Agency Insights: Jess Bachman from FireTeam

Hey Jess! We are quite excited to be chatting with you today about your work, expertise and FireTeam. We’re big fans of the work you and your team do and have long admired your unique perspectives and creative minds.

Ok…let’s get into it! 

Tell us what Jess Bachman and FireTeam do. How many brands do you engage with at a time and what do you typically do for them?

FireTeam is a marketing agency with a strong emphasis on creative. I am the co-founder and Creative Strategy Director. We currently have 10 clients but a range of services for each. Some are only creative production, some including media buying, and one is the entire marketing stack.

Coming from your traditional marketing background, what’s the #1 idea or learning you’ve brought into the DTC world? 

The #1 idea, and this is going to sound stupid, but it’s that creative matters. DTC has been heavily performance based and for a while, media buyers were kings. Creative was an afterthought. When media buying became “hard” post iOS, brands only started to realize that creative was king, and honestly, lots of brands have yet to figure this out. 

The funny thing is that even when media buying was king, creative was also massively important, and I wince just thinking about all the opportunities left on the table in the run up of FB ads.

A million-dollar ad has these 3 traits….

Over 30 seconds, multiple pattern interrupts and shareability.

Why do you think people are jumping onto the “UGC is dead” train? Do you think non-marketing users on these platforms are actually tired of UGC? 

People claim “X is dead” out of self-interest because they do not do X or or know how to do X well. This is the same for UGC. It’s a pretty lame take. UGC was born out of the actual content on the platforms, and until that content changes, UGC will be alive and well.

I don’t think users are as savvy or as skeptical as marketers think they are. It’s all in the execution. A natural or well acted piece of UGC content is worth its weight in gold.

FireTeam is known for making some of the best creative in eCom. With Rejuvia, I’ve personally experienced this. What makes FireTeam uniquely capable of creating ads with incredibly high success rates?

Our philosophy is the opposite of spray and pray. We try to make the best ads possible, then give them enough spend to understand if they did or did not work. What comes next is what makes us stand out. We review the performance of each creative, try to understand WHY it worked, or not, then iterate to make an even better ad unit when needed. 

We strongly believe in internal education and getting cumulative better as a creative agency, and when you put in enough reps of that, you become very good at what you do. To be clear, the spray + pray method can also produce winners, but you won’t know if it was just luck of the algo or creative factors. 

Who is your dream brand to work with at FireTeam?

Well there are brands that need help with marketing, but I’d still love to work with them, like MSCHF or Liquid Death. Then there are brands that are related to my hobbies, like InMotion which is an EUC brand. 

All the EUC brands are out of China and their marketing is terrible. I’d love to help them out. We are also on the lookout for a pet/dog brand to work with, since we have 7 dogs between the 6 of us.

If you personally had to make 1 ad for a brand that you knew would reach 50,000,000 people on Superbowl Sunday, who would it be for?

So many ideas have been done before, but I think making an ad for a political organization or politician would be supremely interesting, given the cross section of viewers. 

Helping AOC appeal to middle America would be my move.