Ep 571: How Pilothouse Cut BFCM CPMs With Smarter Creative (2025 Recap)

0:00Abby:I think the biggest thing was just how much AI has shaped our job. It's actually crazy if you look back at like how AI was in 2024 versus how streamlined it is this year. People use the term like Andromeda, like it's this big scary thing, but it's really reshaped how we test creative and how we view creative. We call it like targeting with creative, where it's like the creative that you end up making is the product of all the strategist persona segmentation work. Your end product needs to actually resonate with people in a deep way.

0:39Before we dive in, let's take a minute to talk about what happened this BFCM because the numbers were massive and they reveal a lot about the state of e-commerce performance right now. Across the Triple Whale platform, brands processed more than 26 million orders and over$2.9 billion in revenue in just one weekend. Brands also spent more than$600 million across the major ad platforms. And Triple Whale brands alone represented nearly 20 % of all Shopify sales during BFCM, which is pretty incredible when you consider the scale. But here's the part that actually matters. The brands that performed best weren't reacting blindly.

1:13They had a clear understanding of what was driving results, which channels were truly profitable, how ROAS was trending throughout the weekend, how AOV shifted as promotions rolled out, and where they had the strongest opportunities to keep momentum high. That level of clarity only comes from having all your data in one place, updating in real time. Triple Whale is the agent-powered intelligence platform trusted by more than 50 ,000 brands like True Classic, Way, and Olipop. It unifies data across every channel and tool, giving you a single source of truth and actionable AI insights so you can make confident decisions faster.

1:48If you want that level of visibility heading into 2026, you can create a free account and see the platform for yourself. Visit triplewhale.com slash DTC. That's T-R-I-P-L-E-W-H-A-L-E dot com slash DTC. It's all killer, no filler. I'm Eric and I am here for another strategic Black Friday Cyber Monday recap with our head of e-commerce at Pilothouse, Grayson, as well as one of our lead strategists, Abby. Welcome to the All Killer No Filler Show. How were the vibes, just high level, how were the vibes this Black Friday Cyber Monday, Grayson? I feel like the sentiment going into Black Friday this year was very much, you know, there's some questions around it throughout the entire year.

2:33And I was also surprised at how well things did, just considering the state of things and all the tariff stuff this year and all that. But yeah, always tons of energy and it was great. Same from your side, Abby?

2:43Abby:Yeah, it was good. I think if anything, there was a lot more emphasis on the actual Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend in comparison to when brands started their sale a little bit earlier. I think buyers this year were just holding out just to see if discounts were bigger on actual Black Friday. So what surprised you most about the 2025 landscape? Who wants to jump in on that one? Just how important email and retention and what your baseline revenue was. I feel like the last couple of years previous, it was all about explosive growth, acquire new customers at all costs. it's pretty relatively speaking easy to get like funding and you know loans to take out for ad spend like all these things for for startups and like this was the first year really where it really really hit where it was like you know make or break and kind of all these like phony businesses really really got hit where it's like how many businesses and brands actually have reoccurring what we call like trigger or baseline revenue versus just paid revenue where you're spending on the same people every single month to get them to purchase again and how many are actually coming back because they like have an emotional connection with your brands and you've built that through like your retention channels and i think it was like the the year of which brands legitimately have those systems set up where they're self-sufficient not reliant on you know all this funding and and paid media yeah i was just talking with the amazon team they were just talking about how much of the success in Q4 on Amazon was determined in Q1 when it came to the year-long keyword strategy, the year-long bid strategy, all of these things.

4:19There's a lot of things you can do in the moment, but so much of it is a long haul. What about from your side, Abby? What were some of the most surprising things about the landscape for you?

4:28Abby:I think the biggest thing was just how much AI has really shaped our job. And it's actually crazy if you look back at like how AI was in 2024 versus how streamlined it is this year. It's shocking just how it's changed our day to day, but also how brands that come in through our sales funnel are asking, how do you use it? But not in a negative way anymore, in a positive way where like they want to be getting the most value from Pilot House, where they want to see what are our capabilities in using AI. And also with that, how can we spend more time on strategic thinking and less time on building spreadsheets and doing simple ad creative, for example.

5:06Give me some examples about the ways that you sort of feel you most effectively used AI this year.

5:11Abby:Oh, it's crazy. I'm very anti-AI when it comes to creator scripts or when it comes to headlines and things like that, because I do think there's room for original thought. But where I'm pro-AI is when I'm pulling like two years worth of ad spend data, net sales, order, new customer count, and just without having to do, like figure out trend patterns with formulas anymore you just click the gemini button and you're you say analyze the data and it just spits out the facts for you and you can just see out the gate like what those trends are so kind of a random answer i think no i love that answer because it's like i haven't checked in for a while like i've been using ai steadily the whole time for the podcast for summarizing it for the notes and things like that but the other day i just tried to take like our entire subscriber database and sort of the answers that have been given on our intake form and i remember previously when I was doing a podcast, I would have to upload it in like five chunks.

6:00I had to go to a special tool and upload the text to five chunks. But now I can put in this entire subscriber database thing and then pull out learnings from it in seconds. So it's just amazing how much it's evolved to be able to just the chat window and how good it was. You're saying Gemini, Abby, is that your weapon of choice mainly? Or do you have a bunch?

6:19Abby:No, I mostly use chat, I think. And then I'll build out like custom gpts for brands too so you can learn like you can feed it brand guidelines pdp information reviews do like a review analysis and things like that and it's less of a like i i hate ai slop but i love when it just makes pulling data simpler but on the creative side of things and when it comes to concepting i try to always take a stab at it myself yeah how about you grayson what were some of your AI use cases this holiday season? I think I'm one of the people who probably use AI the least out of this company, I think. I don't really use it that very often.

6:56I know how the teams are using it is all the ways that Abby said, transposing lots of data. We've actually been using it for media buying quite a bit, just from an efficiency standpoint, an accuracy standpoint like there's some help there but I don't use it that often honestly I don't even use it for like my meetings that much I just like taking notes the old-fashioned way uh I haven't really found anything that actually saves me time yeah note-taking that's that's like the that's I

7:27Abby:like that you're you're hardcore I do not use the note taker either that's where Grayson and I are similar I I'm anti-ai when it comes to creative ideation but I just love it for spreadsheets because I hate spreadsheets. So one of the other questions we have here is just about sort of bad habits or outdated playbooks. This is funny. This is a question I brought up with Nick Sharma when I was chatting with him. I was like, what was operative this year that wouldn't have flown three years ago? And the main thing that he pointed to was not having a strategist. And he was talking about how, whether you're working with an agency or whether you're internal at a brand, having that position where it's not just like run ads at something, and have it work that you really have to be thinking strategically about where everything's pointed to Grayson's point that your retention is all dialed so that you can take bigger swings and know that you'll make it up on retention.

8:20Anything other comments from you guys about the ways the market has shifted, what worked this season that we hadn't thought of in previous seasons? Maybe Abby, kick it off.

8:29Abby:Yeah. When I read that question, the first one that came to mind with me was the changes on meta. I feel like we're way more drastic than what we've seen with how we manage other platforms. And I feel like people use the term like Andromeda, like it's this big scary thing, but it's really reshaped how we test creative and how we view creative. I know I chatted on it last time I was on the podcast, but just like we really used to pride ourselves in creative velocity and quick iterations. But now your meta ad account will flag you for ad creative fatigue. And because of that, you'll see a decrease in performance if you have too much creative fatigue going on.

9:06Abby:So something that we've had to like, somewhere where we've had to pivot or rethink like how we view meta is in creative diversity, not just with quick iterations, but more so with net new creative concepts that are outside of the box and original thought. So it's harder work now, even though you have AI tools that can pump out 50 ads, you need like the heavy lifting of good creative that's net new and a high velocity. So you really do need like a stronger content engine. And then for us, I'd say like the last note on that is just when I started here at Pilot House, maybe three and a half years ago, we almost had a playbook going into Black Friday where we could roll out things like do a box shot, a meme, a repeat text, and guaranteed one is going to hit and you'll be able to scale this Q4.

9:52Abby:Now you have to have like your segments and your personas and you need to build concepts within them and make sure that you're absolutely resonating and with the right person that you're going to try and reach and have like a strong LTV with. If you don't do that hard work and you're speaking very broadly, then Meta won't be able to target your creative properly anymore. Because now with Acromeda, open targeting is strongly encouraged. And some of our best media buyers said that open targeting was just the way to go to help scale up Black Friday. But with open targeting, you have to trust the AI to go and find the right person.

10:25Abby:And if your creative and copy isn't speaking to the right person, your AI is going to be confused and do a bad job. So that's my take. Or if all your variations are just border colors or button colors or really slight tweaks, the system's going to view them all as the same and discount them, I guess, right? It will get mad at you because it will be like you're boring this funnel and you're showing everyone the same thing. And then it will penalize you with higher CPAs, allegedly. That's what I'm reading. The way we talk about it too is like targeting with creative, just building on what you're saying, Abby, like, we call it like targeting with creative where it's like the creative that you end up making is the product of all the strategist persona segmentation work.

11:07And it should be very clear within the creative, who you're targeting, and you should see the strategy through that creative. And if you don't, then, you know, your creative probably won't be like targeting the right people. And that's so crucial right now is like, your end product needs to actually resonate with people. in a deep way. I think that's why like the strategist is so important is the variation of all the ads, the other stuff that's like table stakes, and that's abundant now. But like thinking and intuition and experience is scarce. And so that's why a strategist is like so key for us is having the end product is creative that actually drives an emotional response.

11:45And so when someone buys something, you're actually creating a purchase that will stick around versus like, oh, they bought it because it was cheap or convenient. Like those aren't customers that actually add to your baseline or triggered revenue. Those are people that bought the cheapest thing in the moment and they'll probably buy the cheapest thing in the moment next time. So unless you want a discount and pay for them again, that's not really a customer that's building your brand.

12:05Abby:With one of my brands, it's a jewelry brand where we identified like one of our personas is a millennial mom. And typically like what I would have done two years ago is I would have taken a sticky note, I would have plopped it on like the box of the product and I would have put 30 % off and I would have ran that as a Black Friday ad and that would have scaled. This year, the way that creative spoke to that millennial mom a bit more clear is I asked the brand if they could take an iPhone photo of a Christmas card. And the Christmas card was two, we picked a mom name that was the most popular millennial mom name in the US.

12:41Abby:So first of all, there's like thought behind the name that we choose. And then the writing is from two kids that are talking about how thankful for her they are and chatting through like Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays. And then it ends with the two most popular kid names that that mom would have chosen, like one boy and one girl. And then we layered the necklace over top. We held it up in front of a Christmas tree, took an iPhone photo of that and put an overlay that said Black Friday sale 30 % off. That was one of our winning Black Friday ads. So you have to identify like who your persona is, how are you going to tug on their heartstrings and like sell them your brand and get them to convert?

13:19Abby:Because even though it was like a gift to that mom guaranteed that mom probably DMed it to the husband said, get this from the kids for me because I want this for Christmas. And we actually saw a lift in our post-purchase survey over the past month where friends and family as like, how did you hear about this brand started to increase? And I actually do think that's from like seeing post shares increase on meta from ads like that. It seems like this is the year where strategy and scrappy meet because it's still, you still have some of those, those attention grabbing, thumb stopping elements. And we're pivoting in the moment.

13:53Like I've been talking on the podcast, like watching the feed from, you know, our clients and all some of the funny ads that were being created for this prime millennial, like right millennial, prime millennials are 35 right now. So right in the, you know, that consumer's paradigm and just the way that humor was being used to connect directly to that person for these brands? Was humor something that you guys saw work well across the accounts?

14:17Abby:Yeah, actually. I have a lot of funny ads win this Black Friday, but they all differ in who you're speaking to, right? Another brand that I worked on, one of their top Black Friday ads was a Justin Bieber soundbite where he's like, it's not clocking to you. I'm standing on business. And that's not speaking to a millennial mom that's speaking to a Gen Z-er that understands that reference, finds it funny. I'm not saying that that's deep strategy work. That is just me knowing how to speak to someone a little bit younger because that is a quick trend that will probably die in a month. But there are those quick wins that you can do on top of that.

14:53Abby:And there's always room for humor, no matter what the brand is. And for cultural relevance. There are a lot of what I'm a Gen X and I know all about that quote. I know that that's a very 2025 quote. What I wanted to ask earlier was with all of this, with the new with the developments in Andromeda with this this the gem lattice going out there and picking the right ad for the right person do we end up seeing the same sort of distribution that we would have seen in previous years where it's still 10 % of the creatives driving 90 % of the value or is it more diversified because we're taking all these sort of diversified shots down field or does it still end up netting out to 90-10?

15:27Abby:It's diversified and that was probably one of the toughest sells with some of my brands going into Black Friday was being like no trust me we do need this much content. I know you spoke to Amy from Wildfang and she was talking about like, we've never seen a Black Friday with decreased CPMs and an increase in our click-through rate and actually just like paying for cheaper traffic because everyone says every year competition rises. But by going in with like an Andromeda mindset this year, we actually beat the algorithm. We were really proud of it where we were like, our CPMs dropped and our click costs dropped in the most expensive time of the year when we were looking year over year, when every year, historically, they do go a little bit higher.

16:09Abby:And that was because we had such steady spend across such creative diversity that also spoke to their group and was net new, but also played on winning elements that we had gathered from the year. So we knew what type of videos to do. We brought new ones to the table, did like a Black Friday exclusive drop, but it's crazy. You look at like their ads and there was one of them that was just a text wall and it was black, white, and red. But when we started talking about it and digesting the color and like the messaging on that creative and why we chose the font, the way we chose that font, it was just like from four different use cases of ruling things out and then mushing them all together into a winning Black Friday ad and it cranked for us.

16:51Abby:So, yeah, definitely saw like way more spread out spend this year. But with it, we saw improved results. Increased efficiency, I guess, right? With the idea that it's able to serve not based on segments and broad demographics, but finding the individual right person that each creative is speaking to. What about what I think it was like three years ago, like UGC is dead on podcasts. We like to be bombastic. What was the state of the use of UGC and partnership ads like in the in the meta environment this year? I think the way that like UGC is dead and that still is true is like just like everyone's like pretty aware, you know, at this point that it's like, yeah, everyone pays money to have people just talk about their thing, even if they don't really like it.

17:32So like that's where like the UGC and like the content planning goes into that persona work again, where if you're getting people who are already like embedded into the personas interests, it then becomes authentic. and so it's just that next level of thinking like instead like like cdc or ugc used to be like oh yeah just as long as we get a video of somebody saying they like this thing and going through the talking notes of like the top aspects of this item then it will sell type thing and we've checked our box for like having video content and now it's much more like again but yeah is this person like a known person who is tied to an interest in the millennial mom niche and they have an established kind of like trust or like they are part of the tribe or like group themselves.

18:21That's like recognizable. Like that's kind of the level you have to go now to create that authenticity. It's not just there for you naturally. So it's just a huge, huge part. There's just like kind of another layer of thought that goes into it to make that investment worthwhile and not make it not come off like, you know, it's like a infomercial type thing. As the head of e-commerce, Grace, and this wasn't on our question list, so I'm springing this on you, but I haven't talked about anyone with the sort of the state of post-click this year. Was there a lot of work going on behind the scenes post-click with various custom landing pages that speak to these specific avatars?

18:57Or what was the mindset post-click going? I'm sure it's different for every client, but give me some thoughts on the post-click world. Yeah, so much going into post-click. I think like two main things. One is like all the even post-purchase data that Abby was talking about that's like that like shapes our next steps as far as like getting customers feedback and insight into like okay we converted this person is this someone who's actually contributing to like the long-term health of the business like going that next step further there versus just like oh yeah our CPA was this our AOU was this but are they actually contributing to sales in that persona group and are we gaining market share in that segment like that was really huge and the other thing is like kind of the classic I think where you're probably going with the question which is just like how are we doing post click and aligning it with all the strategic work which is really huge for like bundling and like improving AOV like definitely like conversion rate was a huge issue this year just across the board where yeah people were waiting to see the best possible sale this year to the very last moment generally you know people are in an economic kind of state where they're not just spending willy-nilly they're spending on the brands they really care about and so obviously every you know inch we can get on conversion rate and one of the main ways was like how we were thinking about it was trying to get conversions really early in q4 and then when black friday came around getting people on like higher aob items like bundles so imagine like you know you were to buy a consumable product in september october kind of time frame and then we were setting up like custom funnels and campaigns both on yeah the triggered side and the paid side where we were then pushing people to because we were hitting people that were actually in the persona and they were converting for the right reasons not just because it was a sale then we were following up and using black variety as a way to like turn that person into a lifestyle consumer so it's like here's a bundle where it's like this now becomes like your day-to-day routine versus black bar is an opportunity for us to get a bunch of net new customers.

21:05So that was a huge thing this year too, is using Black Friday to improve our triggered and baseline revenue, not just new customer revenue. This is going to be our last all killer, no filler released of 2025. Are there any resolutions that you have professionally? We'll keep them professional. Any professional resolutions to things that you want to do more or focus, go deeper on, focus more on? Trust, intuition. Like, again i feel like so much of kind of the old way of doing things is just like testing a bunch of stuff because like hey we don't know what's going to work and we have the ability to just make a ton of creative and try it and i think that like trusting your intuition and what you think is actually going to resonate at a at a very human level in your creative and trying to put yourselves in the shoes of the persona that you're targeting and also showing going out and showing it to the people who are in that persona, right?

21:58And getting real people's feedback and getting the reaction and thinking like, oh, if I was that person, would I look at this and think that's really sweet? Like I want to be part of that community or not. So intuition around the human element is a resolution for next year.

22:12Abby:Mine would be like finding new ways to spark creativity where like we were just, I was just talking to our new EP of creative, that's its title, but But just trying to figure out how to put myself in different situations where I can come up with creative concepts outside of just the world that I already live in is something that I think is really challenging. And if you can just have that in your mind, at least, then, yeah, you could be more creative. AI is not going to replace humans. It's just going to free us up to do more human things, I think, is the idea. And I think you guys are giving great examples of the ways we can all be more human in terms of the world of advertising in 2026.

22:53Thanks a lot, guys. This was a unique perspective on this stuff. I would love to do, we'll have to set up another podcast in the future where we go a little deeper on PostClick. Were there any hero apps this year? Any apps that we were running on the e-com side of things that were absolutely game-changing or that made us a lot of additional revenue?

23:10Abby:We love Rebuy. I know we're a partner with Rebuy, but over the past year and a half, our agencies really understood how to gamify Rebuy and figure out how to get the most out of using it because it's also an expensive tool. I was pulling numbers for one of my brands and seeing just items per order increase where we had one brand go from one to two items and it was a 30 % increase year over year. Our AOV is up year over year and bundles are up year over year. One of the craziest stats was 40 % of purchases on one of my brand's websites doesn't even hit the PDP anymore because of smart search. So they just see it in the search bar, they add to cart and they convert.

23:50So we're now taking a whole extra page and a whole extra step out of the purchase path, which is making it easier and limiting people from abandoning the site.

23:59Abby:So Rebuy's done amazing things for the brands that I've been on. And we've got a lot of great case studies on Pilothouse too. And then this was our first year all committed and tied up with Triple Whale. How did that go? Triple Whale is great too. We're a partner now and I've just been using it for a long time anyways. And I really like that tool just for creative reporting. I think out of all of the attribution tools, Triple Whale has some of the strongest creative reporting and I see it getting stronger. So I feel like I'm talking about creative a lot on this podcast. It's great for other things too, but I feel like it's going to be really exciting having most of our brands on Triple Whale and being able to set up custom reports across all of them and be able to just quickly hop in, see top statics, videos, partnership videos, sort by angle, sort by DPAs, and then sort by what stage of the funnel they're in and just have that view for someone who's more creative and less technical to be able to report on will be really fun.