How PopSockets Turned Unprompted Creator Content Into a Measurable Ad Source Using Refunnel

PopSockets makes phone grips, cases, and accessories.

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The brand sells D2C, on Amazon, and through physical retail.

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We spoke with Jack Farrell, Vice President, Global E-Commerce at PopSockets.

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He treats creative volume as the primary growth input.

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Of everything we model against revenue growth, creative count in the ad accounts
explains the most variance. It' the strongest relationship in the dataset, so volume and
variance of creative are the two variables we push hardest on.

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The Creative Supply Chain

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Most brands treat creative as a production problem. Jack treats it as a sourcing problem.

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"We look a lot at building a creative supply chain the same way that a lot of people will build an operational supply chain."

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A production model is capacity-limited. You can only brief, shoot, and edit so much. A sourcing
model is not, because the inputs already exist and the work is finding, licensing, and qualifying
them.

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How They Use Refunnel

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PopSockets' paid media lead is in Refunnel every day.

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Social Listening surfaces creator videos featuring PopSockets that nobody commissioned.

A customer unboxing an order. A mirror selfie showing off a new case.

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The team requests access from the dashboard.

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Refunnel messages the creator. The creator reviews the request and approves it, and only then
does the post become available to run as an ad. Nothing runs without explicit creator consent,
and the approval is recorded in the platform.

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If the creator accepts, they earn a share of the spend behind their video.

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So far, most say yes.

How They Filter Videos

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Two gates. Only one is human.

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The human gate is brand and product accuracy: does the video represent the product correctly,
and does it clear the brand bar? Binary, and not negotiable.

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The second gate is the auction. Cost controls are set against an incrementality-tested target
ROAS, so efficiency is a fixed constraint before any creative enters. An ad that cannot hold it
stops spending on its own.

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"Once your cost controls are honest, the only variable left is how much qualified creative
you can put in front of them. Thus, we're deliberately permissive about what we test and
strict about what we spend.”

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Every video that clears the brand gate is a live hypothesis, and the cost controls decide which
ones survive using real revenue generation against a validated target. The objective is volume of
qualified, profit-generating creative.

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What Refunnel Unlocked

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PopSockets has run hundreds if not thousands of Refunnel-sourced partnership ads.

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The 12-month expected value is $1,450 per ad.

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That figure is modeled, not attributed. PopSockets projects each creative's full-year media value from spend to date, corrected for how long the creative has been live, then converts it at an incrementality-tested return. Young creatives are grossed up rather than counted short.

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Refunnel creative holds its own against the other content sources in the PopSockets creative
supply chain.

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Why Refunnel?

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Refunnel makes partner posts straightforward to get live. The content already exists, so the
work is finding it and getting the creator's approval.

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Find the content, request access, run it as paid, all from the same dashboard.

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"What's so great about Refunnel is how it's all insulated in the platform. It takes almost
nothing to go from finding a video to running it as an ad"

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The deeper value is what the content is.

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"The content is not directly influenced by us. It's people out there singing their hearts out
about why PopSockets makes their phone life better. And hearing those things
unprompted, immensely valuable"