One of my favorite features on TikTok's GMV Max Campaigns is the "boosting" capability –– well, Meta has finally brought it into their platform. I am starting to see consolidated structures (1 ad set, 20 Ads) do better at distributing spend than previous years. With this new feature it makes me lean towards consolidation. This is coming from a day-trading media buyer that has used ABO as the primary budget strategy for over 8 years.

Hermes is truly so much better than OpenClaw. Built and end to end affiliate management tool for identification, recruitment, negotiation, whitelisting. So cool. It’s a little bit of duct tape and bubblegum but the vision is coming to life!

The brands that can spend the most on ads, with the highest CAC will continue to win.

@BryanECano led marketing at @trueclassictees, a brand recently valued at nearly a billion dollars. In this video, he shares an unconventional approach to brand marketing and how to measure it using a twist on a common approach i hadnt heard of before. If you’re fighting rising customer acquisition costs, slowing growth, and eroding margins, and looking to find your next chapter of profitable growth, this post is for you. Here are his key points, what I learned on the topic when operating at Chubbies, and check out the video for an action you can take today. Hope this helps: The core idea is to put dollars behind content that was posted organically to hit new audiences, grow the funnel, get people to take action, and increase the number of people who remember your brand. My lesson: after exclusively playing the bottom funnel direct response demand capture game for half a decade, you get to a point when it just stops working. The funnel isn’t filling with enough newly created demand to support the amount of demand we need to capture to hit our revenue and profit goals. It gets harder and harder every year as the number of customers we need to find increases, but it gets doubly difficult when total demand you can try to capture isn’t growing. That can start the classic doom loop. We had to start increasing the demand we were creating to get back into a balanced funnel, and realized what we needed to do was 1) reach new people we had never reached before, 2) get them to remember us But the only way to do that was to use different tactics and creative because the same ol tactics and creative would continue to limit us to only being able to target the small percentage (the 95/5 rule says only 5% of our potential audience is in-market at any given time) of people who are ready to buy now. An example: If your 5% in-market pool is 50k people, it’s capped by the 950k who aren't yet aware of you. To double your in-market pool to 100k, you must grow the number of peeps in the 95% to 1.9M. What Bryan says is that in order to do that, they don’t measure the effectiveness of those dollars or of that creative by how it drives a click and an easily attributed purchase. He says it needs to be measured completely differently. Every method of measurement has its flaws - we all know that. But this method is definitely an interesting approach that helps them identify the content that’s most effectively getting people to remember True Classic and ultimately get them to purchase, which is the oft-underappreciated, but absolutely essential requirement of any brand building. Check out the video. And as always, thank you to the @M__Operators Podcast, @connorrolain , @codyplof , and @couuor for making great content for modern brand builders. And 🙏 to Bryan for sharing these great tactical nuggets. Hope this helps ✌️❤️🤘

This is a DPA (catalog) ad — Chewy did not make the intentional decision to upload this image as an ad. In large catalogs the products selected lean towards those with the highest CTR (not ROAS) so you end up with situations like this. Saw this a lot working on Wayfair and other large catalog brands during my agency days. The crime here is 1. Meta optimizing catalog selection towards an engagement metric. 2. The brand not using a tool like Marpipe or Feedonomics to optimize their product feed and remove “strange” products - products with weird/shocking/suggestive imagery - products with ludicrous prices (a pizza oven for $20k) - products audiences wouldn’t expect your brand to sell Anything that is too “clicky” will be perceived as “good” and show up in the catalog.

A huge hit to brands growing on Meta — Yoni was an exceptional advocate. Whatever is next for him, it’s going to be incredible.

If you liked my article, you’ll want to read @Chris_Wichert ‘s linked write up. It adds a layer that I missed — what are the non-AI advantages. This is incredibly well said: “Taste. Point of view. The vision for what this product should be, who it's for, and why it exists in the first place. The understanding of your customer that no spreadsheet captures. The instinct for what to make next, what to say, and how to position against a market that moves faster every quarter.”

The Everlane acquisition honestly made me stop and think. It feels like every era of ecommerce creates its own “moat” that brands become obsessed with. 2010–2017: digitally native branding was the moat. 2018–2025: performance sophistication became the moat. and with the adoption of AI I've found myself asking: What will the next generation of brands look like? That question led me down a rabbit hole on: - why some DTC brands struggled - how AI changes competitive advantages - why operational leverage is becoming branding - why ecommerce org charts are about to collapse - what brands should build next to stay durable read about it below:

I wish there was a way for me to measure LTV by Ad. This would help tremendously in understanding 1. If different messaging is setting the right or wrong expectations — impacting return rates and retention. 2. Which ad formats attract the right/wrong quality of customers. 3. How different funnels/offers impact the stickiness of a customer. (When you’re not sprinting to launch 100 ads per week you give yourself space to think about these things).

“{Brands} they don’t need more {ads} they need more reach and stability of reach. I think people are too focused on how many ads they can make and not focused enough on how many people they reach consistently” — Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram

Building a playbook on how to hire people who can make this happen in your org. I’ll share it as soon as I finish — maybe tonight. If you’ve got questions you want answered in the playbook (or here) drop it below

“Most of that marketing spend isn’t making money but everyone is trying to protect their jobs” Cohen’s right and every honest CMO at a large brand knows it. At True Classic we pulled paid to near-zero, measured our organic baseline, then layered spend back slowly, measuring every marginal dollar we spent. The process takes ~1 month. Do this at $100M revenue. Do it again at $200M revenue. Do it again at $500M revenue. Do it again at $1B revenue. The org will fight you. People will freak out. But it changes your P&L for the better.

In ecommerce this translates to: 1. Collapsing Media Buyer x Creative Strategist x Landing Page builder (acquisition engine) 2. Collapsing Lifecycle Marketer x Copywriter x Designer (retention engine) 3. Collapsing Creator Manager x Outreach SDR x Deal Negotiator (affiliate ops) 4. Collapsing Brand Designer x Photographer x Retoucher (content production) 5. Collapsing CX Agents Customer Insights x VOC x Survey Designer 5 operators with agent stacks > 50 specialists with Slack.

Biggest lie brands have been sold is that they need an insane amount of creative volume to grow their business. 100 new ads per week for $150k monthly budget... This encourages volume without any thoughtful strategy or planning on angles, personas, formats. There is a massive difference between being busy and being effective.

Google. Applovin. Meta. Shopify. TikTok Shop. Amazon. Landing Page. Offers. Creative. Holdouts. Post Purchase Survey. Pixels. Paid Media. Organic. Influencer. 🎤

Proper forecasting at scale is underrated