Ep 565: BFCM + Meta in 2025: Shorter Promo Windows and Scrappy Pivots That Crushed

0:00As always, Black Friday came out pretty strong. The brands that we saw the most success with this year, brands that were willing to pivot. What were some of the best or what was the best offer that you guys think you ran this year? The worst thing you can do is stack a bunch of offers during Black Friday and just confuse everyone when they're getting hit with thousands of ads a day. They just want a simple number, big percent off. Scrappy content did really well this year. Warehouse shots worked for a couple of brands, just shots of boxes with products in them. And then product packaging, like having a large quantity of products laid out on the floor.

0:40Creative variety really shined this year versus last year.

0:51It's all killer, no filler. I'm Eric. This is the DTC Podcast, and we are here today with Jacob and Jocelyn, who are leaders on our meta team. Just for a little Black Friday recap on the platform, hearing lots of different things. What are the top learnings about maybe why this year was different or exactly the same as previous years? Yeah. I mean, as always, Black Friday came out pretty strong. We actually saw a softer mid-November in general, like the earlier launches didn't seem to hit quite as well as they have in previous years. A lot of brands across the board were seeing the same, you know, it was, you know, obviously see that an improvement when you launch that early Black Friday, early access, but yeah, the actual jump wasn't quite as strong.

1:36But leading up to Black Friday, we saw really strong, like actual, you know, Black Friday, the actual day of across the board, you know, multiple brands up year over year. I'd say the majority of our brands were up year over year on the actual Black Friday, which is great to see. Buying intent was super high across the board, all channels, not just just meta, of course. But leading into the Saturday, Sunday after the Black Friday, it seemed to be quite a bit softer, honestly, across the board. And this is, again, comparing year over year. Last year, it was very, you know, kind of consistent, stretched across, you know, the back half of November this year, it was very isolated to Black Friday.

2:18And then when Cyber Monday came, again, really strong day. But it almost seemed like there was opportunities to preserve more budget for those two specific days and go a little bit softer on the Saturday, Sunday. People recovering from their big Thanksgiving, you know, parties, all these things, buying intent, whatever reason, it just wasn't there on the Saturday, Sunday as high. Of course, it was still very high, but yeah, those Friday, Mondays were quite strong. And I think that was kind of the general trend we saw. But yeah, over the years, we've seen a real creep on the length that people are launching their promotion.

2:55So it's interesting this year that it really was those sort of tentpole days that held their volume. Overall, would you say, I guess it's hard to tell, like for the brands that were positioned to do well, because that was something I saw because we've been sharing a lot of results on the Pilot House side. And I feel like there's a lot of brands that absolutely popped off and did really well. And then in areas where brands stayed flat or didn't, it really quite usually came down to an internal choice that those brands were making to not go super heavy. Maybe their inventory wasn't in the right spot.

3:26Would you agree with that, Jocelyn? Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree with that. the brands that we saw the most success with this year, it's, I would say fairly common to most years, but, um, this year in particular, uh, brands that were willing to pivot were the brands that were most successful. And what I mean by a willingness to pivot really comes down to your offer. People know what a good offer looks like. Um, if someone's been eyeing your website for four months and you've ran 25 % off consistently and that's what you're running for Black Friday, like they know it's not a great offer. So yeah, like a willingness to adjust your offer, whether it's increase the discount percentage, your shipping threshold, adding more urgency to the website.

4:15So countdown timers or stock accounts, that type of just additional urgency and adjustments more on the fly. That's where we saw more success as well as pivoting on the creative side. So really pushing the boundaries with creative range and being scrappy. That's, I would say, brands that were more willing to go outside of what they're typically comfortable with. That's where we saw the most success and growth. Can you give me an example, Jocelyn, of an offer kind of into Black Friday and then what was tweaked and what the results were? This week we had, we're in cyber week now. So one of our clients changed their offer on Monday and they brought their prices down even further.

5:03And with doing that, one of the bundles that they had on site, the positioning of it isn't as strong now because essentially you could buy a single SKU for the same price as what an individual item would be in the bundle, if that makes sense. So the bundle is less enticing. AOV is dropping. CVR is also shifting because we're headed out of the larger sales period. And then they also removed their free shipping threshold. So there's really no reason for someone to buy more than one SKU or one item. so they have changed their free shipping threshold back and also added an additional discount to the bundle to make it more enticing and that has helped performance so yeah that's one situation where being more willing to adjust even if we're not fully rebuilding their ad account and revamping all creative having that additional stronger offer post click can really leverage CVR.

6:06If someone clicks on an ad that says 45 % off and then they get to site and it's actually 50%, that increases your urgency to purchase and really gets people to check out. So yeah, that's one case where we saw more success with the willingness to adjust on the fly and change things more last minute. Yeah. Just, I mean, overall to Dawson's point, it did seem like across the board, there were a lot of fast sprints from both the brands, and us, you know, on our side to kind of react to what was happening live, you know, versus sort of committing to that, that plan you set back in September. And sure, the overlying plan is still in place, but those little tweaks on prices, oh, crap, like, let's bundle that with this.

6:51Because for some reason, during Black Friday, everyone's on that product page, you know, there's these, these things that we were doing through the weekend. And it made huge differences, like, Like, yeah, to the point of that's where our most success came from was those brands that were working with us on this flexibility or whatever. But yeah. Do you have one offer? I'm always interested in offers. Was there one offer that really – because you mentioned 25 % across the board, changing shipping thresholds. Was there one offer that you can think about this sale period that really stood out among the crowd?

7:26Because I think that's part of the problem as well. it's easy for your offer to get drowned out if you haven't really thought about it. What were some of the best or what was the best offer that you guys think you ran this year? Really basic, just a certain percentage off typically is what I saw working across the board. And then free shipping, if brands typically don't offer free shipping, having it for Black Friday. For people who have been to your site before and know that you typically charge for shipping, than having it for Black Friday. It did help conversion rate on a couple of the brands that I work with.

8:01And then another brand that we work with saw a lot of success with Bogo, but they run it for a limited time. I think it's a 24-hour period. And that does really well on email and in ads. So yeah, I think it really does come down to your brand and what consumers in that industry or segment are looking for. But just really basic percentage off. And then the BOGO offer did well from what I could see. Yeah, the worst thing you can do is stack a bunch of offers during Black Friday and just confuse everyone when they're getting hit with thousands of ads a day. They just want a simple number, big percent off, you know, it's preloaded.

8:43Yeah, exactly. Jocelyn, you mentioned something. I was really enjoying watching the winning ads that the company was creating for our clients. And I was really noticing a lot of Abe's ads. I feel like Abe's ads, she's just like, she's so good at like peak millennial and being like, she always talks about getting weird with it. All of her ads had an element of humor. There was a lot of like stick figured, you know, cartoons and things like this. Is that kind of what you mean about brands being more willing to be flexible with their brand guidelines? Yeah, those ads were really out there. Also, in addition to some of those stick figure ads, Scrappy content did really well this year.

9:22Warehouse shots worked for a couple of brands. Boxes, just shots of boxes with products in them. And then product packaging, like having a large quantity of products laid out on the floor. Just really basic UGC images did really well as well as CGC. So like for brands where CGC video content typically thrives, the same was true through Black Friday. We had iterations with Black Friday messaging and then leveraging some of the evergreen videos with Black Friday ad copy and headlines. That's another thing that we saw work really well. I heard an interesting stat the other day that the average millennial is now 35, which is a little depressing, maybe.

10:06But it's like, I think that that's like the prime consumer group. It probably has been for a while. But it's interesting to see the tactics to really speak to that community who has some purchasing power this time of year. And I thought it was a pretty interesting evolution of those sort of weirder creatives. Yeah. And with Andromeda and stuff on Meta, like a lot of that creative variety really shined this year versus last year. Like last year, it was more simple Black Friday iterations, bold red font with black. This year, it was just like everything. It was all out there. Like you said, and if you have this variety, the way Meta delivers now, you have all these buckets that are hitting different buckets of people.

10:48and you need to stand out like that's the main key so if you're you're stopping that scroll for an extra half a second your ads engagement score is going to be much better than you know all the standard polished ads from your competitors meta is going to deliver it at a much better cost it just stacks and stacks and then you just keep throwing that variety out there it's still aligned to your your target personas and everything of course but yeah that that really did shine to the point of how meta is actually changing their delivery system too you know variety is king now not not iterations it's varieties just to layer on to that i guess and and making people chuckle like if you could make someone crack a smile or chuckle ads don't do that almost ever but when they do it is a form of brand affinity that you're creating in that moment that you it's hard to do otherwise and anything on the platform anything like meta is always changing its platform anything from the technical side, account structure, new tools that really shone this year when it came to the meta platform, Jocelyn?

11:53I found the most success this year with using lighter exclusions. So typically we use max exclusions and exclude engagers through to past purchasers. But what I really have found success with across all of the accounts that I work with was only excluding past purchasers and then allowing meta to deliver between your cold top of funnel audiences and engagers and site visitors. And then we can use the audience segments breakdown within meta to really understand where we're delivering. For the most part, within the first two days of launching, the majority of spend ends up going to new audiences anyway.

12:38And then in addition to those more broad campaigns having segmented retargeting running as well, because we want to really increase retargeting through Black Friday. One thing that also typically works well that wasn't as strong this year is running one-day click campaigns and using day parting and lifetime budgets. That was a bit more hit and miss. I would say this year, one-day click worked for a couple of the accounts that I'm on, but where we haven't done as much attribution testing setting or seen as much success with one day click in evergreen periods, it didn't really thrive during the promo period.

13:20So we just kind of pivoted quickly and ran with the campaigns that had the most momentum and scaled them up. And then dayparting and lifetime budgets, same thing, really varied account to account. So I think it definitely is worth trying, but if it doesn't pick up right away than cutting it early and just running with your campaigns and scaling vertically where you have the most momentum within an account. Just for my clarity, when you're talking about day parting and lifetime budgets, these were just sort of, these are account structures that Meta maybe used to prioritize in their algorithm. If it sees a very high lifetime budget, it might give that campaign more love kind of thing.

13:59Explain to me the thought behind those choices. They're more horizontal for scaling as opposed to vertical. Generally, we want to really go vertical and funnel more budget into the campaigns that are working really well. Through Black Friday, though, we sometimes scale a bit more horizontally. So a lifetime budget campaign set up is just us setting an end date of Cyber Monday, for example, and then putting a 20K budget on one campaign through the weekend. The benefit of that is that Met is going to deliver it through that full weekend period where it will deliver when performance is expected to be the strongest.

14:42With doing that this year, we didn't see as much success. Same with the day parting. That would be more of a horizontal move with the goal of spending during specific hours that are stronger in Shopify. So the way that we would go about setting that up is going into Shopify and reviewing what hours of the day have been the strongest for the last 30 days and then setting your campaign up to only deliver during those hours. So for one brand that I work with, we were running ads between 10 and 2 and then 6 and 10 p.m. Then you're only spending when people are most likely to convert. that's also horizontal and it worked for a couple of brands that I work with but not all so yeah testing but then cutting pretty quickly you I would say like during Black Friday when intent is so high you know pretty quickly if something is going to scale or not so yeah launching those types of tests but being ready to either scale them out really quickly or cut them if they don't pan out as expected.

15:46Anything to add there, Jacob, on the platform side, any changes that you saw or tactics that either started working or stopped working? I mean, we saw some like flags that luckily, I mean, Jocelyn, you found a few where like account spend limits were like added to accounts like a week before Black Friday, like some stuff that could have been a big flag as well. So we fixed that, you know, reach out to the rep, whatever, got our account limit fixed. But other things like uh like when you're going build ads like there's just little bugs that you need to be like triple checking your facebook page name now like i don't know meta's been making changes to the the algorithm the platform and with that honestly there is the odd bug in there so a lot of that seemed to be like popping up during black friday and you know luckily we we have all these safe gaps and safeguards and stuff but it's just kind of interesting because apparently yeah people seeing that across the board as well.

16:42In terms of, yeah, new strategies, new tools on the platform with Black Friday, I think Jocelyn hit most of it on the head for sure. Definitely just echoing that we really came into this Black Friday with a nice fleshed out creative strategy for every client, right? Like aligned to their personas. Here's what we need for Friday. Here's what we need for Cyber Monday, you know? And then on top of that, we had to pivot all add all this other, oh crap, we just changed the offer and now we need more content. And that was very much the story of this Black Friday. And yeah, I definitely could see it pay off again on the actual Black Friday and Cyber Monday, really, really strong days.

17:21And yeah, it's just kind of interesting some of the changes that are happening. I'd guess next year, brands are going to start shortening up their sales again. I just think that's kind of what the numbers seem to be telling us, like preserve those high budgets for a slightly shorter period and really come into it strong with a lot of variety and it's all, you know, proven out stuff. But yeah, it'll be interesting, I think. Anything you think you want to take into next year from this year that you've gleaned, Jocelyn? Yeah, for next year, we'll of course have to see what platform changes come about, but definitely a really heavy focus on creative and less on the post-click side, I would say.

18:01For the aspect of split testing pages. We were way more creative focus this year, and I suspect that it'll be the same next year as well. I was going to ask about post-click. Talk to me about the post-click strategy that we kind of went into this period with. Every brand, of course, is different, but where we saw the most success is the landing pages that typically work. So two of the brands that I work with, the homepage always wins. And the same was true through Black Friday. We tested different collections pages and different PDPs, but homepage rose to the top for a couple of brands. And then for another brand where the collections page typically wins and we tested a pre-sale, the collections page won again through Black Friday.

18:50So yeah, pre-sales work for specific brands. Like where I see them working right now is for health and wellness, where there's a bit more explanation needed on a product. But for high intent sale periods, collections, or home, whatever typically works for your brand is what worked the best. But then we worked with clients to improve some of the features on their site. So where brands were willing to add a countdown timer and have it countdown for 24 hours and reset daily, that's where we saw more urgency. And then adding different badges to collections pages like limited stock, only 500 left, any additional like discount call-outs with a code.

19:38That's, I would say, actual site optimizations as opposed to pre-sell pages is where PostClick is really heading towards for meta ads, I would say. Did either of you buy anything? I know you guys are knee-deep in advertising during this time, but did you manage to make any purchases this year and what were they? I bought a like sketch pad for my three-year-old. One of those like black ones. They just draw on it. But no, not much, honestly. It was too in it on our end. It was too busy. But how about you, Jocelyn? I got shoes on Cyber Monday because they had an extra discount. Nice. But if it wasn't that extra discount, I probably wouldn't have bought them.

20:20I got some Fable Club glasses on, you know, whiskey glasses on the Monday and some steak knives from a different brand. And they both just had 30 % off. Don't think about it. Like it just made it really easy. I've been looking at both these things for a while. 30 % off was a good number. Easy, no thought decision to just to snap those up. So keep it simple, right? Yeah. Nice. Any emerging tools or anything this year, any software tools or platforms that we use to really raise incremental revenue for any of our clients? Yeah, I mean, tons. We're exploring tons of tools. Obviously, there's all these AI management tools popping up, which we've been exploring.

21:01A lot of that's more on the efficiency side, though, versus the quality of it. So it's getting there for sure. But there's also all these other channels where we're exploring like AppLovin, Axon, mobile ads. And we've started to have really good hit rates with our clients starting to expand onto AppLovin. Like I'd say the majority of them are seeing some success. It has a pretty, pretty high overlap with like meta audiences. Typically, if you have a strong meta campaign with strong ads that are working, it might translate over. so I imagine we'll hear more about Axon in the coming year seems like it's it's emerging quite quickly but yeah that'd be the the main ones on top of my mind right now nice any from your side Jocelyn Apple 11 yeah definitely has worked for a few brands and Pinterest as well which is consistent with what I've been reading from a couple of other sources but yeah Pinterest took off for a couple of brands.

22:01Definitely still lower scale, but a supporting channel for those targeting, I would say women, 35 plus. It's a channel to definitely explore. And we'll do another podcast on AppLovin and Axon. This is actually the first I've heard is Axon, the self-service ad platform on AppLovin. What is Axon to AppLovin? AppLovin is just like the umbrella company now. And yeah, it used to be basically Axon is what people used to refer to AppLovin. So yeah, it's the ad management side of things and AppLovin. Well, we'll dive in deeper on that in the coming weeks. Last question, for the brands that really crushed it, like what is your mindset now in the post Cyber Monday period?

22:45Is it a last strong sprint to Christmas for people doing last minute gifts? What's the mindset for the brands that really crush Black Friday, post-Black Friday? A lot of them are now kind of adjusting their New Year's projections and stuff, right? Based on how Black Friday went. So the plan in place right now was set a couple of weeks ago where that transition from Black Friday to holiday sale, you still want some type of offer going. Otherwise, people are still buying gifts and everything. So it's all holiday focused, holiday sale, save, get it before Christmas. And then you hit kind of the Christmas shipping cutoff and then you hit, you know, post Christmas really from then there, it's, it's just starting to act on your 2026 planning goals.

23:30But a lot of clients are pivoting those now because, Oh, you know, we just tripled our sales in November. We were expecting to double them. Now we got to adjust our January projections. We need, we need more rev, right? So it is tailing a lot of that momentum. You don't want to lose the momentum right now, especially while it's still a high holiday sale period and it's just continuing to build and push as much as possible and then yeah hopefully january you're coming out with a strong strong plan strategy all right thanks guys we'll catch up again soon yeah thanks eric

24:08thanks for listening to today's episode if you're not getting the d2c newsletter you can subscribe for free at direct to consumer.co and if you want to learn more about pilot house's all killer no filler services, take off to pilothouse.co. I'm Eric Dick, and this has been the DTC Podcast. We'll see you next time.