The Future of Ads According to Meta (Straight from the Summit)

Tony Chopp: [00:00:00] The best way for me to describe what I, what I believe is happening in the work of performance marketers those of us at CTC is less button pushing overall and more strategy which is a really, really fun place to be.

Richard Gaffin: Hey folks. Welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective. And I'm joined this week as I've been joined a couple times over the last couple of weeks by our VP of Paid Media. Mr. Tony Chopp, the chopper himself.

Tony, what's going on, man?

Tony Chopp: Good morning, Richard. Doing well. Nice to see you again.

Richard Gaffin: Oh, likewise. Of course. It's always good to see you, Tony. So what we wanna talk about today is a trip you were on recently, not to Costa Rica, where you just came back from where you were surfing. But beginning of this month, I believe you took a trip up to the Meta Performance Summit. I. To get a sense of kind of what changes are coming in meta, what's being rolled out, what's down the pipeline, and kind of importantly what meta seems to think is important as it [00:01:00] develops its product over the next year or so.

So, what we wanted to do is give you kind of an on the ground report from Tony. On what went down at the Meta Performance Summit and specifically kind of what some of the big takeaways were. So Tony, I'll turn it right over to you. Talk to us a little bit about the performance Summit and, and jump into some of your talking points.

Tony Chopp: Yeah, sure. So, yeah, it was earlier this month, I believe it was the sixth meta hosted their. Fifth annual performance Marketing Summit, which is their opportunity to, to talk about the, the direction of the platform. What, what they see as important, what they see, what, what they're seeing working. And it's a really exciting opportunity for, for me and for CTC to be able to understand. I think that the direction of the platform is really important because it, it helps us understand the best ways for us to build our tools and our systems to be as, as aligned as possible to produce the best outcome. And I think a, a lot of what. [00:02:00] of what was covered in the summit was not necessarily, it didn't feel like groundbreaking or transformational in, in the sense that these are a lot of things that we've been talking about here at CTC for the better part of, a year or year and a half. The, the introduction of ai. The importance of creative. So, lots of things that, that are doubling down. Ca were, were coming outta the performance summit, but there are, there were some really interesting takeaways that I think will be fun to, to tease out a little bit more and talk about how they relate to CTCs tools like, like STAs and some of the newer stuff that we're building.

Richard Gaffin: Cool. All right. Well, so let's, then, let's start teasing some of those out. So maybe we could start with like, what was the most surprising of the things that you learned?

Tony Chopp: Yeah, so I think the most surprising thing that I heard was maybe said another [00:03:00] way, how many times I heard the word incrementality from the, the folks on stage. And so this, this represents a, a really big shift for, for the media platforms meta. And, and it's, it's interesting to note that I was at the Google marketing Live summit several weeks before, which is the similar thing for the Google Ads platform. was a very similar, similar trend over there as well. And what this is. What this is telling me or showing me is the media platforms are interested in, measurement

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: is more aligned with the way that we think about measurement. In said another way, like actual business impact as opposed to. Sometimes I've been critical of the, the media platforms reporting over the years because I, I think [00:04:00] the best way to say it is they're, they're sort of grading their own homework

Richard Gaffin: Right.

Tony Chopp: on conversion value. So I, I think that that's really surprising and, and it, it actually connects to one of the, one of the real big takeaways from the summit, which is, you know, ai becoming less of a. Black box and becoming more and more customizable. And by customizable I mean opportunity for us to send more signal into the platforms, and then allow the optimization and the targeting mechanisms to, to do to, to work with that signal. So. kind of like a move from, know, a SC for everybody to AI systems that we can tune with profit signals or with LTV signals, or with meta's new incremental attribution setting with true incrementality [00:05:00] in all of this.

Leading to, you know, what I, what I think is. The best way for me to describe what I, what I believe is happening in the work of performance marketers those of us at CTC is less button pushing overall and more strategy which is a really, really fun place to be.

Richard Gaffin: Yeah. So you mentioned a little bit about the, the flexibility maybe of the tools, like, so is what you're describing that there's gonna be increased customizability in terms of like what you have the algorithm going after for you. You mentioned LTV, you mentioned profitability. Yeah. What, what's, what'd you learn along those lines?

Tony Chopp: Yeah. Yeah, I think, I think that's, that's the right way to say it. Increased. Articulation

Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

Tony Chopp: good word to use. So I think bid bidding for profit is a really good example of how as a, as a business, we can send a [00:06:00] signal into meta about profit at the skew level, and then let the optimization engines work with that signal. for many of our clients some of our clients have a small set of skews and their, their margins are pretty similar across that set of sku and it's not as relevant in that case.

But, but for many of our clients with, especially with large SKU portfolios or, you know, even with small ski portfolios, really big differences in margins between product, that that information is, is really critical for us to be able to. Give the algorithm, give the optimization engines the information needed to help us produce the outcome that we're seeking.

And keep in mind, this, this whole game is at the end of the day, it's really simple. We put money in, we wanna get money out,

Richard Gaffin: Yep.

Tony Chopp: a k, a profit or contribution margin. In, in defining, [00:07:00] just, just ROAS is some, in some cases an an incomplete. And, and we've done all sorts of things over the years to try to account for that. When we think about setting cost caps against an A OV or against a margin of a product and, and at points in the past, it's, it's created, it's created a lot of complexity, a lot of manual setup work for

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: You know, think about like, think about if you're using a, a cost cap bidding and you have, I don't know, 10 SKUs and some of them are 20% margin and some of 'em are 60% margin, well, well, effectively you would need different campaigns or at least ad

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: to be able to set the bids differently in, in that scenario.

So yeah, I think. This idea of like customizing the, the input signal connects to a general theme of consolidating our campaigns as much as possible, and a, general theme of [00:08:00] providing the best possible signal so that we can reach the, the best possible out outcome.

Richard Gaffin: Right. I, I think it's interesting. Sorry, the, the point you're just making around like. A lot of our so-called CTC approach to media buying or whatever has basically been a series of workarounds to make up for the fact that the platform just doesn't provide the tools that we need to get the results or to, to measure the results that we wanna measure or to optimize towards them or whatever.

And I think part of what we're saying here is that like meta is finally moving the product in the direction where some of those sort of tricks aren't needed anymore, so to speak. Does that sound accurate?

Tony Chopp: Yeah, I think it's a really fun way of saying it.

Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

Tony Chopp: like workarounds.

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: and there's another example of that, which is You know, for the last year, or, I don't know, ti times like a flat circle here.

Richard Gaffin: Sure.

Tony Chopp: We've been talking about incrementality, right? And we've, built an [00:09:00] incrementality testing tool into stats and we, we talk about geo holdout incrementality test as, as the gold standard of how we measure media's impact on a, on a business. And it's, it remains true for sure. At the same time, meta is building a tool this incremental attribution optimization setting that, that you and I have talked about with McKay in the last several podcasts. That is just so fascinating and interesting to me

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: because. Doing geo holdout tests is it's, it's the best, the best solution that we have. and yet still there's some challenges with

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: A couple of the challenges that we, we discussed last time we were on the podcast it's, it's a point in time measurement. So take a snapshot [00:10:00] of incrementality at a point in time, which doesn't consider seasonality or. Changes in budget or all, all sorts of variables that we could add into the equation? Well, this new incremental attribution product it, it's basically in, in essence always on incrementality testing. Continuously running a, a split test under the hood of exposed to the media, not exposed to the media. And things like that, like, let me connect all these ideas for

Richard Gaffin: Sure.

Tony Chopp: back to your, your point about like workaround. So

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: an example of a workaround is having a separate campaign for acquisition for new customer and a separate campaign for retention. And the reason why is because the incremental contribution of those two cohorts of customers is gonna be different. [00:11:00] And as a result of that, those two groups of customers need to perform at a different efficiency target.

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: maybe you take a two to one on your acquisition, but you need a three or a four to one on your retention campaigns, the workaround then becomes separate campaigns. Separate targeting, et cetera, et cetera. Well, I think the promise of this incremental attribution product is, to not actually not have to do that, to run the campaign. And to say we, we are seeking this incremental outcome regardless of it's, if it's somebody that's bought a t-shirt from us in the past or not, we need, we need to have this much margin on every order. Off you go. Meta, help us understand, by running this ad, these ads to these cohorts of customers and these audiences help us understand how to, how to create that. So

Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

Tony Chopp: [00:12:00] it's more steps on this pathway of like the idea of workaround is a really fun way of thinking about it. I, I appreciate you saying that, but I.

More steps on the pathway of less time having to trying to manipulate the platform

Richard Gaffin: Right.

Tony Chopp: more time spent defining what, what winning looks like. What does it look

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: From a, you know, a, a unit economic perspective of whatever it is you're selling. 

Richard Gaffin: Right. That makes sense. Okay, so, so obviously the point we've just been talking about is incrementality, but I know you had a few more kind of takeaways from, from the performance Summit. So let's jump into those. We can come back to this later if you want to, but, so yeah, let's jump into the next few, few things you learned.

Tony Chopp: Yeah, I mean, not new news here, but creative volume and variety and velocity are, are, are mandatory. They talked a lot about partnership [00:13:00] ads and the how significantly they're outperforming traditional ads. there there's quite a bit of talk about generative AI creative tools improving roas. and I think the way that I might say this is, I believe Meta wants to solve the creative supply chain issue.

Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

Tony Chopp: And I think it's I think it's. The, the right move. It's, it's so much of what we talk about at CTC here. And I know for, for some time now we've been talking about our creator content offering at CTC and he helping produce this type of creative for our clients. And we're seeing fantastic results from from, from that offering and. I think they, they talked quite a bit about the impact of sort of UGC style creative going into accounts that, that don't already have that. it's, it's the exact same thing that we're seeing in our portfolio. If that, if that style of creative isn't something that you're, that you're currently doing, [00:14:00] it's gonna, it's gonna make a huge impact for, for you. Yeah, and more, more standard stuff, like a mix of formats, real stories, catalog, UGC is, is really important. They, they talked about using creators from different affinity clusters to different types of people will inevitably connect with different types of audiences. And I think you know this, all of this really. This idea of creative volume and variety and loc velocity being mandatory has been for years. And at the same time, it, it's becoming even more important,

Richard Gaffin: Right.

Tony Chopp: Especially around the, the recent algorithm updates, the end Andromeda updates at the end of last year. I, I think the easiest way to, to think about the, the Andromeda update is, meta Knows, is [00:15:00] aware intimately of the creative is, who is in it, the product that's being featured the messaging and we got some, I. We've got some interesting specifics about how Andromeda is actually evaluating creative. That that will be really useful to share, Richard.

Richard Gaffin: Okay,

Tony Chopp: gonna dig that up and, and get that for our admission members. But yeah,

Richard Gaffin: is

Tony Chopp: just no way to win. There's no way to win in meta without

Richard Gaffin: right.

Tony Chopp: having volume, variety and velocity on the creative side.

Richard Gaffin: Yeah, and I would be remiss, by the way, we don't usually do this, but I'm gonna do a mid episode plug here for our UGC production workshop that Adrian, who runs our content creator program, is putting together, this is we're gonna kind of reveal her secrets to generating UGC of volume, because as Tony just mentioned, having that type of ad available in your account at scale is extremely important.

And it sounds like basically it's never been more important than it's right now. So [00:16:00] by the time you hear this, it will be. Tomorrow, Wednesday 11:00 AM Pacific time. But of course if you can't make that time the replay, if you purchase a ticket, you will get the replay regardless of whether you attended or not.

So I just have to get that outta the way. Wednesday, June the 25th, join us for the UGC production workshop and start making this happen. Now let's go back to what you're talking about around some of the specifics. So this is particularly like what the algorithm reads as differentiated.

Um, or, or what are the other kind of details there?

Tony Chopp: yeah, exactly what, what the algorithm reads is differentiated. Yeah. Yeah. So, specifically, like, I'll give you some four examples, like

Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

Tony Chopp: people in the advertisement or not? Is the language promotional, is it an offer? Is there is it one product that's featured or multiple? So, and. [00:17:00] There was a there was a there's been a bunch of different ideas around this, like how to define differentiated. But one of the, one of the coolest ones that I've heard so far is you were to, talked about this last time we were on the podcast. If you were to look at the ads and hold them like far away from your face,

Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

Tony Chopp: can you tell the difference?

So, you know, moving the call to action from the top to the bottom it doesn't count. It doesn't count as differentiated. But having an advertisement, a UGC style advertisement compared to, you know, product shot like product, product on white for example, or product on background, or product in, in lifestyle.

Those are, those are gonna be differentiated for sure.

Richard Gaffin: Right.

Tony Chopp: and I think there's, so this isn't something that I heard, but it's something I'm dreaming up.

Richard Gaffin: Okay, sure.

Tony Chopp: so we're getting and this is. This is also like new [00:18:00] directional stuff that we're, CTC is building. So we're building a lot of tools, tooling for our media team off the meta ads API and one of the things that we're able to access through the meta ads API is creative fatigue. And so part of what we're planning to incorporate into STAT is. Create a fatigue information at the, at the campaign level to help us inform, okay, we need, we need something new for this specific campaign. Now what, what I, what I didn't hear but I think is, is likely or in fact possible is some sort of metric or some sort of reporting outta the platform about the diversity of the creative Are, are we actually, are we actually. Feeding meta what, what it's requesting. And Right, right now there, there isn't, there isn't anything that we can, analytically point our finger to, but yeah.[00:19:00] 

Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Cool. So incrementality, it was the first one. Create a volume variety. Velocities is our second. Let's keep rolling down the list. So what, what else popped out?

Tony Chopp: Yeah. I think, I mean the, the first point is really like the tuning of the AI and incrementality is a piece of it

Richard Gaffin: Right.

Tony Chopp: LTV or profit. I think the sort of doubling down on the third point is like measurement, just marching towards incrementality in general. And what I would say is meta is pushing beyond, the measuring of just clicks right into of always on lift studies.

And they, they talked a little bit about like the how. Okay, so here's sort of an interesting takeaway. So we're in the main stage room area

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: and they're talking about okay, by a show of hands how many people would say they've fully operationalized incrementality into their. media planning and operations, [00:20:00] less than 5% of the room

Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

Interesting.

Tony Chopp: this felt like really disconnected for me because it's been so important such a, such a topic for us for, for some time now. I think that's, that's the reality of where where the market is. I think for a lot of brands it's maybe, possibly intimidating or you know, it can be, I think there's, there's costs to, you know, deploy the

Richard Gaffin: Right.

Tony Chopp: to go about it. And many, many, many more people are using sort of MMM tools like Rocker Box or Triple Whale, but those, those are not, that's not the same as as incrementality.

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: That's more of an, more of an attribution tool. So, I think with meta sort of building this incremental attribution into the platform, into the essence of the platform,

Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

Tony Chopp: I, the story I tell myself is that that's the reason why, the reason why is because the, [00:21:00] the audience, the market Sort of a, maybe a inherent distrust of the measurement in the platform, and yet at the same time lacking the skills or resources or knowledge to go and like an incrementality testing

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: across the organization. So, so the folks at Meta are like, oh, we'll just. just build it in the, in the platform,

Richard Gaffin: Right. I see what you're saying. Yeah.

Tony Chopp: not, the idea of incrementality testing certainly isn't, isn't going away for CTC. I think Meta's on the forefront of this for every, other media platforms like know, significantly behind. So, 

Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

Tony Chopp: if we're gonna go run whatever Reddit, Snapchat, or Pinterest or whatever else, we're, we're still gonna, you know, deploy this, this type of measurement.

But 

Richard Gaffin: Right. 

Tony Chopp: really. It's really exciting to see meta take this. This first step, and I mentioned this last time we were on the [00:22:00] podcast too.

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: sort of reminds me of and years ago, I can't remember, maybe 5, 6, 7 years ago, you know, we used to do bidding for campaigns like manually. We'd set like the

Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

Tony Chopp: and like set the bid like, and that just seems like. cave person stuff

Richard Gaffin: Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tony Chopp: for that matter. You know, you, you setting specific interest audiences like is something we haven't, haven't done for a bunch of years because broad targeting 

Richard Gaffin: You know?

Tony Chopp: better. So, 

Richard Gaffin: Well, yeah.

and I think, I think we've been saying like that this is at least as much of a shift, if not more so it's just, so this is sort of a complete kind of revolution in the way that we approach this type of thing, stuff. Right.

Tony Chopp: I mean it certainly could be, yeah,

Richard Gaffin: I just think particularly like, because like it's interesting that you know, 5% of people or whatever are already running incrementality, but I think you're right in pointing out that they do probably all use your triple whale rocker boxes, whatever.

So meta is recognizing that there's an entire market for products that only exist [00:23:00] because everybody thinks meta doesn't do a good job of reporting accurately and. You know, but they're not using the best tool, which is incrementality. And so Facebook or Meta is seeing this opportunity to step in and say, we're going to fix the thing.

That's the reason that all of these other tools exist. And then also we're gonna make it better using this sort of incrementality framework to think about it, I guess.

Tony Chopp: Well, well, and to be, to be totally meta all the AI platforms don't do a. Haven't have had a blind spot with reporting for, for years. Like the, the obvious example is like, you know, new versus existing customers had, there's just a, there's a different incremental contribution or

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: you equate it to the Google side, it's brand versus non-brand.

Like mean one is good or bad. Like,

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: there, there can, and. For sure [00:24:00] capture incremental value from your existing customers. A hundred percent.

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: just needs to be a set, set differently. So, yeah, and, and I think it's the same, the same, all of this, all these like variables that apply to the incremental. Contribution of any investment are so dynamic. Like if you think about if you spend go from spending $50,000 a month to $500,000 a month, that that media investment, the incrementality of it's gonna gonna be different. So, the premise of having that, that signal like in the platform as opposed to, you know, us doing geo holdout studies at some sort of interval and

Richard Gaffin: Right.

Tony Chopp: our targets is, is, is really attractive to me.

Richard Gaffin: Yeah, that's cool. All right, so I mean, it sounds like then really like the big, the big takeaways here are around the development of the incrementality tool and the way that's kind of the AI portion is gonna be used in [00:25:00] developing that. And then obviously how, how creative volume, variety velocity plays into that.

Anything outside of those broad buckets that came out of this that's, that's worth thinking about or mentioning?

Tony Chopp: Well, so this, this was like some conversations that we're, having with our, our leadership team our agency partnership team at Meta that, that we're excited about. This is all, you know, very, very, very TBD. But here, here we are, we'll sort of

Richard Gaffin: Sure.

Tony Chopp: of the hot takes. So, we're seeking to partner with meta on, some additional data that they have access to that they're, they're calling that the headroom analysis headroom availability. And essentially it's the diminishing return curve of any particular campaign. So if you spend, you know, a thousand dollars a day, you're gonna get this [00:26:00] return. If you spend $5,000 a day, you're gonna get a lower return, $10,000 a day et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, I think this, this curve is actually the, the holy grail of what what I am, like, you wanted to know, like Tony's like, doc doctoral thesis of

Richard Gaffin: Sure.

Tony Chopp: years in media. I, I'm like, I'm literally on the verge of, of creating it. And it, it comes as a result of having information about this diminishing returns curve as median investment scales. So if you think about it, our, our growth strategy. modeling looks at two, two primary groups. Our new customer acquisition model and our retention model. And it looks at the business historically and helps us understand optimum levels of investment. the business as a [00:27:00] whole, depending on whether we're seeking contribution margin outcome or a, a new customer outcome or somewhere in the middle, which is extremely useful to help us set the sort of, let's call 'em the, the bound, the rules of the game, so to

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: What, what this info. Alternatively, or, or in addition to what this information about these marginal return curves at the campaign level, I believe are gonna give us the, the ability to do is see how much media investment is possible at any given level of return. So. We're, we're building, we haven't gotten into the podcast about this, but we're, we're building some really exciting stuff into status. in, in the I don't know

Richard Gaffin: Hm.

Tony Chopp: say this. The death of the growth map or the,

Richard Gaffin: Sure.

Tony Chopp: I'm not sure how [00:28:00] much we've talked about this, but the, the growth map is, the growth map is going away. All of the, all of the functions of CTC are gonna exist in Dallas.

Richard Gaffin: Right.

Tony Chopp: of that, the media team's work is gonna exist in Atlas.

We already have our media team trackers, which track spend, spend by every campaign by every day. And those are forecasting out into the future now automatically, which is a huge, huge huge leap forward. The next thing Tony's doctoral thesis on after 20 years of doing this, is to build in a recommendation engine 

Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

Tony Chopp: media teams actually make allocation decisions.

This campaign versus that campaign, a key input to that is gonna be this headroom analysis, this diminishing returns curve.

Richard Gaffin: Interesting.

Tony Chopp: So that's, that's a key input from the media side and then. From the growth side of the equation, we have all of our targets set in, [00:29:00] in any given month, we know or at any, on any given day, in any given month, we have a very clear understanding of where we are in relation to that target. So think about a, think about a scenario where we're working with a partner, we have a target set, and we're, we are, we're ahead on our spend, but behind on our efficiency, right? So we have an efficiency problem. Now we go over in the media side, and recommendation engine has all of this context, all of the target context set. Also has information coming in from this headroom analysis to say, Hey, this campaign's got a lot of room to scale, right? We should be pushing in here. We should be pulling from over there, the recommendation engine being fed by the context here. We need to make changes that create more efficiency and slow down the media spend. And having the context of here, here's campaigns that have additional [00:30:00] headroom. Ma

Richard Gaffin: Yeah, it's beautiful.

Tony Chopp: So yeah, I think that was, I think this, this whole thing, this whole thing feels like it feels like it's all, it's all coming, it's all coming together like.

Richard Gaffin: Yeah, sure. Yeah. Well, it's interesting 'cause I feel like I know that, that Steve, who is our, our data scientist here at Common Thread Collective, he's been doing, basically like incremental forecasting models for some time, right? Where it's like at this level of spend, your incremental return is X. At this level of spend, you bump up, you know, by another sort of traunch of spend.

It's another 2000 bucks or something. Maybe a better way to say it is like you're spending 50,000 bucks a month at this return. If you spend 55,000 bucks a month, the incremental return on that $5,000 will be actually, maybe you'll, you're losing money on it. So even though you're seeing. Sort of ROAS seems like it's okay overall.

If you bump it up to 60, 70 grand, what you're seeing is actually that new spend isn't actually, is actually losing you money. And so that's [00:31:00] one way of, of it. It sounds like essentially what's happening here is this is a development or an evolution of that type of forecasting. Is that, does that sound correct?

Tony Chopp: You're absolutely right. So, and Steve's work is modeling that diminishing return curve at, at the business level.

Richard Gaffin: Right.

Tony Chopp: what we're what we're, we think we're gonna get access to from Meta is that information at the campaign level.

Richard Gaffin: Yeah, that's cool.

Tony Chopp: Yeah. And, and for the record, the, the, the Google Ads platform has a similar piece of information that, that we believe we're gonna be able to fold into the. The, the sort of holy grail here, which is a, a recommendation engine, an an engine that looks at what's happening in, in all the campaigns over here and what's happening with the business over here and, and helps us understand like, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that, we're gonna do the other thing.

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: I, and I, I want to sort of like just double down on this, 'cause I, Taylor and I talk about [00:32:00] this all the time, I have, I think CTC is in the best possible position. To thrive in this world that we're moving

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: which is really, really all about defining what winning is. Right?

Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

Tony Chopp: And I mean, that, that's probably gotta sound really, really familiar to you, Richard, from

Richard Gaffin: Oh, for sure.

Tony Chopp: time you spent with Taylor on the podcast. Really defining what winning, winning looks like. and then, and then with that definition. Doing all the actions that lead to that outcome. So if you think about you know, I think about like some of the tools that, like Triple Whale's building, like Triple Whale has an an AI agent, like a media agent that's like a recommendation engine and it's really cool.

But what, what they, I haven't seen from them yet is. When I keep scratching my head, I'm like, how do you make [00:33:00] a media recommendation without the broader business context?

Richard Gaffin: Right.

Tony Chopp: You, you, you don't, what do I, what do I do? Do I what? Scale this campaign that pull that one back? Like why? 

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: we get from all, all of the work that our growth strategy teams do in partnership with our clients to understand. You know, p and l level impact for, for a business that, that context is, the thing that informs the media. And now if we get, if we can get into this headroom analysis, that's another piece of information that we can use to inform the, the media recommendation. Creative fatigue is another piece of information that we can use to inform the media recommendation. Creative diversity is another programmatic piece of information that we can use to, to direct to focus energy actions, into the media accounts that will [00:34:00] connect to the business outcome that we're seeking.

Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Well, no, no. I mean, it, it's, it's exciting. I, I think like, again, going back to our point about. So much of our approach to meta ad buying especially has been, like we were saying, a series of, of kind of MacGyver situations where we're trying to like get to what we we need, which is like this p and l level result.

By manipulating a platform that is not built to bring you that outcome, it can, it gives you access to a billion people and you can put your. Your ads on it, whatever, but it doesn't actually, it's not actually built for that outcome. And now what it just sounds like is that everything is moving in this direction.

Or at the very least, we're getting the tools finally from meta to do this at a level we've not been able to do it before. Which yeah, that's, that's the future feels like it's here. You know what I mean?

Tony Chopp: It feels really exciting. Like

Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

Tony Chopp: a really cool time to be a performance marketer.

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: More and more I feel [00:35:00] like the job is becoming less, less mechanical Hmm.

You know, at the end of the day you have like a thing like to sell, like, I

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: this phone.

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: At the end of the day the job of a marketer, a performance marketer is to, you know, take a picture of it then distribute to some ad copy, and then to

Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

Tony Chopp: that as broadly as possible and to, and to set up to understand the unit economics of how I, I profit from selling this phone. And I think that's like. It's, it's exciting to think about like getting into like, as a performance marketer, getting into, know, storytelling and, thinking about the moments and how to speak to an audience as opposed to, to spending tons of time on set this bid this way, or set

Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

Tony Chopp: audience that way.

I think, [00:36:00] I

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: the, the, the platforms. Over the years became really complex and, and lot, lots of layers to them, and they became really labor intensive to do the, the workarounds

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: whatever it is you want to call it in the

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: fields that we're headed away from that and headed more towards or back towards you know, why this CTC hat is really cool. And you know, if you work for CTC, you might, you might wanna have that,

Richard Gaffin: Yeah, exactly.

Tony Chopp: or if you're a CTC fan, I don't know if we sell 'em, but we probably should.

Richard Gaffin: Oh yeah, absolutely. There's a whole merch store. There's something there.

Um, but yeah, I mean, like the idea is, is we've talked about this a lot over the years, but like gradually or continuing to move forward towards allowing humans to do what humans are good at and allowing machines to do what machines are good at.

And it turns out there's so much stuff that machines are better at than we are, and we're finally, it feels like they're taking like a pretty big step forward into. [00:37:00] Allowing most of those types of decisions to be machine made. So that what your brain power is now used for is, like you're saying, overall strategy.

What do I want to do with this business? What's the result I actually want on a p and l level from my marketing? So that's one or two questions, I guess. And then three, putting your brain towards creative, like thinking about, yeah, why would anybody want this thing that I'm selling anyway?

And getting that message out as, as much as possible.

Tony Chopp: Yeah. As opposed to trying to hack your way there through some

Richard Gaffin: Exactly.

Tony Chopp: or audience or whatever else, like, can't, what did, what did Taylor say recently? He said something like, you can't hack your way to business growth, like

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: media tactic your way to business growth. Like

Richard Gaffin: Right.

Yeah. I, I, yeah, I think that there's definitely been, like, there's, there's a sense, and I still feel it myself sometimes. It's like the, the key to success on meta. This is especially the case a few years ago. It's less so now, but like if having the right tactics, like knowing the right hacks some sort [00:38:00] of like, basically it's, it's like, I dunno, gambler's tricks to like betting the spread and just the right way or whatever.

It's like all that stuff is, has been maybe important in the past, but it's always papered over the fact that like, when you really boil it down, the, the brands that are winning are winning because they have a great offer and good creative and. A lot of the times I think a brand succeeds because they have great creative and a good offer.

But in the past it's been like, well, because they've been doing these, what, what did, what tips or what hacks or tricks did their media buyer use? Actually, really, it was just, the creative was good, the product was good, but I think we're moving into a, a world maybe where, because those tricks don't really exist anymore or won't, the only thing left is like, wait a minute, do I have a good product?

Do I have a good brand? Is my creative telling the story the way it needs to tell it? Is the offer good? Is it connecting? And like really thinking about that stuff, which is what actually ultimately makes the biggest difference anyway.

Tony Chopp: Yeah, well, I, both things have been true forever. And, and I we're [00:39:00] like, listen, if you. If you ask the media platforms, they'll just tell you like, yeah, sure. Just give us all your money and give us more of it. So we're gonna

Richard Gaffin: sure. I.

Tony Chopp: it all, take it all with a healthy grain of salt. And, you know, there's, there's absolutely going to need to be like if I think about the, the recommendation engine that, that we're building at CTC, the, there's, there's going to be. Let's call 'em like allocation decisions that happen in media accounts or, or maybe even across media accounts. Like spend more on this media platform, less on that media platform. So what, what I'm like really excited about doing is, is building and what, what we're in the process of doing right now is building really, really systematic ways of approaching those questions.

So, so the way that we. The way that we answer them and the way that we behave is really consistent and really connected to the, to the [00:40:00] structured data that we have around the, the business goal. give you a really, you know, quick, for example, like, actually, lemme say it a different way. The, the other thing that we're going to, we wanna do with this sort of action level at the media account is use. Use all of those actions to back check, right? So let's just say we took, you know, I don't know, actions in a media account over the course of a month. Well, we can ask and answer a really, really easy question on the

Richard Gaffin: Mm.

Tony Chopp: of that which is did, were we able to achieve the outcome, the goal

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

Tony Chopp: And sort of connecting all of these dots to like all action in the media account, business outcome.

Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm. Yep. That's what you want. Cool.

Tony Chopp: the future is now, Richard.

Richard Gaffin: The future. That's, that's what I was gonna say. It does feel like it's all, it's all right [00:41:00] here. I mean, I was, so I was gonna ask, speaking of which any sort of like timeline information that came outta that in terms of, I know obviously Andrew Mond has already basically rolled out in terms of any of this other stuff, like what's, did you any interesting timelines?

Tony Chopp: well, the incremental attribution setting was released, the system wide, the, the week of the, the summit. So everyone should see that in their

Richard Gaffin: Sorry. Yeah.

Tony Chopp: And that, that would be the first thing that I, I would go and do. The other thing that has been in. Most accounts for, we've been seeing in more and more accounts over the last six or eight months is, is opportunity score.

Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

Tony Chopp: so, but that was also, has been released to, to all accounts. So that's another, another feature that's, that's worth exploring. And the opportunity score is gonna look at things like you know, event match quality and sort of different signal considerations. And I, I have an I'm joining a meeting with our [00:42:00] agency support team later this week around, meta is working on building sort of an AI recommendation engine into the platform. I think it's part of the opportunity score process and, and I'm, we're getting an opportunity to, to talk with them and give some feedback and see what their direction is on that. So, yeah, I think, I think those, those two things are, are. Go explore them now. Go learn more about what, what they have to offer. And, and for sure just get, get started testing with this incremental attribution thing. I, I don't know, I can't remember being as excited about like a, a technical thing in a media platform since like, know, conversion based bidding, really.

So go

Richard Gaffin: Wow, that's exciting. Yeah. We don't see you excited often, Tony. So I'm yeah. Stoked. This is, this is big folks. Cool man. Well, yeah, it sounds like. Timeline wise, the future is now. Anything else you wanna hit on this before we wrap up [00:43:00] here?

Tony Chopp: I, I guess I, I think it's like, well, no, I'm gonna save it for the next podcast. I want

Richard Gaffin: Sure.

Tony Chopp: to get on here with you and, and show off like the, the tools that we're building into STAs around the media side and, and how I, how they're benefiting our teams. And, and I, we, I just wanna get to share that with more people, but I think it'd be a great follow up podcast 'cause we can connect some of the dots from, okay, cool, here's what, here's what Meta's doing, and then here's how CTCs toolkit is, is aligning with that.

Richard Gaffin: Awesome. All right, well there's a teaser for you folks that's coming up. But until next time, oh, I'll plug one more time. The UGC Content Creator Workshop, it's tomorrow. Come join us. But again, if you can't, you can get the replay. I'll have a link in the show notes for you where you can purchase tickets.

But anyway, Tony, thanks for joining us. Everybody else also, if you wanna work with us, get on the train commentary co.com, smash that hire us button. We would love to talk to you. Alright folks, till next time.

Tony Chopp: See.

Richard Gaffin: So, yep.