Episode 54: How Mr. Beast's Feastables Skyrocketed Brand Revenue

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Transcript

Announcer:

Hey, welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Join co-hosts in ecom OGs, Drew Sanocki and Michael Epstein. Get ready as they'll bring you trusted tactics and strategies from boosting your brand's revenue, operations, and profitability.

Drew Sanocki:

Hey,  everybody. Drew Sanocki here, at the Nerd Marketing Podcast. Today's guest is director of Retention at Mr. Beast's Feastables, Joseph Siegel. Joseph, a long time user of post pilot and a colleague of ours. We really enjoyed getting to know what it's like to work for Mr. Beast, what it's like to grow a new property within this massive, massive media company, how they think about marketing, how they think about retention. They've got the biggest audience in the business. So I think there are a lot of tips there for how you can engage your customers and keep them buying longer that a lot of us would be curious about, as well as how do you get a job working for Mr. Beast. So without further ado, Joseph Siegel,

Michael Epstein:

Who's Mr. Beast? For those of you that don't know, Mr. Beast is the number one YouTube influencer in the world has, I think it's up to, what, 160 million subscribers now on his main YouTube channel. Bigger than most countries’ population. He became sort of famous for these crazy stunts, a lot around giving away big prizes. So last to leave a circle gets a hundred thousand dollars or last to take their hand off a Lamborghini, keeps the Lamborghini or the private jet or gives away a private island and all kinds of crazy stuff and has just built a massive, massive following. And since then he's also monetized the brand by introducing Beast Burger, which is like I guess a ghost kitchen sort of chain that has hundreds of locations of delivery of burgers and fast food and then Feast Bowls, the chocolate and candy brand, and that's what Joseph runs is Director of Retention at Feast Bowls. What I miss about Mr. Beast, what's the big story there? My kids watch every one of his videos, so if you don't know who Mr Beast is, ask your kids. I guarantee they will know.

Joseph Siegel:

I mean look, you're pretty spot on. I would say he is at 160 million on YouTube as well, but to be honest with you, it's probably even higher at this point. What a lot of people don't talk about with Mr. Beast is that he is a philanthropist at the end of the day. He has his own philanthropy, which isn't talked about enough, Mr. Beast Philanthropy, he also has a YouTube channel for it where they actually go and document what he's doing out there in the wild. I think he went to Africa and gave away, I think it was like 20,000 pairs of shoes or something. So at the end of the day, he's here to make the world a better place and I think that really translates into everything he does. He's here to help everyone internally at his companies. He's here to help all of his contestants and he's just a fantastic human in general and so it is truly a blessing to work with him.

Michael Epstein:

That's amazing. How did you get involved with him? What's your background? It feels like you almost won the lottery in a sense to get involved with him and part of this sort of rocket ship brand.

Joseph Siegel:

Yeah, I mean I was definitely a fan of him before joining the company and I was very fortunate to work with an agency called Fluency Firm where I was the head of Lifecycle and Retention. There we got a chance to work with some really cool CPG brands, think like Better Boots, but also some cool celebrity led brands as well. So Michelle Pfeiffer's company named Henry Rose. We also worked with Farrell's Company, human Race and a couple others. So I think I did have some experience in the influencer space and ultimately I got poached by festivals and it was kind of just like, I dunno, I guess you could say hitting the lottery. It still didn't feel real I would say after a month or so and it's been truly awesome.

Michael Epstein:

And what's your day-to-Day? Like? What's your primary responsibility? As head of retention and feasts,

Joseph Siegel:

We've really transformed our retention strategy into being an engagement first play. So really what that means is building at this point, email games. We're really trying to invest heavily into this aspect of our marketing. A few for example are: click this email 500 times and you'll win 50% off. A game that we're actually running at this moment right now is, if you can guess how many gummies are in this jar, then you can actually win a free pack of Carl Gummies. So we're really including all the elements of what you would think a Beast brand would have and it really keeps people engaged. I would say our click rate has skyrocketed. People are just actively waiting until we post these games or send these email games out. All the games are powered through a and p technology through Spellbound. Their team is really awesome there and we've actually built this arm out of their business.

It wasn't really a thing before us and they kind of hate us for it to be honest with you because it's a lot of work, but a lot of my day is spent working on these games and strategizing new ones and also going after the standard kind of retention plays here, win back efforts through post pilot. We've done a couple of those before SMS games. We've done an emoji game before where if you can decode three emoji phrases in a row and if you were one of the first 10 people to do it, you would win every single snack we have in our store and doing these things comes with risk. We broke a postscript so people weren't too happy online. They were attacking Mr. Beast. That part of the job is no fun. When you do something that doesn't go to plan, it all comes down to them thinking it's Jimmy and whether it's good or bad, Jimmy gets the credit. Managing that has been fun. What's

Drew Sanocki:

Your average open rate for an email campaign?

Joseph Siegel:

It's probably around 40% at this point. We don't try to go after every single subscriber in the database. We really try to target the people who are engaging. The click rate to me is more so the number I'm looking at. I would say on an average email it's around 1%, but with these emails it's 10% plus

Drew Sanocki:

Double the average open rate and I don't know, 10x the average click-through rate or 5x at least.

Michael Epstein:

It's so smart and so on brand. That's awesome. Everything's gamified. What

Drew Sanocki:

Are your KPIs? What are your goals that you have to hit? 

Joseph Siegel:

That's a great question. So to be totally honest with you, I was actually the more conscious one in building these games. I would want to say let's reserve the prize for a handful of people, maybe up to five people so we can kind of mitigate our damage here. Because look, it's a lot and actually the feedback from the Mr. Beast team actually is, look, if we're going to do this, let's do this big, let's up it to a hundred people and depending on how many people engage with this, let's then up it to a thousand people. We don't really spend any money on advertising at this point. All of our advertising dollars goes into I guess a Lamborghini, which we're giving away with a partnership with a seven 11. So that's where we spend our money that allows us to reserve some cash for stuff like this. That really goes down to the customer experience.

Michael Epstein:

I remember the first time you and I talked even about the post power campaigns, it was like, look, we are going to want to do some crazy stuff. It has to be on brand. You're giving away the Lambo, you're creating exclusive content for people that scan the wrapper. Again, super smart, very on brand with Mr. Beast. What are some of the other crazy things that you've talked about doing and maybe haven't done or what are the craziest things you have done from a promotional aspect? I can imagine those meetings must be throwing out a million crazy ideas. What didn't make the cut?

Joseph Siegel:

I may just start with one that did make the cut and that was last Black Friday. We were game planning, obviously what can we do that's BS and on and obviously would generate sales. So we ended up landing on a 99% off spin the wheel and it really ended up in madness. Our fans, we call them our fans at this point, they're no longer just customers. They found a way to hack the spin wheel form or pop up is through Justino. I don't mean to call them out, but we set the percentage I think to 1% of spins would actually get the 90% off and we're seeing orders come in and one order after another 99% off, 99% off. And if it's not that one, it's 69% off. So we had to end our Black Friday sale pretty early unfortunately. And that was actually the first month that I joined the company. It was a headache for me and I think probably all eyes probably turned to me what just happened. Thankfully the team is super supportive and we worked through the issues together, but I would say that was a crazy one.

Drew Sanocki:

It's got to be like a love hate relationship with these service providers because they're all psyched to have Mr. Beast, but then they're not as psyched to have 20 million people on one email send or whatever you guys have going out and all with a 40% open rate. That's got to cause some headaches at Klaviyo headquarters.

Joseph Siegel:

Yeah, I mean I haven't communicated personally with Klaviyo for the most part, Klaviyo has been okay for us, but there are some other large vendors out there that I won't name that certainly have to keep up. Ultimately we have a fantastic tech team. I guess our resolution to these problems is we're just going to build it, we're just going to build it. And I think after that just do no problem. We actually have gone on to build that technology in-house among along with some other stuff,

Drew Sanocki:

Everything except direct mail, which you'll continue to outsource.

Joseph Siegel:

Direct mail is all a post BYOT for us. We have no complaints there.

Michael Epstein:

Awesome.

Drew Sanocki:

And we've been able to handle the surge, I got to say that. So

Michael Epstein:

The business has obviously been growing like crazy and evolving really, really fast, both in terms of growth, in terms of a huge distribution footprint. Now you've been expanding the product assortment pretty rapidly. You mentioned the gummies. It started out with what, three chocolate bars and now it's a bunch more bars, gummies, cookies, other products. How's the business evolved in the time that you've been there and how has your role evolved, particularly on the retention side and as you move more into retail? How do you think about your role?

Joseph Siegel:

That's a great question. Yeah, so we launched with I think four dark chocolate bars and we've expanded the product line into Milk Chocolate, which is now our bestselling skew. We've now expanded into cookies. We've really been rapidly expanding in retail. We started with every single Walmart in America. We've now gone into every single Albertsons, every single seven 11, soon to be every single target and so on. And so with that just comes ridiculous growth and for us, the marketing play has always been coming up with viral strategies to draw attention and traffic to those stores. Again, referencing the seven 11 example, giving away a Lamborghini in partnership with seven 11 just for buying a chocolate bar in one of their stores. You could win something crazy just for the price of three or $4. I guess how that's affected my job, I really started to learn more a lot about these retailers DSP platforms, so like Amazon, DSP, Walmart Connect, target, roundel, using the media side of these platforms to bring people in.

We're really essentially trying to create a whole ecosystem of we don't care where they buy it and actually we have better margins in retail. We are actually looking at a company like Liquid Death for example. If you go to their website, they have a super simple PDP page that actually allows you to buy pretty much anywhere simple to find a store near you, a select store if you're looking for Target or Walmart or whatever it is. I think that's the next development for us to create a central hub that may be hosted on festivals.com, but essentially having every single channel live for a specific reason. So if they're going to Amazon, we may want to push them to buy in bulk. If they're going to D two C, we may want to include some sort of extra incentives. Since they're buying 10 bars at a time, they may have to pay for shipping, so we want to make sure they're getting the best experience there. So attaching some cool personalized digital experience maybe from Jimmy at some point, connecting it to a game or potentially like a punch card system, you can actually punch in digitally, Hey, I purchased from Feasibles online X number of times and now I'm going to redeem that for a prize. So we're really leaning into personalized experiences for every single channel.

Drew Sanocki:

Does that all fall under you under retention?

Joseph Siegel:

Not all of it, but the marketing team is small right now, so we're leaning and mean and we all work together. It's really not just a me kind of thing here.

Drew Sanocki:

I mean it's almost like a skillset that you find common in Vegas, like in casinos where you bring in the loyalty teams. There are sort of the best in the business at getting people to come back, creating those incentives. They know the cost of the Lamborghini, they know how many people are going to respond to the promo. They know it's going to net out and they've run all those calculations. So I was just curious if you had any 50 pound heads out of Vegas who roll in and help you guys devise these promos or if it's all being done by you?

Joseph Siegel:

No, it's definitely not on me. We actually just hired a new VP of marketing. His name is Ryan Frisco. He was formerly at Monster and actually built, I think most of their marketing program, which includes CRM, retention, lifecycle loyalty. So he was doing all of the above and thankfully I've had him to lean on for a lot of this as well as the Beast team. I mean, people under Mr. Beast are essentially just experts at retaining users' attention, and so we lean on them heavy for really drastic crazy ideas.

Michael Epstein:

What's it like working for Mr. Beast? I'm guessing he's not in every meeting with you guys. What's the environment like there? What's it like working for Jimmy?

Joseph Siegel:

Oh man. I would say first of all, it's cool to have a guy like that as your boss. At the end of the day, someone who encourages crazy ideas, who says there's no bad idea. I think he's challenged everyone at the company to think more creatively. There is never a no, essentially if we want to figure something out, there is a way. So if a couple doors aren't there, you find the next door open, and I think that's really funneled down to everyone here at the company. It's turned me into a better problem solver and just I would say probably a better teammate, but I'm very thankful to work under him. It's cool working in a job that you see direct impact and you see how your marketing campaign or the marketing team that we all come together to build actually translates going into a Mr. Beast video and his own content. And so it is very rewarding and it's definitely not easy, but it's been an awesome journey so far.

Drew Sanocki:

Is he the day-to-day CEO?

Joseph Siegel:

He's not, no, but he's very involved just in terms of product development, top level marketing strategies. So yeah, he, he's certainly has a hand in everything.

Michael Epstein:

I want to go back to one thing you mentioned earlier that you launched essentially in all Walmarts, all Albertsons going to be in all targets. That's not the typical rollout for most brands who are going, they're doing small regional tests and then if they succeed, they get bigger and then they go national. Eventually you guys went big out of the gate. How do you manage that kind of growth and scale that quickly?

Joseph Siegel:

Thankfully, I'm not on the retail sales team, but I'm the beneficiary of that. But I think at the end of the day, nailing down our supply chain, keeping up with demand, I would say has probably been the biggest problem for us. Just because like you said, it's not the normal route a company would go in. And also managing expectations between different retail buyers. Again, I'm not day-to-day in that, but I know that's been something to I guess keep in the back of your mind.

Michael Epstein:

You mentioned creating sort of this ecosystem and not necessarily caring where they purchase or having different experiences or different expectations based on where someone might buy the product. In general, how do you as head of retention and just the brand in general, think about D two C versus retail metrics for both prioritization of one versus the other?

Joseph Siegel:

We look at retail as an engine to funneling traffic into our D two C business. So obviously there's so much foot traffic in all these different retail stores. Thankfully we're in displays, near checkout that have Jimmy's face. So the recognition factor is super at play here. So people will buy the bars in stores, scan the Q QR codes, and then essentially that's where the D two C business takes over, or at least that's my goal is to retain them, get them coming back into this D two C personalized experience. So we're really big on first party data capture and serving our customers probably at every single intersection. D two C is ultimately always going to be the place where we can give away cool stuff. We can give people ways to interact with us, whether that's, like I said, an email game or receiving a late text from Nolan who's on Mr. Beast's team, that's where they're going to come and stay for the fun, but ultimately it's just more realistic that they're going to come back to our retail stores to purchase.

Michael Epstein:

One thing that I've noticed that as you've described a lot of this stuff, it's like it's crushing, it's brilliant, it's performing really well, like the gamification of emails, but it's not something that other brands couldn't do. Obviously it has to be on brand for their respective brands, but creating experiences like that is something that should be every brand should be thinking about doing. You don't have to be Mr. Beast just to gamify your ad campaigns or your email campaigns. So I thought that was really interesting, probably a lot of takeaways. What other advice would you have for D two C brands today in general, and I think specifically those who want to partner or work with influencers, seeing so much of that now, either influencers starting brands or brands partnering with influencers to help drive sales.

Joseph Siegel:

So at the end of the day, a lot of brands follow the same playbook. Coming from the agency world, we felt like there was a playbook to grow and scale a brand with Mr. Beast and feasts. We don't look at any specific playbook when it comes to our marketing. We really try to be the ones creating that ourselves. And that's kind of how I think stuff like crazy giveaways and cool games on the email and SMS side of things have really come to life. That's true for every other brand. I mean, you could just be like everyone else and send the same standard SMS and email communications, but it's not going to help you stand out. It's not going to get you mindshare. And so I think it's something that every brand should practice, and it truly, again, comes down to knowing who your customer is. Maybe they're not of the demographic of people who want to be texting you or want to be replying to an email, but if that's you, then I would say lean into it and find ways to make people excited and think about your brand as a one of a kind brand essentially. 

Michael Epstein:

So I've noticed Mr. Beast mentioning Feastables a lot more frequently lately in the videos. What happens after he just casually mentions it in the video or shows it? Is it just craziness or is it sort of leveled off more? At this point?

Joseph Siegel:

We usually see a 200% plus spike in traffic. Now, in terms of sales, it definitely gives us a little sales boost, but it also depends on the message that he's pushing. So if he's saying Go buy feasts, I mean, that is a direct call to action. People are going to go buy feasts. We'll usually see a ridiculous number of sales that I can't share publicly. But essentially he is our marketing engine, so we do rely on his organic media and all fronts, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram stories, Instagram posts, and I think feasts has been his primary push, I guess now instead of Mr. Beberg even. So, yeah, it's amazing. It's crazy. This has been great. Thanks Joseph. Awesome guys. Thank you for having me. On

Announcer:

This season of the Nerd Marketing Podcast, you'll hear from the Wharton professor that literally wrote the book on customer centricity, along with Drew and Michael's experience in private equity and advice from VC firm partners on what they look for in investments. And you'll hear topics about brick and mortar retail strategies for CPG brands and much more. Alright, drew and Michael, we'll be back very soon.