The New Meta Ad Playbook: Avoiding Creative Similarity on Meta

0:00One of our biggest clients went from 54k in spend from this same period in October 1st to the 8th versus this year the same period 622k in spend.

0:16Welcome back to another episode of DTC Diaries. Today I'm joined again by COO Sam, the man who wears many hats, operations but also growth marketing expert and excited to be talking a bit more about some of the recent developments we've been seeing in the agency around creative diversity. Recently had a tweet that we published go, I'd say like D2C viral. D2C viral for sure. Not quite viral in the sense of influencer, but yeah, got a lot of attention off the back of a couple of sessions we did with Meta. So yeah, looking forward to diving into that, but welcome back to lucas's reliable substitute back again not not um subjecting people to ops theory and ai this time more tactical might even get in the weeds yeah yeah looking looking forward to diving in more executional which we love so yeah people seem to love those topics lucas will be back i think well definitely we'll be back in the next couple of episodes to go deeper into like how we're work how we're kind of coming up with new concepts and really leaning into these updates.

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2:36Stop worrying about maxing out credit cards or getting bogged down by bank bureaucracy. Get the capital you need, seize the moments and keep 100 % of your business and get back to what you do best. Check them out in the link in the description. i think meta have really redefined um and brought to the forefront a new way of thinking about creative diversity that i guess we've been talking a lot about internally for a few months now and you can certainly see in the accounts that we have where we're seeing compounding results and i think you mentioned in a session recently the accounts where it feels easy to scale um i feel like we've been leaning into this maybe for for for many months now um but i think they've really codified it in in some of this some of this put some of these um slides and some of this some of these resources that they've brought to us over the last few few weeks yeah it feels like those that are really leaning in right now have almost created like a bit of a power law because they've done it for so long the accounts in such like an optimized state where you're giving meta so many different signals and just like compounding growth and it gets easier to scale but also becomes super predictable when you start pouring more fuel into the fire you can see it compounding over time and i think there's a lot of fuel still left to be like squeezed not there's not many people talking about like the idea of just pouring more on but thinking about what to actually pour um so a couple of bits that we're going to go into today but for sure seeing those that invest they just create a power law for themselves i'd be interested to get your thoughts on this actually do you think there's like a window in the next like six to 12 months where you can really leverage it you can really take advantage of what we're seeing yeah i still think and i think the results we're getting on our top the fastest growing accounts are testimony to this i think meta is as powerful as ever like brands we work with are getting better results than ever if they're really leaning into andromeda i don't want to rehash andromeda in too much detail because we've talked about that and and how it works how it's been rolled out and what it means for the algorithm on Facebook in previous episodes but I still don't think many brands are really like sitting down and thinking from first principles how do we lean into this how do we provide meta with the creative led signals to allow it to drive better delivery at your targets over time and really thinking about how we get in front of of new audience and until recently we hadn't really had any materials from meta's internal team to sort of codify this or give us guidance on this but recently we ran a couple of creative sessions with our reps who are who have been instrumental in helping us benchmark incremental reach and and drive scale for those brands that are spending multi six figures a month on platform where it really does become a limiter getting in front of new audience and how you think about that and how you KPI around that intentionally, which I think we're going to touch on a little bit further into the episode.

5:45But I'm going to surface on screen somewhere around our heads. A slide that we shared on Twitter recently and LinkedIn, which is like a left to right scale for those people listening and not watching. On the left is they've identified less differentiated ads. So these are ads with a similar message and a similar visual style so perhaps the same angle the same visual whether that's static or whether that's a UGC with very similar creator and very similar hook and yeah middle of this sliding scale is differentiated message but same style so maybe you're using a different script angle or angle persona a combination but the same sort of format so similar creator similar static and then on the far right of the scale you've got differentiated message and differentiated style and i think that's like the type of asset and the type of deliverable that's really supporting incremental new reach um that's a sweet spot to invest in right yeah and i think that's creative diversity at its heart it's like how do we look at the building blocks of creative from message at the very bottom angle, which is, I guess, the foundation of any piece of content, all the way up to the very tip of the triangle in terms of impact, which is like font, color, and maybe even copy to some degree if it's in the same angle.

7:17Minimal impact. No, I think copy, I see copy as the thing that users will check after they've been hooked in. so it's not that relevant i see it more of a conversion lever than an attention and signaling signaling lever but yeah right at the tip like not much impact versus the bottom which is very persona led um that's that's the most potent form of fuel right yeah so it's like finding a new angle is what can drive that significant step change in results initially and then as you double down on it through further visual variety it's like you multiply the impact to finding that new angle and yeah i think the last if we rewind like 18 months many brands will have been making a huge amount of iterations across statics that maybe it's the same static format the same angle and just the the copy presentation would be different and that was working and i still think that can work as like a leading indicator for like on a click-through rate of like what someone's interested in more and maybe you double down on that but it's not providing it's not going to drive growth it's not going to drive significant incremental reach and transform an ad account for a brand that's already spending it yeah exactly if you want to like squeeze the juice then yeah maybe you can iterate on something small and more minutiae like copy and a static for example but the thing that's going to make the big swing is and the thing that also is going to almost create a halo effect on the rest of the account is going to be persona mass differentiation because you're going to be bringing so many more impressions into your funnel it's then the statics and the small iterations that then might sweep up after you've brought in that net new reach and you'll see that when you break it down and look at your new visitor percentage your static is usually the one that's smaller new visit percentage and your video where you've done a new angle a new persona that's the one that's driving more net new impressions to website but also driving your volume of incremental reach up over time yeah and i think that whole this whole concept of like asset similarity is something that we've we've had um it's not something we've we've probably put as much thought into until recently but we then did a second session for a client um where meta presented a batch of their top spending assets and side-by-sided them and gave us a better like a rating of how similar those assets were and one of the real standouts for me here was they highlighted two different ugc creators who were in a similar setting both in a kitchen both delivering a similar message but they were two completely different individuals and meta had identified them as the same asset and i think that really was like a an inflection point in like right we need to be looking at this intentionally because you can almost see those two assets is like the investment in creating those two assets the investment in creating these assets that are seen as the same by meta has been almost not not worth it entirely but far less impactful than spending that that creative budget in different ways in the pursuit of greater visual diversity or messaging diversity yeah it's like what you said what first principles what's the thing that's going to what's the variable that's likely going to have the most impact probably not the creator and how they look and feel but it's probably the persona that is wrapped within that creative what are the pain points that you're trying to dig into what are like the emotional narratives i see that all forming a really strong persona-led creative and that's what's really moving the needle for us right now it does feel like this needs to be almost a kpi that you look at on a day-to-day basis in an ad account and if you give ownership maybe a secondary kpi for like a creative strategist for example just just looking at intentionally every day and make making sure that your incremental reach is going up over time i think is super super important and nobody's really talking about that yeah 100 and i think i think they also gave a statistic that was like different motivators unlock new audiences 89 of the time i I think that comes back to that angle and that persona-based approach to creative production being so important.

11:37And as you start to find that angle that works, I almost see it as breaking off into a couple of different work streams at that point. You've got this angle that you've found. It's like how do we re-skin that into different ways of presenting that visually and through a messaging? and through messaging whilst also continuing to run another work stream that is focused on those bigger unlocks alongside that because you are going to see the impact of that that message or that that persona dwindle and decrease over time it's going to become less incremental as you feed more volume into the algorithm yeah i think the bottom layer of the cake is product the one the thing that sits above that persona you're going to probably have like i mean it depends on the tam of your product right but if you've got a super big tam you might be able to get 12 personas out of a product fairly broad personas within that you might have let's be optimistic and say 20 angles within each persona you've already probably got like 500 angles there you could tie into across all those different personas and then from that you can think about your vehicles and your styles that ladder up to that angle and when people say like oh um like what more can we do so i just i just i just fundamentally don't believe that when you actually do the math and there's a multiply effect for every single layer that works back from the persona and you'll end up with the realization that you've probably got like 50 000 unique concepts that you could inject into account and that's where prioritization comes in of course but yeah there's there's so much opportunity when you break it down like that and create that pyramid layered approach which i think you can really every brand in my opinion should be baking that into their like research and insights uh getting into the rhythm of doing that maybe every two weeks for example and then forming your next steps off the back of that that initial build that you've done yeah it's bringing that idea of like similarity back into that strategy equation right it's like making sure we're intentional with asset splits across the awareness phases across the vehicles across the angles across the personas it and i think it does just introduce another layer of complexity um there's obviously been that that a lot of conversation over the last six to twelve months around volume versus quality of assets and it's it's often painted as like you need to like one or the other whereas i really think this is like a a proof point that you really do need to figure out a way to do both you need to figure out a way to retain hit rate and average spend per asset as you continue to drive volume and diverse volume across all of those different variables to maximize the platform because it still is possible to get to mid eight nine figures through through very little channel diversification if you can lean really heavily into into that way of approaching creative strategy and execution i couldn't agree with that more i think there's so much juice to be squeezed out of meta when when brands say to us oh we want to diversify it's like let's look at the amount of diversification in the single channel that you're running which is meta before we start thinking about extra channels um we've seen this happen right one of our biggest clients went from i've got it noted down here i think it was 500k in 54k in spend from this same period in october from the first to the eighth versus this year the same period 622k and spend over 10x by just obsessing about persona persona and diversity creative diversity that creates the signals for meta to go and find your new audiences that's it signals and like relevancy scores i don't think anyone's thinking through thinking of creative through that lens of signal engineering like how are you providing meta with signals and signals for andromeda are is engagement it's watch time it's hook rate it's like a signal that a specific audience is conversion as well but it's a signal that a specific audience is resonating with an asset that allows it to latch onto that signal and go and find similar people to that to those individuals and get in front of of individuals you haven't reached before as a result of that feels like signal rich ads are almost like context and your ad spend is like the prompt the output that you get from the prompt is only as rich as your context sorry to talk about AI, I had to I like that analogy though I think it's only going to, and the exciting thing is for brands if they can lean into this I think it's only going to become better because they've rolled Andromeda out, if you think about it, it's context window expanding, it's machine learning getting more and more effective and efficient over time you should expect the long tail of your ads those those outside of those real top performers the impact of that long tail to improve as it's able to better deliver if that if the quality of those assets is high enough if that makes sense yeah yeah agreed i think to make this practical for people people need to i know you've already on an episode with lucas spoken about the reports and things like that you can gain um but you need what you want to be benchmarking incremental reach and watching the volume increase over time you and as an expression of a percentage expression it's likely going to decrease with scale but as long as you to a certain level as long as that volume is increasing over time then you are bringing new impressions into the funnel i think 10 to 20 is where i've seen sweet spot um relative to brand size of course if you're dropping below 10 % then it's likely that you'll run into diminishing returns a lot quicker than other brands that are more weighted towards that 20 % range um so I think that's a super key one to look at and request every month or so which I know you've already touched on um cost per a thousand accounts reached is something that Cody has been saying on X over the past week or so Cody Plotf from Jones Road has been pushing this hard.

17:57It's like CPMR, right? Yeah. And it is a metric in Meta that you can pull. It's just CPM times frequency, really. And that's like, if you aren't able to get those incremental reach reports from your reps, because I know that's a bottleneck for some brands, we're able to, through the great support that we get from the guys over at Meta, I think it's about, yeah, building these proxies for like, how do you get a gauge on that? and that is a big one yeah such a quick one add it to the ad account you can see it on trend over time and you'll see that if you've just injected a load of this persona-led diversified creative into account you'll likely see that cost of incremental reach reduce that week it'll probably level out as you saturate the impressions that are coming through from that creative but yeah i actually looked at this for a client and looked it on a chart over last month or so and it did line up with every single creative sprint it spikes and then goes levels out a little bit and then it goes up and down so yeah super interesting yeah and i think the the the red flag is if you're pushing spend and that's and you're that's um and the cost to reach a thousand people is increasing either proportionally or or more so than than that spend increase in percentage terms i also think you can see that on an asset level so you can look at it on an account level but you can also often when you find those real unaware problem aware asset unlocks the cpm will be remarkably lower than an account average like sometimes can be like five x yeah five six x lower and that's just again a signal that it's getting in front of just such a vastly different audience and it'll start to drag those through the ad account and across all of those other assets that may be lower funnel yeah i think it's important to benchmark that on an account level but also reviewing specific angles specific formats um vehicles and then you can compound that by reviewing whitelisting which i think is another way to to really drive better cpm we're seeing that play out aren't we yeah massively massively yeah i think people need to look at that as though they do thumb stop ratio and click through rate just add it to your column mix and start looking at that on a on a week-to-week basis done some similar analysis with partnership ads the learnings there so far are pretty limited um however interesting to see i mean not interesting you would expect click-through rate increases and what that's doing to your point is giving more signals to meta which is creating better relevancy scores and because of that we're seeing conversion rate increases a lot of across a lot of partnership ads which is something to do if you're not already doing and quick little tactic there we found the best performance come through like native instagram static that looks like a story and you pair it with the partnership ad it literally looks like a an influencer story that is driving like really cheap cpms right now and super high click-through rates and because of that conversion rate increasing interestingly we haven't seen it impact incremental reach as much as i thought but i think that comes down to my hypothesis here is it's doing a really good job at like getting in front of the more stubborn audience pools that weren't otherwise converting but it'd be interesting to start testing this around more with brand story founder story level content which is something we've done a little bit of but don't have the data to hand but yeah seeing a lot seeing it work really well across lower funnel and like squeezing the juice um the previous video to this on the channel and will have been the um the third party and partnership ads masterclass that i put out last week so if you haven't watched that and you're watching this go back and look at how to do those best in class because i think they there's there's one thing executing on an asset level but it really works best if you pull that through the funnel because conversion rate goes up and again it supports signals and supports better asset delivery to new audience.

22:02I also think another KPI to touch on is like new visitor percentage. I think alongside CPMR, I think tracking new visitor percentage across an ad account holistically, but also asset format, like you mentioned, is just another way to really like get a data point on how your creative approach which is influencing incrementality over time of spend. Yeah, agreed. That is the amount of people that actually land on site that are new, not necessarily, it doesn't capture anything to do with the creative itself. It's more, did this creative do a good job of getting new visitors onto the site, not necessarily engaging, which is why I think you need to look at CPMR and then also look at new visitor percentage, because it'll tell you if it's done a good job of both getting in new eyeballs, but getting them to actually go through to site as well which you would expect if you had a strong click-through rate but yeah there's such a strong correlation between declining new visitor percentage and declining performance so marry that up with incremental reach and i think new visitors percentage is almost like a lagging indicator of rising cpmr because if that's yeah reducing then yeah you're obviously not getting enough new eyeballs into the funnel and then i feel like those are both a leading indicator of declining performance further down the line because whenever we take on an account that's really struggling with incremental reach, it's a hard problem to solve initially because you often have to focus on doing a lot of very different new things which by default have a lower hit rate.

23:45Maybe you're tapping into completely new angles and personas, completely new ways of selling a product. And I feel like that it's so important to keep that as an always-on work stream because it's less predictable than those proven messaging frameworks those proven ways of taking a product to market and starting that from from a standing start when you're in a position of of um low incremental reach or declining performance off the back of that can it can take a good couple of months to really turn an account around yeah i think the going back to what we were saying at the start as well around that almost halo effect when you start really investing in this i think if you don't have that halo effect right now there are like really quick wins you can think about through more of a vehicle lens not not i guess a vehicle can a varied vehicle can become part of a different persona unlock because like different vehicles might appeal to different personas just to touch on vehicle when we're saying vehicle we mean podcast ad or vsl or founder story it's those like proven frameworks to deliver a message through um and like you said it can be a quick win because you've you can you can take literally almost an identical script and just reproduce it in some in a way that's super visually diverse and therefore appeals to someone else's preference for content consumption right exactly that like some people are going to convert higher through a podcast ad whereas someone might convert through a guy walking through a supermarket telling you about his amazing supplement it's all relative to like i guess it comes back to what what will emotionally resonate with someone and that can help you unlock the extra scale as well um tiktok's an amazing place to find inspiration for that so i think like organic content especially usually it comes with ease of creation versus something more high production led like a podcast so there are like there are easy quick wins you can do to get yourself started with this whole incremental reach idea um and it should just compound from there and um yeah kpis to measure that as well over time 100 i think organic tiktok and even looking at longer form youtube we've touched on this previously and pulling if you've got the budget some of those um more structured um high prod like approaches to series to content formats back into a direct response framework can work really really well i was just going to ask you a question how do you think how do you think people should be thinking about concept level variations to really maximize incremental reach how should we be thinking about that because i think maybe like you said 12 months ago it was very minutiae the change whereas now it feels like we need to go much bigger swing with that initial message that initial three seconds that we hook people in with there's um dr squatch i think an amazing example of hook variations because it's visually completely different but the body of the video is so i think that's probably where my head girls but be good to get your thoughts yeah i think visual diversification um is is one of that's like the obvious is way and like taking bigger swings there than than previous uh so maybe you go from like um sitting in a car to first person to traditional ugc to um supermarket etc etc you You can often reproduce assets visually in so many different ways in a similar creative format, and that will drive incremental delivery to a different audience.

27:42I also think you can do it through framing. We've seen a couple of examples where we've framed the ad differently. So one that comes to mind is where Lucas called out his mum, as the target but it was him in the asset rather than using someone over the age of 45 to produce that ad and that's two different ways to again the message was very similar in those ads but the way we presented it was it was very different um i also think a third one is like the the way you present the product and like the psychological motivation and the way you present it on like a um in from a from a buyer psychology perspective um one of our lead magnets had a real good deep dive into this and showed a few different statics around how we're doing this um well i feel like it's a good example would be like um people who are more predisposed to loss versus gain is like an example um i can't remember the other ones i need to it's like reframing a benefit yeah yeah in a different way yeah yeah because yeah it's going to appeal to different um i heard a good quote on this the other day as well i think it was like a steve jobs quote to be honest um just talking about mass variation of marketing angles that all add up to the same benefit which is the point that you're getting at um yeah i think i think that's key um i think creators is an interesting one um i'm not seeing as great great performance through creator diversity as we were six months ago um which is fairly anecdotal don't have data to back that up but it does feel like that full like visual journey that you take a user on needs to be the number one variable that differentiates a creative versus your last creative not necessarily giving the same concept to brief it briefed into two different creators like when I've seen a band do that it just hasn't hit like it did six months ago it's to your point at the start yeah I think unless you've got a really wide range of demographics and those creators are different genders different ages and often when you're doing that they also have different sort of motivations and pain points so it's kind of a combination of angle persona and creator differentiation rather than just one but yeah we've seen we've definitely seen that anecdotally play out over the last few months it used to be a massive lever i think um yeah being being more diverse than the individual that's delivering the message from a creative perspective yeah yeah i mean it's that whole shift from deterministic to probabilistic right i know we've been through this in previous episodes but i truly believe like if you can just study the algorithm and how it works you can build from there and not enough people think think about how to put yourself into a more favorable position by like truly understanding how an algorithm work like deterministic is if y then x whereas probabilistic is if x then maybe y based on all the signals it had access to rather than prior where it's like oh this person added to cart this person purchased let's serve this ad to this person based on those actions that they've taken so it's very if x then y whereas now it's like signals creating relevancy scores ad gets delivered based on relevancy scores and not enough people are talking about that and thinking through that lens when it comes to creative strategy i think there's the opportunity if you can really lean into it so you're running an e-commerce business you've got a great product your ads are finally hitting their stride and then you look at the calendar and realize that Black Friday and Cyber Monday are right around the corner.

31:42But do you have enough cash to buy all of the inventory you need? Will you have enough in your ad budget to really maximize scale? This is the exact moment so many founders hit a wall. They've tried the old school bank loan thing, weeks of paperwork and meetings and then a rejection letter because their business is just too new. They've thought about going VC but who wants to give up a piece of their company just to buy stock? That's what makes our partner Waveflyer such a game changer. Waveflyer provides funding for e-commerce businesses just like yours but here's the best part it's non-dilutive that means you get the cash you need to scale up to buy more inventory launch that new ad campaign or hire a key team member without giving up a single percentage of your company.

32:24And the process is incredibly fast we're talking about a matter of days not months their data-powered platform gives you personalized insights into your business's performance so you can make smarter decisions about your cash flow and marketing. Stop worrying about maxing out credit cards or getting bogged down by bank bureaucracy. Get the capital you need, seize the moments and keep 100 % of your business and get back to what you do best. Check them out in the link in the description. And I think we saw off the back of the um post that i put out um an individual from meta jason who who is internal at meta but shares quite a lot about their like um platform developments um we'll put his twitter down below because i think it's a worthwhile follow if you're in the space to stay on top of this they he put out a tweet that um announced the fact that meta are launching three new metrics around creative in platform and they all help you better have a better read of incrementality of of asset delivery and better and hopefully provide metrics that can allow you to adjust creative strategy more intentionally around the signals you're getting from the channel that were previously unknown to us as advertisers so the first is a creative fatigue report which is um just gives them a measure of like when the target audience is getting too saturated by a specific creative so it's a percentage score of creative fatigue on an asset level um and it's it's going to give you a read of where when the creative is getting less interaction as a result of that fatigue and therefore you're starting to see declining performance i think that's super interesting on an asset level because you you could kind of see and feel that from a cpa perspective but we never had data to provide us with like a leading indicator of that coming yeah so almost i think it's going to be a mixture of it's probably like cpmr with a performance kpi like cpa on a time scale is the thing that's going to determine the strength of that as a as a measurement and yeah if you're starting to see that tick up towards like 30 40 on a winning asset probably puts a bit of urgency into you to be like we need if you're really reliant on a few ads and you're starting to see them fatigue i think that again refocuses minds on in on speed of execution volume into the ad account and making sure that there's a lot of pace and quality across that work stream 100 i think you always should have i mean for some of our biggest brands we've got like up to 50 high performers in an asc so we don't when you get into this position where you've got so many top performers in a core asc you don't really have to worry about fatigue in the way that all you just described because you know that if you have got an ad that's ready to substitute that from the previous sprint then you know that spend likely going to go there because meta is way smarter than us and knows where to distribute spend but if you are in a position where you've only got like three of those and they're all rising then yeah it's danger zone yeah it's like a risk right risk of just of performance being significantly impacted at some point in the future if we're not able to find those winners.

35:47Second of these is creative similarity. So that's going to provide you a view of when assets visually are too similar. So what we mentioned earlier about the report that Meta provided us in this workshop, that's going to be surfaced in the ad account. And it's going to tell you directly when Andromeda is seeing two assets as the same. And I think that's just going to be when that lands in accounts i think it's going to be super eye-opening to just go through and just just see what what andromeda is is scoring as is visually or or asset levels similar and therefore impeding um new reach and and grouping that to the same audience i wonder if how they're going to define that is going to get more and more like strict like if diversity is going to become more and more important based on how they create that, create the overlap just now.

36:42But yeah, I mean, we don't, have we, do we have any indication of like what, what warrants the actual differentiation? It's like more of the, how punchy the visual is. And I guess if it's a video, then it's the actual messaging of the video that's taken in by the AI and it's analyzed it from there. But yeah, I think the best thing you can do is hedge your bets on the fact that it needs to look visually completely different and the narrative of the video if it's a video needs to be massively varied as well if not then you're going to see your similarity score shoot through the roof yeah be interesting to see how that plays out and then the final one which i almost feel is like perhaps the most interesting of the three is is like this idea of top creative themes so understanding the number of active ads and amount of spend across key creative themes so think humor nostalgia savings or offer and social proof etc and i think that's a really interesting way of thinking about um it's another layer i guess it's like we're talking angle we're talking theme we're talking vehicle especially when you start talking about humor nostalgia as those sort of those satire we've talked about that in previous episodes is something that often over-indexes in top performers is satire and humor um but not all brands lean into that it's kind of saying that that we need to be we need to be covering a lot of a lot of different um uh presentations of ads in tone as well which is interesting and getting a real read on that will be um will probably firstly help spot gaps but also maybe spot where you're over-indexing in production like social proof being an obvious one where people do a lot of like review testimonial uh ads and perhaps it's like enough is enough is enough if we've already got that bucket covered to a high level because that's that's meta just trying to make instagram facebook a way more just a better experience for their users um because they're going to reward you if you create a better experience and invest more into themes if it's like satire for example we've been doing that already through the likes of triple where where you break down the buckets of angles but very little done it on a theme level so it's going to be super interesting to see what the ui looks like for that and what metrics they attach to each theme for example are we going to get the granularity of incremental reach for example we're going to be able to see that over time but yeah looking forward to that for sure it's interesting what the role of brand takes within all of this because like brand by definition from a creative perspective has a high degree of similarity if you look at like if you roll back like 12 to 18 months and look at ag1 as a creative example like you could look at ag1's ad library and it had a brand look and feel throughout every single asset i would could put you in put one of their ads in front of you without the identity and you could probably tell me that it was from their brand due to the theme due to the the consistency but if meta's saying that that's that consistency and similarity is a negative for growing through their channel those brands that are more protective and less open to diversity are probably going to have a harder time.

40:13And again, it's felt like this anecdotally for the last 12 to 18 months, thinking about clients that we work with that are more brand protective because that's what makes their business valuable, what it is to the consumer. But I think that's going to be a very interesting challenge to overcome for those businesses to get the most out of meta in this ecosystem. Yeah, really good thought. is a really interesting one and we've we've definitely seen that over the last six months more brand protective equals harder to differentiate so i think brands that are more brand protective need to really figure out a solution to that sooner rather than later because it is going to get harder and harder to see consistent returns when we're going into a diverse diversity diversity centric algorithm um i use ag1 as an example because i've looked in and diversity in comparison to where they were previously.

41:11And I don't think it's impossible to balance those two things still. It's just, it's harder. It needs more intention. You probably need to lean into more vehicles and high prod more. And yeah, it's just going to probably be a little bit more difficult to drive incremental reach unless you've really been super intentional with that process. Yeah. it's also just remembering like what the word brand means and to me it's like the look it's the feeling that you create in the user's mind when they see the brand and again first principles you can you can take that and the answer to that doesn't need to be less diversity it can be more diversity but wrap your value proposition under that the thing that makes you guys special think about that more not necessarily like the visual aspect think about what makes what feeling you want to be created in the customer's mind when they see your brand not necessarily how you look when you come across yeah more about the feeling you want to invoke 100 i also think this is and this this leads into a piece on unless do you want to touch on anything else on on that topic before a segue segue segue um it's also like where does it end right where does that creative requirement end um you can see this like path like we're making for some of our clients hundreds and hundreds of ads a month and they're scared our top spenders i expect when we had a conversation around forecasting for for a couple of brands over the last few weeks and they're planning to double spend on meta into into next next year and average spend per asset it's hard to retain average spend per asset as you grow creative volume.

42:55And therefore, it's just a bit overwhelming when you think about how many ads that are really required to get what we want from Meta and consistently drive that growth. And I guess that brings back into focus the role of AI in driving asset cost and volume as we move into 2026. and the greater role that we're seeing that play. And obviously we've seen Sora 2 drop since we last had a, probably seen about 15 different AI advancements drop over the last three months. It has, it's anxiety inducing in some ways. But yeah, obviously Sora landed frustratingly as always in the UK, we're miles behind. Even in the EU, I feel sorry for them because they're even further behind.

43:49but we've managed to get access through um josh who's who's built as a little um api platform to start to start playing with the platform but yeah what have your thoughts on on sora been since yeah having a play yeah you used it quite a bit this yesterday morning and it has not disappointed it is very very good for a few reasons that i've got noted down here speed it's fast it's a lot than VO3 probably twice as fast from comparing them anecdotally don't have data um it's cheaper as well it's probably like half the cost when you look at the amount of credits that you use through VO3 and compare it to the API usage it's a lot it's a lot cheaper to use in terms of the actual like content itself that is producing because here's your thoughts on this but as well but it feels like it's way better at producing UGC content um it's more like the the realism of it the speed of it how the camera pans um how it like layers different parts of the video together that for me has been quite a big big standout so far yeah I the thing that blows my mind about the app because because we're using the API key but there's obviously the app the consumer app that we haven't been fortunate to get access here in the UK but I've watched a lot of videos and you go on and you say three numbers and it instantly matches your voice and then you record a video of your face and it instantly can pick up your likeness and that is just crazy it's crazy it's so good at generating people and individuals and retaining quality um it's also really good at from an upper body shot getting proportions right which is based on like your face shape and you probably understand your shoulder width and like yeah it's just that percentage from like you you treat like you don't know how he does it but it's it's crazy it's just a massive leap forward in quality and speed and efficiency i guess you'd call it from a cost and turnaround time perspective yeah um i think that's key to making it like production ready as well to like mass adoption is speed and efficiency because to create a really good ad you've got to go through multiple rounds of revision and like output multiple variations to pick something good off and if each part of a video is costing you a lot of money that's going to soon add up and if it's slow to do that as well it's not going to get adoption quickly but it's i mean it's still early days in video gen ultimately it's just and the thing that's really difficult to kind of think about is like there's a vo 3.1 or vo 4 coming i imagine i would i would assume that's going to be even higher quality than Sora based on the quality of VO3 relative to the previous open AI models and the context that YouTube is to Google.

46:49And it's, I just, I feel like timelines are compressing on, on AI becoming a very large percentage of asset creation and production. And just the speed of, of, of output and development is, is rapidly increasing um so yeah i i assume that obviously we were making a lot of ads with vo3 not full creatives but they were playing a growing role in asset production i assume this is just going to drive another step change in that and vo 3.1 is going to drive another step change in that and i do think there's a world by the end of next year where probably over 50 of creative that we produce is some is heavily ai driven might even say sooner yeah maybe even sooner yeah i mean i think yeah i think the thing that's really standing out to me over the last since nano banana dropped and then sora is um i guess you'd call it remixing like taking something and putting it in a different environment or context which is basically what sora is doing when it gets your face it can then remix it into a completely different context it feels like that's the thing that's really advancing i think that's key because it removes ai slop just making things up based on what it's got access to across the internet to actual real things.

48:09And product placement is obviously a massive part of that, which is why I do think it's going to come around very quickly. Yeah. Interesting to see how that plays out. Obviously, we also had the update from OpenAI. We've had about 9 ,000 updates from OpenAI since we last did a solo episode. The big one for commerce is obviously the Shopify integration and the integration with Stripe to make checkout native to their platform, which I think is exciting in many ways because I think it's another channel of distribution for brands, which is a great thing. It allows you to meet your customers in a place that they're transacting and discovering products.

48:57And that point of discovery and point of transaction becomes seamless. It's all in one location. that's what open eye trying to do right just take over the internet yeah it's like redefining what the internet is right with the way um yeah yeah that yeah i guess generative engine optimization um and just the the ability to get like hyper personalized products within a chat interface is going to be really interesting to see um it's like right now nobody really thinks about boring stuff but like in your shopify metadata and really defining that down to the blend of fabric for example or the like fit on your collar so like not many people actually define that but when Shopify is sending this data to open AI that's exactly what it's going to pick up on because if there's anyone that knows you like you it's AI right now and it's going to be able to ingest that and serve your products that are just incredibly personalized.

49:53Yeah it's that feed optimization I think is going to be really important for that and doing it in natural language rather than optimizing for Google where you're like calling something that's blue a completely crazy midnight xyz color i think redefining or like setting like re-optimizing towards the way that people actually interact with it with with ai through natural language is going to be an interesting transition that brands need to go through i do think that that and sora like sora is sora 2's download rate that i think it could have probably eclipsed tiktok's growth if they hadn't rate limited it i dread to think how much power they're draining through with the amount of content that's being produced on that platform right now it's like um i think i was looking at i think it was they capped it really small much smaller i thought i think it was like 250 000 users on the first day invite only invite only which is nothing um yeah i would expect i i was bearish the other day when you said it could be bigger than tiktok but then after going deeper into it i'm like yeah it's probably it's got a chance yeah i think it'll if they hadn't rate limited downloads i think it would have had like gone bananas in those first days because i think it's driven by like humor and it's the first i was listening to another podcast where they said it's the first time ai has been peer-to-peer so like you can interact with mates on that channel you can send each other funny videos that then pulls someone else into the platform in the way that facebook did with tagging photos i think that was my first million i was listening to and that creates like compounding growth and exponentiality from a from a social app yeah um so i think when they remove the rate limiter i just think it's going to be crazy yeah it's also like they're doing so many they're diversifying across so many different things like they're doing App Store, they're doing this, they're doing Agent Builder.

51:51The commerce and Sora surely breeds an ad network next, right? It's got to. Everything becomes an ad platform eventually. Of course. Yeah, just imagine the sheer amount that they are learning, even from getting the third-party tools integrated into the chat interface, I forgot what they call now, toolkit or something, like Canva, Figma, learning how people use softwares that aren't their own they are now learning like how people use zapier canva it's like yeah what could they build off the back of that just literally taking over it's crazy um so yeah i think that there's an ad network coming i don't know what it'll look like but it'll be i slop yeah yeah i'm all for it though yeah i think it's it's really interesting it's exciting because with any new like method of distribution there's a massive arbitrage opportunity right um and it's just interesting to see how attention where attention goes um i think like if you're selling to people under the age of sort of 35 i think you have you you need to be really thinking and and engaging with these new methods of product discovery yeah because i think that's the demographic that are ultimately using these tools the most if you're selling to someone over the age of sort of 40 then i think meta some of these more traditional channels are still going to be um the core growth levers in the in the medium term but it's going to be interesting to see how that like split progresses over time yeah if you think the matter algorithm's good where you see the open ai i'll go when it knows way more about you than meta does it literally has been listening to you talk to it for the past 24 months about your deepest desires and your your biggest weaknesses it knows all of that now and it's going to use that to its advantage start producing product recommendations for you um we obviously went to the meta exec day and it was interesting to see their wearables um advancements and that's obviously open ai i've got johnny ive um in there producing their products it's interesting to see what that'll be but i think that wearables thing what really like interested me about their developments in wearables was like battery life and like the idea that if you wore those ray-bans enough the ai would then have so much more context on you like it's like you already tell it a lot but then it can listen and see like are they gonna are they porting that into the model i imagine they are like i would yeah yeah so it's just like how yeah crazy to think about that is the new ui right that's going to be the default ui in like 20 years is that the the idea of like meta's core premise is like the idea of a keyboard and a mouse and a big screen where you're stuck in one room and you can't connect with people is probably gone where it could be on your face outdoors you can connect with people but still like immerse yourself into the digital world i do love that idea and i do think it will um it'll start picking up some momentum it's like obviously the google uh glasses failed um too early because it was way too early whereas this people are really warming up to the idea of it now yeah that that that next like that next development in the way that we interface with the digital world which i think is really interesting and i'm sure it'll breed many opportunities but it's also kind of scary more anxiety um did you have any more um wanted to finish with some some like quick fire tactics yes um obviously we've been we've been heads down in preparation for black friday um experimenting a lot across our client base um wanted to to get some insights from yourself being being more in the weeds of like any any quick wins or things you've really seen drive performance for runs currently yes been pretty in the weeds over the last couple of weeks and um thoroughly enjoyed it and i've got a couple of things that I wanted to share with the audience.

56:06So first one is, so yeah, this is an interesting one. It's like more around the idea of horizontal scale as well as vertical. It's like something that we've invested a lot into is heavy vertical scale going like really deep into one campaign, super high budget, but not going as hard on horizontal scale. I'm seeing has come away from that now naturally because I think surface area is is becoming really important and I think with Andromeda the whole algorithm you you're putting yourself in a position where you can tap into different audience pools I think that's what horizontal scale allows you to do so what I'm seeing work really well right now is every creative sprint not only promoting that into your core environment but getting that into something with a manual bid constraint and do that on a weekly cycle.

56:59But if you time it just before the weekend, that weekend can be maximized because it's obviously when your estimated action rates are going to be through the roof. And we've been getting into the habit of doing that for a client and it's been working really, really well. And weekends are just compounding and compounding with performance. And that works really well if you do weekly or bi-weekly creative sprints. So that idea of surface area is really working well for us right now. And I think that's a great learning at this time of year going into Black Friday, Cyber Monday. that's number one i think that plays nicely into like we talked about how this redefinition of andromeda creative similarity should change your creative strategy but then it's how does that ladder down to your ad account so and we've seen that like um we've seen limitations when we've got a super consolidated structure at scale because we're not getting that that diversity delivery so it's like breaking out by persona breaking out ascs by persona is like once you've got that creative process working that's can be it can be a big win right which is what you're saying yeah yeah for sure and another one that kind of leans into andromeda where this time last year it wasn't as big of a thing same with maybe start of this year if you're on the older campaign setups before asc i think it's a really good idea to take some of your previous winners and put them into a bid cap with the new asc algorithm just done that last week and yeah it's doing it um so that's a very in the weeds tactic to do now um mentioned partnership ads with native native instagram story statics literally looks organic do that if you're not already um another one might be a hot take but it'd be good to get your thoughts on this not turning ads off in non-testing campaigns I there's obviously uh caveats to that I the last time I turned an ad off in a campaign that was a scaling campaign was probably last month early last month over over like 30 days ago and that's because like I was saying earlier if you if you're getting into that mass diversity in an ad account and you've got a campaign with tons of really high performing assets you can trust in meta to allocate spend in the best possible places at a given time and you'll see over time it kind of trends back and forth between different assets i think that's more relative to like uh demand maybe persona demand things like that um but that's an interesting one that i've seen working well and i guess it's just trusting in in meta and something i've always believed in is just like it's just so much smarter than you it knows exactly what to do just give it the right context yeah i also think that plays into like that idea of the long tail becoming more effective so if you've got all if you've proven those assets work you put them in the scaling campaign but maybe they are getting that out something else is outperforming them at that moment that may not hold forever that may exhaust that that make that asset may get exhausted by across that audience and you you want that um security of other assets to kind of pick up that that burden but you'd also hypothesis would be like as andromeda gets better the whole average like the the long tail of those ads should just automatically spend more and you're able to spend more across that campaign holistically yeah it's almost like a cascading sort of thing yeah every week it just trickle down effect yeah yeah exactly um and then i am finding it's taking for brand new campaigns and ad sets i'm finding it's taking meta a little bit longer to learn versus what it was six months ago which is interesting don't have a hypothesis yet but the thing that i'm work i'm seeing do well right now is even more consolidation on an ad set creative testing level and just letting them sit for at least a week not getting too impatient there and the reason why you consolidate with that is because you reduce the chances of your ad spend going into more inefficient ads whereas consolidated more ads to work with more places that you can they can spend through the high performing um and then past that point is when you enter that like optimization window where then it's like going down the horizontal and vertical scaling route um if you time it well you can obviously maximize the weekend so see it all as like a really nice system working together if you're in that sprint cycle promotion cycle and you you do that week in week out and it will compound over time so yeah there's my there's my tactics of the week nice and i think um it just just made me think about this but i think another thing that we've seen over the last sort of three months across our business and we've been doing a lot of work on on it operationally and from a quality perspective but i think high production just continues to to grow as a percentage of spend so if i could give one piece of advice to brands watching if they're maybe you've tested high production before and it's not worked or maybe you're just doing ugc and statics i would encourage you to vote to find a way to build that into your creative production workflow either ahead of black friday maybe that's too late now but certainly ahead of going into into next year because it's our fastest growing asset format as a percentage of ad account spend and I think it over-indexes a lot similarly to like problem aware and unaware ads it over-indexes in driving significant change in incremental reach in accounts yeah I would even say if high production hasn't worked for you it's not because of high production it's because it was probably a port you didn't go through the process of understanding the persona and the angle and wrapped it in a really strong script that's why it didn't work it's not because high production doesn't work so 100 % agree it's stripped into execution for sure and I think Lucas will be coming back in next week to really dive deep into some of the like nitty gritty creative tactics that we've been experimenting with over the last couple of months to drive some of those unlocks in accounts do you have anything you wanted to touch on before we wrap up?

1:03:04I don't think so I think we're good I think that was a wrap perfect, well yeah, thank you all for listening thank you for coming on Sam again I'm sure you'll be back very soon and yeah if you've stuck around till the end please as always drop us a like drop us a subscribe we've got a couple of big guests coming up through the remainder of Q4 and many more tactical episodes that you can take and hopefully implement into your ad account ahead of 2026 so thanks for listening