Ep 633: Why Your Winning Meta Ad Dies in 8 Days, and What to Test Instead

0:00Nate Vankoughnet:Before we jump into today's all killer, no filler episode, a quick word about who makes this show possible. The D2C podcast is brought to you by Pilothouse, the performance agency behind some of the fastest growing D2C brands in the world. Creative, media and customer journey all under one roof. Performance and brand without the tradeoff. Every Friday, we hand the mic to a Pilothouse operator to break down what's actually working in their space right now. Want a team that treats your growth like their own? That's Pilothouse. Head to Pilothouse.co and now on with the show.

0:30Liam Robinson:It used to be so tactical, just the way you were media buying, some of the meta tactics you were using could go a really, really long way in how you scaled meta. Now, it's almost moved back a step to foundational marketing. To succeed on meta, there's this like hierarchy of needs. The foundation of success on meta, it's like a unit economics question. Is there actually enough margin to sustain a reasonable CPA on meta if you want to win? We were working with this brand. They basically make ceramic to-go cups. The thing that fundamentally unlocked their success on Meta was...

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2:03Nate Vankoughnet:And I'm Eric. And it's been such a long time since I've had the boys, Nate and Liam on the D2C podcast. Got an exciting bit of news today, as I think most people know in the audience, I hope they know that D2C is a project of myself and Pilot House. And it's actually an entrepreneurial project where I kind of partnered up with Pilot House back in March of 2020 and started making some content with them with the idea that when it became something, we started making our own money, we'd spin it out into its own company. And it's kind of a unique opportunity that we have here at the Pilothouse ecosystem.

2:36Nate Vankoughnet:And it's the exact kind of thing has happened with both Nate and Liam here, who have long been some of Pilothouse's top operators on the socials, on the meta side, and more recently on just the broader marketing side. And now you guys have the opportunity to spin out a company in partnership with Pilot House and you're here to tell us about it.

2:56Liam Robinson:Yeah, it's been it's been a fun 2026. We've we're back in the in the agency game here. I think like more importantly to we're back with early stage brands on the on the e-com side. And obviously, like 2019, when Pilot House started, that's most of what we were doing. And then progressively you get bigger. And now it's household DTC. And now Nate and I are back in the driver's seat working with, you know, basically going from step zero to one and right back to those early stages. So yeah, it's been super fun. I don't want to get too, I don't want to be salesy

3:32Nate Vankoughnet:early in the interview, but it's just a cool opportunity. You guys were working on some of our highest scale accounts over the years. I know from right back since the first couple years, you guys have been such a huge part of so many brands getting so big that it's a pretty cool opportunity for brands that are on the smaller side to get to work with people that have been to those high heights. So who can give me the Marl Bank? First of all, it's called Marl Bank. I don't even think we've said that yet. It's called Marl Bank. So who could give me the hero's journey for Marl Bank?

4:00Liam Robinson:Funny enough, the name comes from a project that Liam and I were working on with my brother a couple years ago. It was a hunting company. We made hang-on tree stands for people who bow hunt primarily. So this was kind of a little bit outside of the Pilothouse realm, kind of in partnership with Pilothouse. We were building that hunting brand with my brother. Pretty niche. Super niche. It was a made in Canada product. We were getting aluminum cut in Ontario. Liam and I flew out to Ontario. We were hand building all of the product, hand painting it, assembling it, doing all the drill holes in the aluminum, all that kind of stuff.

4:35Liam Robinson:So we had kind of a summer of grueling labor and where my brother lives in Ontario is a small town called Marlbank. And so we, when we spun out this new agency, we kind of wanted to pay homage to that little town that we built that brand in. So that's where the name comes from. Kind of random. Most people won't understand what it is or why we called it that. But funny little backstory there.

5:03Nate Vankoughnet:homage to to grueling labor yeah that i was just what you want the top media buyers from your company doing going off to start building metal work uh with your bare hands but it's led into this really cool opportunity and maybe just a quick note on why this opportunity has come up i think it's an interesting one and it relates to d2c as well right where with d2c we for the longest time we've been this great inbound lead source for pilot house but what we found over the years after like the meteoric rise of 2021 and 2022, we found that I think because our content, you know, appeals to the full range of DTC founders, there were a lot of beginning and smaller DTC brands who were both listening to the podcast and reading the newsletter.

5:47Nate Vankoughnet:And so it ended up, we ended up sort of, Pilot House ended up tailoring some of its services to smaller and smaller clients. I remember we had the launch pad and different things like that. And now Pilot House, we've really made a conscious decision to move up market. So we've kind of tailored our content in that little way, but that left this real opportunity to work with some of the most exciting up and coming brands, which I know with both of you guys, that's been your sweet spot is being able to take brands that are in that small space and really scale them up, up rapidly. So what a cool opportunity.

6:18Liam Robinson:Exactly. Yeah. And I think the, so taking it back a little bit, pre building that brand in Marlbank, Liam and I had built something called, along with a couple other guys at Pilot House had built something called Launchpad, like you, like you just mentioned inside of Pilot House. And so that was a program we had built on the social media side. So mainly meta, some TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, the other social platforms, but primarily meta. It was a program built to help, like you just said, the super early stage brands going from kind of zero to one, one to two that can't really afford to go and pay a big agency to do a bunch of brand work.

6:53Liam Robinson:So we built that program to help those brands get from stage zero to one, one to two, two to three, to a place where they could become full service clients for Pilot House. That did really, really well in its first year. But because of what you just talked about, Pilot House has now made some strategic decisions to move upmarket and really focus primarily on those later stage brands because they've now built out this big strategy wing of the business and they've got the full omni-channel services. and so much goes into that that they really just want to stay hyper-focused on being the best at growing those you know late stage brands and so yeah like you said it created an opportunity for us after the sunset or the launchpad program was sunset to spin out and create another agency obviously called moral bank digital that really specializes in those those early stage brands and like you said it's where liam and i cut our teeth the earliest days of pilot house you know we were the first couple employees and all we were getting obviously was earlier stage brands brands that took a shot with a couple of guys that were pretty new to the space.

7:53Liam Robinson:And that's kind of the stuff that we were really passionate about back in the day. And so it's really fun to be able to now build a company that's super focused on that stage of growth.

8:02Nate Vankoughnet:Has much changed between, I'm thinking back to just some of the crazy stories you guys had of taking these smaller brands and blowing them up to really high heights. I'm curious when it comes to early stages brands now versus, I don't know, three, four years ago, has very much changed in how you guys think and approach how you scale?

8:21Liam Robinson:I'll let Liam take the bulk of this. But I think from the highest level, just zooming out, I think the biggest thing is it used to be so tactical, like you could just be super tactical and make a huge difference for some of these brands, just the way you were media buying some of the meta tactics you were using, could go a really, really long way in how you scaled meta. Now, it has become so automated, there's a lot of AI integration into the platform, obviously, it's become not that there's not tactics that are important. There are tactics that are really important, but it's almost moved back a step to foundational marketing and just actually doing good marketing.

8:56Liam Robinson:And so we take a little bit of a different approach now with the brands we're working with. I'll let Liam touch on that. Yeah. I've heard other people on the podcast say this. I think maybe Raph mentioned this in his pod a couple of weeks ago where it really feels like traditional marketing, almost like Mad Men style marketing is back. Maybe it's especially the case post-Andromeda and I think that's only brought it more in this direction but if we're talking like three or four years ago just like Nate said it's like there's a lot of tactical wins to be had and things like choosing the right interest audiences and there's very like manual oversight in terms of like where meta deployed spend versus now it's just like so consolidated and algorithmic and really the way that you target someone is the sentiment of the ads that you're building in the first place, right?

9:51Liam Robinson:If you want to target golfers, then you need to lead with a hook that speaks to a golfer and the creative is on the golf course and it's no longer going into pre-built audiences and selecting people who have interests in golf clubs and golf courses, right? I was trying to think about a good way of explaining this because we get these questions all the time with meeting new clients and partners. And, you know, you might appreciate this analogy where I like to think about it, where there's like to succeed on meta, there's less like hierarchy of needs basically. And the foundation of success on meta, and this part might be more obvious, but it's, it's, it's like a unit economics question where it's literally, does your product or service have enough gross margin to sustain a reasonable meta CPA.

10:43Liam Robinson:Right. And again, like seems obvious, but you'd be surprised how many times we come across people who need a three and a half ROAS to barely break even. And that product might not have future cash flows baked into it. And, you know, those are just really difficult situations to make work and especially difficult to scale. And so there really is like a foundational level question around like, is there actually enough margin to sustain a reasonable CPA on meta if you want to win? And the middle part of the hierarchy is like the marketing strategy piece. And I think this is really where MarlBank wins and like what we're really good at.

11:25Liam Robinson:what basically I would say most people miss, it is the question of product market fit. Who are you as a brand? What do you stand for? Who do you serve within your space, right? And I think that a lot of people will do the thing where basically, you know, you're making a business plan, you sort of define those characteristics about who you are and who you serve. And then you jump to the top of this hierarchy, this pyramid, which is creative strategy. And all of a sudden, all the work that you're doing, and it sort of manifests on meta is iterative, tactical, creative tests where you're asking yourself, you know, does this hook work better than this hook?

12:08Liam Robinson:Is it static versus like video or a red versus blue, et cetera. And you can spend a shit ton of money and a lot of time in that mode where you've had this sort of naive sense of conviction around those product market fit circumstances and you just jump too creative too soon. And really, like the question you asked, like what's different and how do you win? I think it's specifically showing up to Meta with an openness to being able to pivot or being wrong about some of those ideas you maybe had about like exactly who you serve and how you serve them and structure your campaigns to actually go out and answer those questions.

12:53Liam Robinson:It's really a matter of like, what are the variables that you're really choosing to test out, right?

12:58Nate Vankoughnet:And to, as Nate says, have a higher resolution or like a broader focus on it. It makes me think of the amount of podcasts we did on the pilot test, right? Where you're sort of testing individual aspects of your ad and trying to forge. And I'm sure there's elements where you're doing that, but it is about moving less into like the button colors, the this, the that. It's more into like the psychological things that are behind why your customer's buying.

13:23Liam Robinson:Oh, 100%. 100%. I can give you like a really quick example that's recent. We were working with this brand. I won't like name drop any brands because we haven't gotten permission yet and it's all early, but they basically make ceramic to-go cups. So obviously it's sort of novel. Most to-go cups are metal or plastic and their ads when we started working with them were really two-fold basically. They had ads that were focused on the visual of the cups. So they're very pretty cups and they look great. And they also had ads that were centered around this sort of like eco angle and wanting to reduce the amount of single-use cups that are going into landfills which obviously is like an important initiative the thing that we sort of realized was the it was sort of like a too much of an uphill battle to speak to this like eco angle and the solution of like someone who habitually uses single-use cups is going to switch all the way to this more like luxury priced high-end to-go cup and we basically made this campaign that was more like we basically pivoted and did a couple different angle tests but the thing that like fundamentally unlocked their success on meta was pivoting from talking to people who are using single-use cups and going all in on people who already use to-go cups and it became more of like a metal upgrade than it was like a switch from single use to the ceramic option so you don't feel bad about yourself you know what i mean yeah that's a tough ask totally and so the the campaign in that case was um would you use a metal mug at home and we've had this really cool thing where it's sort of we're able to niche down even as far as to go like we really had a lot of ads that worked where we were focusing on people's commute so it's like you you get to actually have this ceramic mug sort of like a taste of home almost right but it's it's now part of your commute you have to compromise.

15:29Liam Robinson:A lot of like metal to go cups have that like metallic aftertaste and stuff versus, you know, like it's just like we use this saying where it's like finding the path of least resistance to fitting into someone's life, right? Like that is really what we're talking about at this marketing strategy layer. It's when you win with these types of tests, they're like a very scalable wins compared to creative seems to be working and, you know, let's scale it this week and it'll be fatigued in eight days from now.

15:58Nate Vankoughnet:You know what I mean? You guys have a term in your notes here called circumstance testing, which seems like an evolution of what we would call angle testing. Because it's like angle testing is sort of like your marketing on a static thing. How does your angle work? But circumstance testing takes into account the avatar, the moment they're in, all of those other elements we're talking about. Am I right about that's what you mean about circumstance testing?

16:21Liam Robinson:Yeah. And one important note is that this doesn't take away from the rest of it. The other things exist deeper inside of the circumstance testing, the persona testing, the higher level stuff that Liam's talking about. So it's once you understand those things by using meta, you can then go and test angles that speak to those people about those circumstances. And then you can go and do your iterative creative testing to get a little bit deeper into that. But what we've adjusted is the start line and the finish line, instead of going straight into creative testing, straight into the tactics. It's starting with the higher level questions, learning a bunch about our customer, and then getting a little bit deeper in angle and creative testing.

17:00Liam Robinson:Yeah, maybe like a good way of putting it too is, I know Pilot House has talked a lot about distinction and relevance. That's like a really important way that brands win. You either have a distinct product and you might even have a distinct product that is also relevant in the place that you're selling. And I think the way that we see circumstance, it's a very subtle nuance compared to saying things like personas or angles, but it's really understanding what is actually distinct about the product that you were selling, right? Like, is it a proprietary technology thing? Is it a like a brand style or personality thing?

17:40Liam Robinson:Do you have like unique features that other people don't? It's then asking yourself, given those potential distinctions, are there cultural trends or currents that your distinctions might be relevant for? And if you can understand those things really well, you'll then find yourself asking, okay, well, given my distinctions, given how they might be relevant in this community I'm participating in, how might that specifically, and even in niche ways, fit into someone's life in a really like frictionless way. So the ceramics example I gave was the commute, where it was this like, wow, like people really when they're looking at this product through the lens of this like upgrade to their commute it was like a really easy sell compared to all the way at the beginning which was trying to sell people going to coffee shops to like bring this cup with them and they're not you know not even to-go cup users in the first place so it can seem niche right but it's really like owning that sometimes very specific way that you actually fit into someone's lifestyle is what circumstance means to us.

18:46Nate Vankoughnet:This is great you mentioned the raft too, because this is like a continuation on that conversation of what it actually means for creative to be your targeting. You know what I mean? So we're just talking about going further down the funnel with a kind of person and then reflecting that in the creative. And that's where you make the sale. 100%.

19:04Liam Robinson:Yeah, because it's like sometimes brands will find this information, like these things that ultimately work for their products, but they'll do it the other way. Like they'll spray and pray first and they'll find that like an ad worked. And then maybe through deduction or like reverse engineering, they'll go, oh, wow, like we're actually really, we actually really win with golfers in the Pacific Northwest or something. You know what I mean? And it's, it's, they didn't, they never intended to find that winning circumstance. They just tried a bunch of stuff and something stuck and they were able to kind of figure it out afterwards.

19:38Liam Robinson:It's more just, that's an expensive way to get there. And sometimes you just never end up getting there versus the sort of methodical asking the right questions and really using meta as a testing environment to ask those questions and create signal around them. And again, like just like you said, we aren't imposing demographic instructions on meta. This is is really like a it's the creative. It's the copy in the headline. Like that's what makes one ad different versus versus the next one.

20:08Nate Vankoughnet:I wanted to ask, I was saying, I've talked with you guys over the years so much about the technical, tactical aspects of meta. How does, what does circumstance look, testing look like in a meta account?

20:19Liam Robinson:Yeah, that's a good question. So there's, I mean, it's, it's not like there's one right structure. It also depends on how much someone's spending. It's more like, I would like to think in most cases that circumstance could be like a campaign level control or an ad set level control. And then maybe within those groupings, you can layer in some other components. You could do the, you know, to stick with the ceramic example, right? Like you could speak to, okay, we're going to have conviction around speaking to people who already use to-go cups. So implicit in our messaging is you are a to-go cup user.

20:57Liam Robinson:But I might be really interested to say, okay, well, for someone who uses to-go cups, we might pick like three or four situations where one of them is they bring it with them to work. One of them is we're specifically talking about where they're actually making the coffee and it's still in their living room. We can talk about when they're cleaning their to-go cup. There's all of these different pieces in their life where this to-go cup sort of like finds itself. and sometimes you'd be surprised where like one of those particular interactions actually really resonates when they're viewing your product and so it's it's more um the the the variable is the circumstance right and how you choose to create those campaigns could be you know we could talk about all day right it's like is this advantage plus and we have four different advantage plus campaigns with different ads in it is a one campaign with four ad sets that's i don't think there's like a right or wrong way to do it it's more just adopting this mentality that we're testing at the circumstance level that really moves moves the needle very cool anything to add there nate um yeah i would just say that like the the way we're actually testing it structure wise is pretty similar to what we've talked about in the past i mean things are pretty consolidated now we're running to open audiences um the vast vast majority of the testing that we're going to be doing is at the very top of the funnel.

22:20Liam Robinson:So we're going to be excluding any of our existing audiences just so that we can make sure we're learning with people who have never heard of the brand before versus, you know, maybe mixing that into people who have already heard of the brand. And most of the time I would say we're doing CBO, single ad set, and we'll have multiple ads in it testing one of these circumstances. There are times if we're spending a lot more where maybe we'll break it out into 10 different ad sets and test a circumstance at the ad set level, different ads in each. Most of the time, we're using some level of control on the creative and the ad copy that we're using.

22:54Liam Robinson:We don't want them to be vastly different. Otherwise, they're going to impact results as well. So we'll use relatively similar creative or ad copy structures and then testing the variable of circumstance inside of the ad copy or the hook.

23:07Nate Vankoughnet:One thing I'm hearing and I'm experiencing in both our D2C lead gen account and our agency membership drive is to not really be turning ads off anymore. And to me, it makes sense. Like when you're creating ads that cover this like cornucopia of a user's circumstances, their emotions, their feelings, you want them all to reflect in different ways. And they might all be part of the conversion, even if they don't show up as actually driving the conversion. Is that accurate in your mind?

23:38Liam Robinson:I'm sure there's some level of that. definitely i i think there are absolutely cases where we'll still turn off ads there are times where facebook is still an algorithm and at times it's going to spend a ton of money on something that just doesn't work there are times where we're going to need to pause ads like that or ads that just aren't getting any spend at all but yeah the some of the ads that are maybe in the more mediocre stage where they're maybe driving some sales but don't look that great but they're part of the user journey they definitely are contributing to to other conversions as well especially in that middle and bottom of funnel top of funnel not so much i would just add like this is why the structure is important too right where it's so common these days where especially if you're running advantage plus where one ad will get all of the spend in one ad set right and if you're launching four five six ads in an ad set and all of those fall under one say circumstance in this this conversation a lot of the time you have to like that's where the intentionality comes in with how you're building ads in the first place where if it's an ad set budget campaign with four circumstances each ad set has a$25 a day budget it's really common where you'll see like in each of those four ad sets each of which might have five ads that all speak to its respective circumstance there's like one ad that takes 80 of the spend and all of it in each ad set and you're really testing like four different circumstances with four different ads if you just look at the distribution of spend so it's it's tough right like it's like knowing those things like knowing that that happens a lot with with meta these days like i think that's why it's generally better to try and not launch too many ads at one time and then that's i didn't keep it to that like four to six range because spend just like usually isn't distributed very evenly anymore

25:30Nate Vankoughnet:Walk me through who wants to work with you. Who is your ideal client to work with you at this stage? What stage do they need to be at? And then what does that look like from your end?