. Let's have less clients but do them very well. But clients usually, I would say, come to us at Series A kind of, and I would say usually like over 3 million in revenue. Obviously we have clients that are over. We have a couple that are like over 100, but it kind of runs the gamut.

We have a couple of startups that are definitely under that. And I always want to be nimble and flexible for, I think, founders that we're just as a team extremely inspired by. I don't ever want our cost to kind of be inhibitive for them. So it really kind of depends on the brand and the story. And really, I think our belief in the brand thriving over the long term and us growing with them as their. Partner over time, but also our ability to really provide a successful case study. All of our business is word of mouth and usually our best clients are just referred from other founders that we work with. And so we really want to keep it that way with the best case studies.

Not sure if I answered all your.

Questions, but does that replace so ten A, that is like a lot of people and that's awesome that it's pretty much like Navy Seal team just like flying in to really implement this full strategy. I'm thinking about this like, hey, this could probably drive an entire brand's growth strategy until their next phase. I wonder if some companies are now just looking at this as their sole marketing strategy rather than it be paid first. And I know this does have a paid component to it, but the overall strategy is not necessarily don't even do.

Honestly for a lot of affiliate agencies. Also you have to give them whatever, 10,000, let's say, sponsored content per month, kind of like budget. We don't do that. We don't do any sponsored content. And I can get into why we can do it if a client requests it, of course, but we really want to flex up on kind of the organic and the affiliate side. Obviously you have to factor in the commission rate that you're offering and that goes into the overall affiliate CPA. But usually affiliate marketing is still one of the most efficient channels. I think we had a client last year that they had analyzed Facebook versus affiliate marketing and affiliate as a channel was like 15 times more efficient and had sorry, 15 times higher ROAS than paid social.

So I think it is an amazing channel. I think, yes, as you mentioned, as Facebook and Instagram, the CPAs are rising and it's becoming untenable to buy ads there and for brands to really scale using that channel, I do think that organic, meaning press and affiliate has really become a high priority kind of on the list. And to one of your questions earlier, Blaine, I forget which one it was, but I will say that if your brand does not have an affiliate program, it's just like doing your brand the worst disadvantage. If you're trying to actually make press like a part of the strategy, it's almost impossible. There's a couple of brands that we work with that didn't have an affiliate program and they still got press, but they were just like very celebrity driven. But if you're not that, it's extremely hard to get press because publishers just, they want to work with brands that are going to be mutually beneficial for.

Sure, and the affiliate is going to want to choose companies they know they can drive results for. So I do want to switch gears to the quality edit a bit more. So how do brands collaborate with the quality edit? Is it all of your customers are you guys working with brands that aren't necessarily customers of Daydream, how does that really work? How do you see the Quality Edit today and over the long term yeah.

Just to clarify, it's really church and state with Dream Day and the Quality Edit. So the Quality Edit editors or sorry, yeah, editors are pitched by the publicists of Dream Day, just as they would as Dream Day publicists would pitch any other publication. Sometimes the Quality Edit approves a pitch, sometimes they don't. I'm actually completely removed from that entire process. We have like 50 editors at the Quality Edit, so they're two completely separate businesses. I think there's like a couple of clients, maybe that are both clients of the Quality Edit and Dream Day. But I think that's just like, we're doing a lot of cool stuff on the content marketing side, working with a lot of the same kind of direct to consumer brands. So just clarifying that those are two separate businesses.

And then you asked your original question was kind of like, how it works. And then do we work with a lot of organic brands? Which I would say probably 90% of everything that we write on the Quality Edit is just our editors discovering the coolest and best brands and products. So that is really driving kind of building the brand of the Quality Edit and building the credibility. We do have really great SEO that has been beating out a lot of traditional publishers. So when you search XYZ brand name review, if we've written about them, the Quality Edit will rank usually like first or second. And I think that is because of the actual, no pun intended quality that we're putting into each long form dedicated content piece, the photography, all these different components. And I think, as consumers, like I mentioned before, you're looking for long form reviews. You really want to understand, is this a product that I should buy? And we're trying to help kind of take out that hard work and that diligence to kind of make it easy for our readers.

So that's kind of like the organic side. On the business side, sometimes what will happen is we'll write a story organically, and the brand will be like, oh my gosh, this is the best story we've ever had written about our brand. Is there a way for us to amplify this on paid social so that's when it becomes more of a business partnership, we change the language on the article from this is an affiliate article to now, this is sponsored content. So that anyone that is coming in knows this is now like a business relationship. And basically the main things that we're providing are, one, media management and strategy on behalf of the quality edit campaigns. So we're actually buying the Facebook and Instagram ads and TikTok and Google and Pinterest if clients want to add those channels as well. We also provide, like I mentioned, long form dedicated editorial on brands. We provide Conversion optimized landing pages.

We also provide UGC influencer driven creative. So we have like a creator roster where we're briefing the creator. We're getting the best kind of influencer creative that could be like a hero kind of explainer video just talking about the brand. Or it could be like a testimonial type of video where you're saying, I tried this phone. This is the best phone I've ever tried. Here's why, what am I missing? And then we also provide Influencer whitelisting, wherein in addition to the Quality Edits serving these ads, you could also have one of our influencers serving these ads. So roll that all up into one service. Basically, a brand comes to us if they want to work with us, and we really only have like a couple of packages to choose from.

It's really straightforward and within three to four weeks, we're developing all of those assets and all of that content. And then usually by week four, we're ready to launch the campaigns. And again, we're buying those ads and starting to kind of figure out what are the KPIs that we need to hit, what is their target CPA, what is their internal CPA? So I can say, too, across all of our clients, we work with over 50 direct to consumer brands at the Quality Edit, and we're driving 20% lower CACS and 30% higher ROAS on average. So again, it's like we're not like we're reinventing the wheel. If everything on your Facebook is not working, we're not going to likely come around and change that, but we're going to provide these kind of tactics on the content marketing side that are going to help you just achieve that extra efficiency and scale on paid social. The last thing I would say, too, is just that 90% of the time we're beating their internal CPA. So it's proven to be like a pretty effective method.

So that's why you guys come in with your own media team, just to make sure that you have more control over hitting those KPIs. Like, if I were to come in as a DTC brand and say, no, I want my own team, I guess that creates bigger challenges on your end for actually driving those KPIs.

It's interesting because we started that way at the Quality Edit and it's interesting too, now that I'm reflecting back. We kind of started that way with Buzfeed too, back in the day. But I think, yes, exactly what you said. We started that way. And what would happen sometimes is that we would have the perfect assets, perfect editorial, like everything on our end, we feel really perfectly lined up and we might give it away to an agency that the brand is working with and the campaign flops. And we're like one, we don't know why it flops because we don't have access to the ad account. We can't really provide insight or any sort of strategy, but two, when my co founder might go dig into that account and get access, she would see that, okay, everything in this account is not working. How were we ever going to be successful? So I think being able to have that insight from the beginning and kind of help drive kind of that strategy working closely with the brand and figuring out what KPIs they're trying to target has also allowed us to be very nimble and move quickly.

So if something is working, how can we tweak that creative or how can we tweak that content to lean more into that? Or if something is not working, let's quickly shut off that ad or figure out why. And I think ultimately it's like just controlling as many variables as possible so that it is a true test and so that we can kind of control our own destiny without it being left up to chance. Something's not working. I want to know why it's not working, basically.

Lauren, one question that I have in regards to because I think what you guys are doing with the quality edit is really cool and clearly understanding the value of media and organic media and the value it brings to brands. So for a lot of whether you're a brand, whether you're in D to C, whether you're in SaaS, clearly the common theme here is media and content marketing work and are really important. But how do you think you just mentioned we built a team of like 50 writers who are able to come in, be editors, and be able to generate this massive amount of really good content. How did you build up the quality edit from the ground up? What was the early days? Was it just like one writer who was writing and then how did you start to scale that up and get conviction that this was like a business to really build out?

Yeah, so my co founder and I kind of had this idea that really started as a passion project. Again, it was like in the height of the pandemic. And I remember exactly where I was. We just kept calling each other thinking about this further. And she had initially came to me with we had this other kind of landing page strategy where many brands could drive traffic to the same landing page and they could share on the acquisition cost. But it was all around, how do we help brands kind of lower the CPAs? And then how do we build the publication that we ourselves want to read, trying to put all these things together? We called my uncle sorry if my uncle's listening, called my uncle to help him make us a website. It was not very good. Finally invested in a real web developer just over time, just got kind of more serious about it.

And then I think when we got our first client, which was our place, and now they have category exclusivity with us where they're like on the cookware category. They're our only cookware partner. Two years later, that kind of once we started seeing that this strategy was working that we had envisioned for our clients, that's obviously what kind of propelled us to take it more seriously and to really figure out what our secret sauce kind of was around it and what we could offer these brands. And obviously it's been a very iterative process over the last two years. But in terms of sourcing the editors, we have a third co founder who's our editorial director, who's actually my I didn't share this part of the story, but my co founder was the head of growth at Ritual, and she and I were sitting side by side when we were doing all these BuzzFeed and working with all these other publications. So I'd work to kind of bring in the publication and to get the ideal story written and to get the affiliates kind of there. And she would work to really amplify it and figure out kind of the paid acquisition side. So fast forward to seven years later.

We're almost doing that same thing here. So that's one co founder and then her now husband is our editorial director and our third co founder. And when we were first starting, honestly, she's like, this is at the time, she's like, my boyfriend is like an amazing writer. He has this little newsletter. I think he could really help us. And that evolved from him joining as our editorial director and then into a third co founder as he's just provided really tremendous value. And I can't imagine Odly like anyone else doing the role that he's doing. And then in terms of scaling up to 50 editors, I think it does help because I have a PR agency, I see who a lot of the best freelance editors are, and I have some of those relationships already.

So that really helps. And then he as well is just constantly looking at who are the best kind of freelancers or editors that have left top tier publications that are looking to come on. And it's just been kind of a slow process over the last two years, just recruiting as many good people as we can. Yeah.

And I think what's really unique, like you just said, you're able to lock in different category partners for each one of the verticals. I think that's a really cool thing because they can have their own voice directly to their customers and directly in their lifecycle, marketing and all that sort of stuff. But externally, that stuff drives traffic. That stuff matters as well to drive conversion back onto site and back to the brand. So I think that's a really cool way of structuring it. So as we wrap up here, I know we covered a lot. This was a really awesome episode to talk everything from media to brand to PR and how it's all kind of related? Where can our listeners connect with you? Are you on Twitter? LinkedIn? And where can they find out more about Dream Day as well as the quality edit?

Yeah, I deleted my Twitter app, so probably not there. Sometimes I check it, but probably email is best. Lauren at Dreamday la for Dream Day and Lauren@thequalityedit.com for the quality edit. And I would say LinkedIn is a close second. I'm on LinkedIn a lot.

Awesome.

Well, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you so much. Really appreciate both of your time and great questions. Look forward to chatting more soon. Take care.