How to use Uncreative agency

In order to generate ideas, you need to input some details about what you need. Precisely, the brand you are promoting, what type of campaign it should be, who are you targeting, and what results willing to achieve. We ordered a TV commercial for AIN.Capital, that will make entrepreneurs subscribe to our site.

After submitting, the magic begins. It takes several minutes for AI to generate ideas, meanwhile, the client is watching it “drinking coffee, reading Reddit, watching sand, calling freelancer” and other stuff real creative people usually do (probably) while working on the project.

But here we’re dealing with algorithms, remember? So the project is ready within minutes and emailed to you as a PDF. You can check out what we’ve got in a slideshow below:

As the Uncreative agency website claimed, all the creative work is done by machines. It is also yet unclear who made the tool itself. All that is known, so far, is that the company is headquartered in California.

While Uncreative is in beta, the service is completely free. After that, according to the site, users will be charged $5 dollars per idea.

Why is it interesting

This tool was launched as a fun experiment and obviously can’t replace people, at least yet. The ideas it generates are quite common and superficial but can be useful for stressed marketers who are struggling to produce many ideas in a short period of time. Sometimes, rethinking and developing the idea is easier than creating it from scratch.

• PromoRepublic is a Finnish-Ukrainian startup that develops solutions for corporations that help standardize and automate sales through social media.
• In 2020, the company raised $1.5 million from the Finnish investment firm Innovestor and other investors. According to CrunchBase, the startup has raised a total of $3.9 million in investments.
• The company is developing in the North American and UK markets. Among its clients are Expedia Group, Curves International, Mannatech, doTERRA, EZCORP.
• PromoRepublic has approximately 50 employees and contractors. The company has offices in Helsinki, Kyiv, London, and New York.
• PromoRepublic plans to use the funds raised to scale up its business.
• NetSolid Investments is a Ukrainian fund that focuses on smart investments. It mainly invests in affiliate marketing, traffic products, marketplaces, platforms, saas, apps, and other digital marketing products.

OBRIO, one of Genesis’s businesses, works on four product directions: Mobile, Web, GameDev, SaaS. Currently, the astrology app Nebula is the largest project of the company and is also the most downloaded app in the US in the astrology niche. It is used by over 13 million people in 50 countries. Besides, it has become the app of the day in App Store in the US and Great Britain and even outpaced Tinder several times.

Launch of the Android version

Although Android is the most popular OS for smartphones, the companies involved with mobile apps development usually invest more effort into the iOS platform. It is quite logical since iOS users normally bring more profit as compared to Android users. However, after the iOS 14.5 release, it became vital to use all opportunities for conducting purchases with clear and timely metrics. 

My work in the OBRIO company and in marketing began in June 2020. I started with marketing for Nebula, the only existing product at that time, which was available only on iOS. Our marketing team comprised three media buyers, each of whom was responsible for their ads platform (one or several). My first experiences were related to Snapchat and TikTok.

These platforms brought us good results but were quite unstable. They are rather suitable for one-time scaling, when one has a top-performing ad creative, than for the correctly organized strategy and stable volumes.

Later on, new products appeared on the project. One of them was Nebula for the Android platform. Thus we had to change the working process of the marketing team. Since then, the focus of each marketer shifted from ad platforms to a particular product. We wanted to make the new products as steeply developing as Nebula iOS was. However, this was impossible without corresponding resources. Furthermore, we had noticed that our team often faced communication difficulties. For instance, some team members could not understand why did we make particular changes? Why did we conduct these tests, not others? This pushed us to create separate marketing mini teams inside OBRIO, those which had to be responsible for Nebula iOS, Nebula Android, and other apps.

It may seem that parting the app versions for different operating systems into a separate product was not logical. The thing is that the Android version was released much later than the version for iOS. When the iOS version was on the scaling stage, outpacing Tinder in the ratings, bitting new records each day, the Android version was only on the MVP stage, and we knew neither the audience nor the economy well. 

Our mini teams were quite small in size. Back then, we lacked a product manager for all apps and an analyst. A marketer was in response for choosing which ad platforms to invest time in to reach business aims. On the level of mini teams, we also identified problems of the products and brainstormed ideas to solve them.

Prioritization and ideas testing 

We estimated the pool of available ideas according to the ICE framework (crossed out). We TRIED to estimate the pool of available ideas according to the ICE framework. But we discovered that it was somewhat hard to objectively consider the ideas and their impact on the product (even based on the prepared grading scale).

One of the failed plans was to limit the most popular functionality. Nebula contains the section of zodiac compatibility in which the user can check up to 10 zodiac pairs in one session. Our idea formed naturally: what would happen if we restrict the number of checks per day and offer them as the premium functionality? Now it seems quite logical that motivation through restrictions is not the best idea, but now we also have the numbers with test results for complete confidence.

We have learned three lessons out of this case:

1. If you want to make the product successful — you should translate it into value, and do not force a user to believe that it is valuable.
2. When you generate an idea, you should choose the instruments that would help you distinctly estimate its impacts and necessary resources. You need the experience to make those instruments work right. 
3. Each genius idea has to be underpinned by the MVP functionality, according to which you can check the hypothesis. 

Nebula Android pipeline: the problems

To understand, which changes does the product need, one has to carefully analyze previous marketing results and product metrics. Analysis of the pipeline considerably helps in forming ideas and tasks prioritization. 

The Nebula Android pipelines had significant differences from the iOS-version on each stage: conversion from installing to trial was smaller by 1.5 times, conversion from trial to payment — by 2.4. These metrics hugely impacted the efficiency and volumes of purchases as the LTV trial (the effective cost per user who began the trial) was too low to scale volumes with positive ROMI (Return of Marketing Investments).

Additionally, we discovered that above 70% of users who began the trial did it immediately after onboarding. So it was vital to translate the value of the product from the first seconds of usage. 

Apart from the product metrics, the potential obstacle concerned our score in the Play Market. In April 2021, it was 2.9. The users complained that the Android version was not complete, that the subscription was too expensive, and the ads were too many. The score can either motivate a user to download an app or push them to find an alternative. In fact, it represents reputation. The 2.9 score is objectively not too attractive for a user. Especially I would not have trust or wish to try such a product.

We could have chosen to improve only the app content, add new sections, but decided to focus on two metrics instead — conversion from installing to trial and from trial to subscription. To boost these, we resolved to improve the first two stages — onboarding and user activation. And it gave remarkable results. 

What we did

1. Conversion from trial to subscription 

This was the first step we started working with. We held monetization tests, changed subscription opportunities, prices, and tested different variants of sales screens. But practically, the test groups showed worse results as compared to the actual variants. If there were some which worked better, their benefit still was minor. 

Ordering compatibility reports was one of the most popular services among our users at that time. The report was completed by astrologers based on parters’ data and gave detailed information about the relations of two people.  Our idea was to present our subscribers with the basic compatibility report for free. It was also completed by astrologers and provided accurate information (but did not take into account all personal data, was more generalized). The idea did not require major development resources but boosted the conversion from trial to subscription by more than 2 percentage points.   

2. Trial conversion

This number is formed by estimating an app onboarding: the experience of a user during their first usage of the product, its usefulness, and pleasantness. 

At that moment, Nebula Android had the standard onboarding process, which required basic information about the user: name, place, and date of birth. On one hand, the onboarding was simple and understandable. It needed a minimum of personal information, which meant it was secure for a user since we did not collect their detailed data. On the other hand, such onboarding could signify that we provided only basic knowledge which could be found on other resources.

We decided to conduct a test, by adding more questions to better understand the purposes for which users downloaded the app, and later introduce even more unique content and opportunities.

The onboarding consisted of extended questions about diverse life spheres and required more time to pass. However, the test results turned out positive, and the trial conversion was boosted by more than 1 percentage point. 

3. Rating compilation in the app

Besides conducting tests, we also worked over other app features and content. The Play Market score remained low, but we had the hypothesis that it would increase as we improve our product. Nonetheless, we decided to realize the rating pop-up in the app. Mostly, people are more willing to complain about the problems than to express their gratitude. So it was vital for us to receive more user responses to understand if our product was helpful or needed drastic changes. We did not expect that rating collection would change our Play Market score. But when the new version with the pop-ups was released, our score elevated from 2.9 to 4.6 in less than a day. 

All we needed to do was to ask active users about how much they liked our app. 

With such seemingly easy steps, we improved each stage of the pipeline starting with a click on an ad to the activation and users retain. 

Marketing 

Singular improvements, which we made, did not guarantee the growth of the audience. The situation changed drastically only when we applied all the product changes for 100% of users. In approximately a month, the volumes increased 4 times. 

Facebook is the primary source of traffic for Nebula Android. For quite some time, the platform did not provide the required results. The deterring factors besides Facebook itself also included our approach to marketing and the efficiency of ad campaigns. 

We had one question in mind: how can we boost the volumes from Facebook? Back then, almost all the campaigns were launched on “bid cap”, which meant that volumes were minimal. The expenses could reach ~5% of the daily budget during the whole life cycle of the campaign. Meanwhile, the purchases at the “lowest cost”, which could boost our traffic, were expensive, and campaigns burnt out in a few days. However, we had to learn to optimize these exact campaigns, which would help us scale in the long run. Here are several rules which we had defined during this period:

1. If you have any doubts regarding work with the lowest cost — you would better withdraw these campaigns into a separate account or revise the automated rules for the main one to reduce their impact on the lowest cost campaigns. Automatic Facebook rules for ads turning on/off can impact the optimization and restrict you from noticing the positive dynamics.
2. Start with small budgets. I cannot provide exact recommendations, but you should expect approximately ten target actions.
3. Try not to make decisions about campaign shut down during the first day and observe which conversion % you will receive in some time. Our model is subscriptions, and we are optimizing for trials, so at the beginning of working with these campaigns, I watched how the trials lasted in the first 2-3 days. If I see that for 2-3 days in small volumes, the price is approaching the target, I raise the budget. You should take into account that this time gap can be bigger for you since you do not optimize actions, which a user takes immediately (maybe you should better observe the campaign during ~7 days)
4. I do not follow the rule which advises “not to increase by more than 20%” when I see positive dynamics. I can double it to collect more data for a campaign. If your budgets are bigger, you better play safe.
5. Duplicate the companies from the beginning:

• your budget will be divided into smaller portions among several campaigns. If some of them do not optimize, you will lose much less as compared to the losses in the case of bigger investments into one large campaign.
• there is a serious possibility that the indicators by these campaigns would differ. Thus you can choose a “winner” and scale it.
• besides, one company with a small budget will hardly give you the possibility to scale volumes quickly.

Such an experiment has witnessed that campaigns can really be held even during a whole month. The market seasonality also had a positive role. However, we could not have increased the volume and preserved traffic payback without improving the product and rethinking the marketing strategy.

Conclusions 

Here I would like to share several conclusions:

1. Many effective ideas have already been realized — do not be too shy to use them. When one starts working over something new, they desire to generate a new genius idea, that would produce a breakthrough in their industry. This intention is very commendable. But always keep in mind that many working approaches have already been realized, and sometimes all you need is to use them properly. 
2. Numeric books and articles were written about soft skills for a clear reason — communication is vital. Any team sometimes faces problems: developers do not understand how does marketing work and why it is impossible to scale in a day; marketers do not understand why some crucial tasks cannot be realized immediately; analytics launch tests, and someone does not see their purpose. It is important to trace all the cases when someone from the team “did not know” or “did not understand” because this is the marker of miscommunication. In our case, the creation of mini teams helped us better understand the process and each other.
3. Concentration. It is impossible to become successful with a product in which someone devotes 10%, 20%, or even 50% of their time. Success equals 150% of the attention.

I hope you enjoyed reading about our experience in product scaling. By writing this article, I wanted to show that it is vital to cooperate as a team, be quick in making decisions, and be flexible in your work. I will be thankful for any comments and reviews!

Author: Katia Pietukhova, Marketing Specialist at OBRIO

Victor Dubrovin: For us, this is evolution, the natural course of things. Obviously, digital does not solve all the issues. We began to look wider and started with the question: “what does the client need?”

After all, in fact, the client does not come for SMM or BTL, rebranding, etc. The client comes to help increase sales, increase the demand for his/her product.

When we realized for ourselves that this was the key question of the client in the category of marketing, we came to the realization in which direction it was necessary to develop.

Victor Dubrovin

Roman Gavrish: My colleague explained it in such a way that it would not be clear to an ordinary person.

Look: there used to be a tire shop, and now there is a service center.

Previously, they came to change the tires and said, “and here something is out of whack.” Now we started to look for it and try to understand. This led to the creation of a full-service station. We can disassemble the car from a beginning to an end. We do solve problems, we don’t just change winter tires. I’m not saying that winter tires aren’t important, however, when there is a problem, it needs to be addressed globally. That’s what we started doing.

What stages can this transformation be divided into? How did it start?

V.D.: The first project that we “shot” was Viasat, this is our work from nine years ago. Customer’s request was the following: you need to increase the conversion to the site. We realized that the request is actually much deeper and wider, and the value that we can create is worth much more.

As a part of that project, we not only redid the site but also looked at what happens after receiving the applications, how the display advertising works. We helped the client with display advertising, and with recommendations on the work of the call center and the processing of applications.

As a result, the conversion increased 15 times. This was only through the site, through the digital channel. The cost of attracting a client has become cheaper than through TV. This happened not only because we changed the site, but because we looked at the situation as widely as possible in terms of the consumer experience.

R.G.: Then we realized that we can generate a difference in the results several times.

This became the starting point. Then the clients came and asked for a conditional site, and we looked at the wide picture and understood that the site would not help. They have a problem with the price offer, for example. Even if we make a new site, without changing the price offer, the consumer will not buy the product.

Or we also had situations when the client ordered an advertising campaign from us, and we understood that the product did not meet the price category. You need to change the price and only then there will be a good result.

That is, we tried in some way to solve the final problem – increasing customers’ demand.

After some time, we realized that we had been doing marketing for a long time. We barely do digital work now. Accordingly, we decided to arrange it and went into the process of working with marketing.

Roman Gavrish

How does this happen from a client’s point of view? You come to the site, and you offer to reduce the price?

V.D.: There are, I think, two types of clients.

There are those who are afraid of such an approach. As if you come to the doctor and say: “I have a headache” (hoping that he will give you a pill), and he says: “Oh, you need to do some tests first. In general, firstly go to a physiotherapist, do the massages.” After all, you only had a headache!

The second type of clients is those who have the most suffered problem. They need expertise. A request for a conditional “site” is just a reason for us to start a conversation. And in fact, we lay out the whole situation, so the client immediately understands the issue. After all, when they come for a promotion video, the problem is not always in the video clip. Perhaps the old video is suitable, however, the problem is quite different here.

For the client, everything can be obvious and understandable, but he/she lacks an expert opinion or a desire to understand the issue him/herself.

Our task is to abstract, look like a sober diagnostician and tell the client where the problem is, and whether it’s “like”, “dislike”, “pleasant”, “unpleasant” – that is the whole other story.

When is it worth not just changing the price, but doing the whole re-branding?

R.G.: In two cases.

• The first case is when there are technical problems with the brand. For example, naming is not readable. The font is chosen poorly, it is hard to see from afar, from the shop window, etc. If it is impossible to read, then we need to change it.
• Second, we recommend to re-brand if the business is really undergoing change, but it has low recognition. When people know little about business, but it is already changing and transforming.

Therefore, in these two cases: when there are technical problems, and the second, when there are no technical problems, but there is some change with low recognition.

V.D.: For us, branding is functional. A brand should be easily recognizable, remembered and be the same everywhere, in all contexts, whether it is a shop window, packaging or a business card. It should be well and conveniently used.

There is an analogy with road signs. There is no need to experiment, no need to change the parking sign and change the letter “P”. Replacing the mark should take place only if it is unreadable.

What about the current wave of rebranding – is it just hype or real accumulated problems?

R.G.: This is surely hype. A lot of times the owner, director or marketing manager is bored.

Rebranding is the way to occupy yourself.

As a result, they find arguments that make rebranding a necessary step in the development of the company: they expanded the range of products, changed the direction of their activities, got a new audience. This is not a rational idea, there is no rationality behind it. People just want to do it. Worst of all, most often it hurts the business.

V.D.: I would add here that often rebranding is the path of least resistance for a business owner when it comes to marketing because the updated brand is noticeable to everyone. You made a re-branding, and everyone starts saying that cardinal changes are taking place. At the same time, the company itself does not change, working in the old way. Rebranding is not a functional task. This story is not about helping businesses, but about personal ambitions.

Do you often discourage customers from something?

R.G.: Yes, regularly. For example, rebranding is one of the “must-haves”. Next, I want to make a promo video. Next, I will ask to start the site, without changing anything in the product. In other words, they are not interested in the back-end, which is important, they only look at the front-end.

Everyone wants to look beautiful. We say that we need to change something inside as well.

What is the chronology of work with the customer, how is everything arranged?

R.G.: The client, as a rule, comes for one thing. We carry out the task smoothly and in parallel, we show the diagnosis. It shows that there are other nuances. Very often, the client is interested in their resolution. As a result, we are already working on other tasks. For example, we have been working with Mastercard for 5 years. Before that, we worked with Pepsi for 6 years.

V.D.: We have two lines of services:

• intellectual – strategy and consulting;
• production – the creation of the final product (promotion video, outdoor advertising, etc.).

As a result, some of our products are, in fact, just presentations. The client requests an audit, a session, and after receiving information from us, he/she goes on to solve it with his/her marketing team.

However, it also happens that we shoot promotion videos, create a new brand, etc. Depending on the situation, we are already working on the system of cooperation with the client.

You want to work with small and medium-sized businesses. Aren’t you scared of working with such clients? After all, the smaller the scale, the less money you get.

R.G.: In fact, this market has a larger scale and more money. Of course, if we compare the individual budgets of companies, they are several times smaller. But you see it otherwise.

There are hundreds of thousands of officially registered enterprises, including sole proprietors, and only two thousand of big businesses. There are about fifteen or twenty thousand of average size businesses. Total, if you remove sole proprietors from the counting, about 300,000 customers can withstand a check of UAH 100,000. Our task is to sell our services to them.

How will this work? Through the so-called batch product. We will begin to issue recommendations that will be unified for different formats. We will not sharpen cases for a specific business, as we do it with large customers. We will give a typical product, and the client will deal with it. Whether they will be able to work effectively or not – that’s their question, our business is to give them such a guide to action, an instruction.

V.D.: The idea is to reduce the check and the participation of different specialists. The product can be repeated, it can be reused. In this way, we reduce the cost to people, and they gain access to our knowledge. But there won’t be such work as we do with large customers.

What is Aimbulance today, in numbers?

V.D.: We now have more than 70 employees. At the same time, there are about 40-50 projects in work, of varying degrees of complexity. Some projects are a full-fledged marketing strategy with product development, value proposition and brand from scratch, some are just the development of an advertising campaign, and some – the development/creation of an online service and its promotion in digital.

The work is spread between the teams inside the company, we have 5 separate teams. One team works on the foreign market and 4 of them work on the local market. Formats are also different. There is, for example, annual cooperation when we work as a creative agency for a client. We also do point tasks: either we are working on a strategy, or just covering the media project, or just a commercial or branding. It happens when we do everything from the beginning to the end.

R.G.: In addition, there are representative offices in three more countries – the USA, Belgium and the Netherlands.

How do you work abroad?

R.G.: Belgium and the Netherlands are difficult markets for us. They are more conservative, they do not like working with remote teams. The countries have very specific nuances that we do not know how to work with. The prospects of the markets are incomprehensible – everything is very complicated there.

We have been working with America for the past six months. Everything is much more dynamic there, much easier. They are more open to international work, and now we are working on the third project. Everything will be faster in the future. Therefore, for now, America is our bet.

V.D.: Such a situation was a surprise for us because we have been flying to Europe for a whole year and completed only 5-6 projects. And when we entered the US market, we completed three projects of a serious level in a couple of months. In Europe, we only have customers who say, “make us landing” or “make a promotion video”.

Why do you have such a choice of countries?

R.G.: Absolutely by chance. We have partners who were interested in promoting us. This opportunity came to us and we decided to use it.

Do you have big offices abroad?

V.D.: No, in fact, these are small offices. Our goal is to sell local professionals there. Therefore, the team is here, and there we have people who sell our services.

Everyone loves to read about money, but nobody likes to talk about it. Tell us about the order of numbers in which the company earns.

V.D.: The revenue of the agency is about 50 million, so far in Ukrainian hryvnias. I can’t talk about the prices, because we have a variable product.

R.G.: Our task is to enter the global market, so we don’t have to depend only on Ukraine and to increase our revenue. Our plan is to increase the revenue threefold by the end of the next year. This is the maximum plan if all goes well.

In addition, a global presence will allow us to remain competitive in the long run. Everything is globalizing and it is possible that local companies start ordering creative in London, in Poland, in Hong Kong, anywhere. Then we need to understand how they think.

What are the feelings after getting another Red Dot? Did it help you?

R.G.: For the agency, in terms of business growth, the rewards do not matter. That is, in principle, we even once tracked such a situation with the Effie nomination: when you win a lot of Effies, a lot of bad traffic starts coming to you. What does bad traffic mean? I mean those who came and saw you at the award ceremony. However, in reality, they suck out resources, then they don’t want to do projects, etc., because they came on the hype wave. Therefore, from a business point of view, it can be said that the reward is not the main driver.

V.D.: It can be a driver, when it is used consciously as a tool for promotion, when you get an award and you trumpet everywhere about it, it’s just a reason to announce yourself. It is also a nice bonus for a team whose project is appreciated.

Is there such a reward that you would like to receive? Your personal challenge?

R.G.: Yes. Market share. Global one.

We want to win a large share of the global market.

Specifically, for me and Victor, probably, this is the main reward, which cannot be replaced with anything.