Generative AI tips for high-performing Meta Ads for Black Friday & Cyber Monday

Episode Description

We spoke a great deal about getting your Google search and shopping campaigns ready for Black Friday & Cyber Monday in the past few episodes. This time, we want to put the focus on paid social, primarily Meta Ads.

Compared to last year, we’ve seen a big shift in how advertisers are approaching campaign strategy. For starters, there were changes in consumer behavior — more people are shopping earlier than ever before. Then, there is the global economic situation. And, last but not least, there was an explosion of readily available, powerful AI tools.

In this episode of PPC Town Hall, I spoke to two of the top paid social experts in the industry, Akvile Defazio and Susan Wenograd about all of those things. They shared many examples of how they use generative AI tools to create high-performing campaigns and a lot more.

Tune in to learn how to:

- Create more engaging ads with generative AI

- Build social proof for more impactful advertising

- Build a good campaign structure

Episode Takeaways

Create More Engaging Ads with Generative AI

• Generative AI tools like Jasper and MidJourney are useful for sparking creative ideas and generating initial content drafts. This can be particularly useful for overcoming creative blocks or iterating on new ad concepts.
• These tools can assist in visualizing campaign themes or specific ad elements, which can then be refined by human creatives for final production.

Build Social Proof for More Impactful Advertising

• Social proof, such as user comments and interactions, enhances ad credibility and can lead to better performance.
• To accumulate social proof, strategies like running simultaneous engagement and conversion campaigns can be effective. Engaging creative content that resonates with the audience encourages interactions and builds up the perceived popularity of the ad.

Build a Good Campaign Structure

• A well-structured campaign takes advantage of AI’s capabilities without compromising the campaign’s core objectives. It’s important to strike a balance between giving AI enough data to work effectively and keeping campaign goals focused.
• While broad targeting can help AI learn and optimize, too much breadth can dilute results. Campaigns should be structured with enough specificity to guide AI towards desired outcomes without overly constraining its operational space.

Additional Takeaways

• Effective use of generative AI in marketing requires a blend of technology and traditional marketing wisdom. Marketers should ensure that while using AI to enhance creativity and efficiency, they also maintain the core marketing message and connect authentically with their audience.
• Continuous testing and refinement are key, as is maintaining an up-to-date understanding of both AI capabilities and audience expectations to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving digital advertising landscape.

Episode Transcript

AKVILE DEFAZIO: You know, people talk about hooks all the time, so asking a question that’s maybe shocking or will make somebody stop and look at the first three seconds, um, doing product demos, we do a lot of, um, ads that are video, like UGC primarily, of parents setting up, uh, children’s play equipment, where I feel like there’s, we’re finding a lot of success with that.

And then putting overlay text on a Tik Tok style, but about not just what the product does, but what does it do for your child? So just value props over it.

SUSAN WENOGRAD: If you start trying to do too much with one campaign, it’s going to really like overcorrect for what you’re trying to accomplish. So like, let’s say that you are, you know, you’re trying to optimize everything towards.

Highest possible ROAS, right? Well, if you sell a whole array of products and one of them is 500 and one of them is 50, it might show the 500 product more just because it’s a safer gamble that if someone buys it, it’s going to hit the ROAS.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys.

I’m your host. I’m also. Co founder and CEO at Optmyzr. So today we’re going to talk about e commerce, Q4, social, all of the things that retailers will need to do to get ready, to get the most out of Cyber Week that’s coming up very soon. But for this episode, we’re going to take more of a look at social as opposed to search, which we usually do.

And to talk about social, I’ve got two of the best people in the world, social experts, uh, former guests on the show who are coming back. So let’s welcome them. And let’s get rolling with this episode of PPC Town Hall.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right, Susan, Akvile, good to see you again. Thanks for coming back to PPC Town Hall.

SUSAN WENOGRAD: Thanks for having me.

Frederick Vallaeys: Akvile, how are you doing?

AKVILE DEFAZIO: Thanks for having us.

Frederick Vallaeys: Let’s start with you, uh, tell us a little bit about who you are for the people who haven’t seen you before, uh, what you’re up to and where are you calling us from today?

Sure.

AKVILE DEFAZIO: So I’m based in the Los Angeles area. I’ve been working in paid search and paid social for 15 years, but about nine years ago, I am amicably parted ways with the search world and focus only on paid social. And yeah, we’re mostly with e commerce brands, some events and some entertainment industry clients.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. And, uh, we didn’t say your last name, Akvile DeFazio, right? So if people want to look you up, go to LinkedIn, that’s Akvile. Okay. Susan Wenograd, welcome back to the show as well. Tell us what you’ve been up to.

SUSAN WENOGRAD: Um, these days after, uh, 20 years in marketing, um, I’m still doing a lot of paid media. So I’m, um, head of paid media for a few places.

I’m, I do some fractional CMO work as well. Um, so I get to kind of take the paid media part and then also do the fun stuff like email marketing and content and all that kind of stuff. So. Um, kind of blending a little bit more of the world these days, but still very, very heavily in paid ads.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And I remembered, uh, you know, when I talked to you in the past, it was much more search focused, uh, you’ve certainly gone on down the social path a little bit more, especially, so maybe talk about that.

Right. So now that you’ve been doing social for a number of years, like what is that like compared to search? Um, what kind of growth do you see? How does it stack up and, uh, what are some of the differences and challenges that you have compared to search? Or Susan, let’s go with you first.

SUSAN WENOGRAD: Yeah, so, um, I think what’s interesting is that paid search is starting to feel more like paid social in some ways it when I started in it, it was like 2014 was when I started doing Facebook ads, and it was all very, you know, it was detailed, but you didn’t have, um, The same kind of insights that you did with Google ads.

So being a search person that could see like every keyword and you had all these levers and all these things you could do, you got on Facebook and it was kind of like, okay, yo u know, pick your objective. You had control, but not nearly as much as you did in Google. And so that was an adjustment, but now it’s been interesting because now google’s going more towards, you know the black boxy world in google ads and so I think because i’ve been in social for a while.

I’m a little more comfortable With that happening. I mean i’m not thrilled about it, but i’m also kind of like i’ve This feels very familiar So I think for a lot of searchers it doesn’t because they’re watching their control go away and having worked in For a second, so, I mean, I think that’s a really Interesting topic.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I’d love to hear from you from you, but so like in search, we’re all fighting this change that Google’s making towards more automated bidding, more black box, uh, performance max campaigns. And it’s like the struggle, right? But now in social, like you’re saying, Susan, social started in a whole different era when automation was better.

And so Facebook has never had those controls. And yet people, deal with it, and they still seem to be quite successful with it, right? So what is it we’re missing in search? And I feel I’d love to hear from you, but like, how do we make that transition? And should we stop whining? Or are we really going to miss out on something?

AKVILE DEFAZIO: I think we all have a certain degree of love hate with the platforms that we work on. Um, I feel like paid social is going in that direction. There’s a lot more automation going broader is getting more personalized, which, you know, Seems ridiculous to say it that way, but. It works better these days as you kind of consolidate everything together.

Frederick Vallaeys: There are less levers, broader, but more personalized,

AKVILE DEFAZIO: uh, broader in terms of targeting, but more personalized in terms of how the AI just serves ads much more effectively in the last year compared to the few years prior to that, um, after iOS 14, that whole thing happened. But in the last year, there’s been a significant change, at least from what we’ve seen in the accounts that we work on that.

We’re having to go broader to get better results, which seems like the adverse of what we’ve done in the decade before that.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s really interesting. And I know we wanted to talk about campaign structures, so it might be a good segue here, right? So you’re saying you have to go broader to take full advantage of the machine learning capabilities, which then give you more personalized ads.

And I’m assuming. That you’re also saying more personalized ads probably have better performance.

AKVILE DEFAZIO: Uh, not always testing. I think you have to diversify in terms of what you’re testing still, because a lot of people buy the same product, um, or get the same service, but for different reasons, right? So I think figuring out what messaging works best within a campaign, but targeting broader.

But then the system knows who to serve ads to that are more likely to accomplish your objective, like purchasing, for instance.

Frederick Vallaeys: So in social, uh, Susan, let’s go to you, but in social advantage plus campaigns, I believe you can have up to eight for the same product or something like do you typically take full advantage of the full eight?

Or when you talk about like going broad and kind of like giving more leeway to the machine, does that mean? One works better than many.

SUSAN WENOGRAD: So I think the challenge that I’ve always had with Facebook is like, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. So, um, it, if you start trying to do too much with one campaign, it’s going to really like over correct for what you’re trying to accomplish.

So like, let’s say that you are, you know, you’re trying to optimize everything towards. The highest possible ROAS, right? Well, if you sell a whole array of products and one of them is 500 and one of them is 50, it might show the 500 product more just because it’s a safer gamble that if someone buys it, it’s going to hit the ROAS.

So we’ve seen kind of this disparity when we try and do too much with one campaign that way, because it’s, you’re not going to learn what you think you’re learning because it’s, It’s really trying to optimize towards whatever your overall goal is. So I try and find that happy balance and Google’s actually like this too, at this point where you need to try and make things broad enough that Facebook will get enough data to make decisions.

Um, but you can’t. Make it give it so many options that it just ends up kind of watering everything down. And it’s not an exact science by any stretch of the imagination. Um, but it’s kind of the same, you know, the same issue we see with Google, where it’s like, if it’s the chicken in the egg problem, you’re like, you need it to get a lot of purchases.

But if it’s. You know, achieving that by just over indexing on one certain type of purchaser or user, there’s still going to be this, no matter how broad you target, it’s going to be, it’s going to keep leaning into that one area if you go super broad. So there’s a balance for sure.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. Thank you. Bella, what are your thoughts on.

Structured,

AKVILE DEFAZIO: um, simplified structure, but we’re still doing things that some people are very adamant about not doing anymore. Uh, we still do some interest at targeting. I do too. Still do retargeting and like, as long as it works, as long as I don’t start seeing a dip in performance, I’ll keep running it. I mean, we have had one retargeting ad for a client running since September 2020, and it’s still our top performing ads.

So I’m like. I’m going to keep running it until I can’t anymore or I shouldn’t.

SUSAN WENOGRAD: Yeah. I had a top of the funnel ad that I ran for two and a half years and it didn’t matter what I put up against it. It always won. I could not beat it.

Frederick Vallaeys: We’re super fascinating because I thought one of the whole differences between search and social was in search.

You can have that evergreen ad that just continues to perform. I had one, I think for a decade, it was doing great. Um, and then eventually I had to change it because the ad format simply went away. And on social, the whole take is that people start tuning out if it’s the same ad, the same creative, so you have to keep it fresh.

But what do you think what you’re describing here is an element of like, there’s always a new audience that’s seeing this ad. So there’s a continuous influx that comes from that. Or can you like not vary the ads that much with the same audience and still at some point, it’ll, it’ll resonate and they’ll click and they’ll convert.

A little bit of both.

AKVILE DEFAZIO: The frequency is still low. They have a lot of website traffic. We’re advertising a lot of channels for them. So I feel like there’s a continuous influx of just feeding their funnel. And I’m sure people are still seeing their ads numerous times because we’re not able to exclude as much anymore these days, but it’s still performing well.

SUSAN WENOGRAD: So I think the other thing is too, especially if it’s an ad that gets a lot of attention and a lot of interaction. You automatically see like as more interactions happen, like it starts to do better and better because a, your costs are going down because people are interacting with it, but B users are just more likely to stop and look at it because if there’s 900 comments on something you want to see what’s going on, it’s like, Oh, is that a train wreck?

Or do people love the product? Right? Stop and look. So there’s kind of like the thumb stop piece of it to where the longer that it’s running, the more likely it is to start building up that social proof.

Frederick Vallaeys: And that social proof, uh, how do you fuel that?

SUSAN WENOGRAD: Do you want to take that or go ahead? So yeah, I mean, back in the day, um, you know, I used to do a lot of like, take one ad ID and simultaneously run it as an engagement campaign and as a purchase campaign so that it had one ID that was accruing both of the objectives. Um, I don’t find that that works as well anymore.

And there’s all kinds of. Like hinky stuff where it won’t run the same ad idea. It just creates a new one. Um, so that’s kind of where I think having the right creative is becoming more and more important because everybody does just tune it out unless it’s something really good. So I feel like the brands, you know, that I worked with and have worked with that do well are the ones that really get their audience and they.

Deliberately create stuff that they know will get a reaction of some kind. So they go into their creative with that in mind, where it’s like, we’re not necessarily going to talk about the product we want to get them to react somehow. And that’s, that’s like the goal of the creative beyond just even selling anything.

So they go in with that as like what they’re focusing on, knowing that that’s going to have the outcome that they want eventually.

Frederick Vallaeys: It’s a good point. I mean, if I think about myself and I see, uh, an ad on Instagram and it’s got like four reactions, I’m like, yeah, the product’s probably not that good. And it’s almost like the star reviews and the count of how many reviews are being contributed by that.

SUSAN WENOGRAD: Yeah. Yeah. The more, the more that you can kind of tell your audience, like we are one of you. The more that they’re going to interact because a it’s like they they see something they identify with but the other thing that we see is people will tag Friends co workers like if it’s something that they’re just like, oh my gosh, this is you or this is us or whatever The more you can produce creative like that The easier it is to kind of get those those automatic social proof things that just happen because it’s a community So you have to capitalize on the community piece

Frederick Vallaeys: And so that’s a huge difference from search, right?

In search, it’s all about being relevant and answering as directly as possible that consumer intent. Right here, it sounds like, how do we have something that builds engagement, that builds community? So, so what are some of the little tricks that people or that, you know, both of you use to make that happen?

What resonates in ads?

SUSAN WENOGRAD: Did you want to answer, Phyllis? Sure. Um,

AKVILE DEFAZIO: You know, people talk about hooks all the time. So asking a question that’s maybe shocking or will make somebody stop and look at the first three seconds. Um, doing product demos, we do a lot of, um, ads that are video, like, UGC primarily, of um, Parents setting up children’s play equipment where I feel like there’s we’re finding a lot of success with that and then putting overlay text on a tick tock style, but about not just what the product does.

But what does it do for your child? So just value props over it. Um,

Frederick Vallaeys: so it almost doesn’t feel like that is so is this like organic content that is.

AKVILE DEFAZIO: Yes. So we’ll run it as ad, but we found more success kind of what we’re talking about the last subject where we’ll have the client post it on their organic channels and then we’ll boost it and then we can take that engagement and move it around to different campaigns without resetting it.

And that’s worked out really well, but things that are less refined and more natural in, in content and visual content, um, seem to be performing a lot better than things that are a bit more polished these days.

SUSAN WENOGRAD: Agreed. I think I was going to say the other thing that works well is, um, inside jokes. So, like, things that no one would get unless they were that person.

Right? So it’s like, no matter what kind of product it is, and this works in B2B or Ecom, but it’s also really helpful because you are having to target broadly. The more that you can kind of make that creative speak very specifically and get a reaction the better off it tends to do with the optimization faster.

So I’ve frequently find that like a sense of humor actually just goes leaps and bounds ahead of most most ads and the more that you can make it like someone would just stare at me. Like, I don’t get it. That’s actually good because if they’re not your person, you don’t want them to get it. So it’s like don’t don’t post, you know, general cat memes that everyone will like it’s like post the stuff that only your target would Acknowledge and laugh at and respond to yeah, if

Frederick Vallaeys: you know, you know, yeah Yeah, I was reading an interesting article in the wall street journal about laurel piano The the brand which has never put logos on their clothes and they’re very expensive I didn’t realize how expensive they were.

I looked it up and I think a hat was around Was it 3, 000? Oh my God! What’s

AKVILE DEFAZIO: it made

SUSAN WENOGRAD: of? I mean, I was going to say I like my brain, but like, it’s a really expensive thing to stick on it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. The whole point was like, it’s, it’s, they don’t have to put the logo on and that’s what makes it appealing is that if you know that that’s that brand.

Then you’re part of that exclusive club of people who can afford it. Wow. And, um, then you might aspire to be like them. Oh, hmm. Um, but then, but then, so part of the angle of the story was that they have started being a little bit more forward with the logo, like a, a black on black sort of a thing. Hi, maybe I don’t know that it’s a consumer shift where I don’t know what

SUSAN WENOGRAD: they have to send the signal like they have to send some signal that they have a 3, 000 hat.

You know, otherwise people are like, where’d you get that hat target? Like, I wouldn’t know somebody.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, let me shift topics here to Gen AI, and I know it wasn’t something we we sort of told you we were going to talk about. But speaking of ads, right? I mean, I imagine you must be using some sort of Gen AI to help you with the humor, the inside jokes, the imagery. Tell me about what you’ve tried and what’s been working.

And Susan, let’s start with you.

SUSAN WENOGRAD: Um, so I’ve started to get good at mid journey, um, for, and it’s not that we necessarily end up using what’s created, but it’s helped a lot with like inspiration for photo shoots and things like that. Um, and just kind of like theming for campaigns. And I cannot. I can’t draw.

I cannot design a damn thing. So I love that I can go and be like, make me this. And it’s like, it, it still does weird stuff where like, they still don’t have hands, right? There’ll be like an arm growing out of a hand. Like it’s very confused by limbs still. And it struggles to understand we have five fingers.

That’s the other thing it’s not good at. So there’s, there’s weird things like that. But. It’s been really helpful to like communicate, like tone or, you know, campaign ideas or, you know, those, those sorts of things. Um, and then I personally, I love Gen AI for just helping me when I feel like I’m stuck on ad copy and I do the same thing for search too, because especially, I mean, I feel like sometimes more so a search, because how many times can, how many headlines can you write?

About like, whatever it is that the product that’s like, you run out of ideas. And I don’t find Google’s suggestions to be that great. Um, so I, I have become a fan of like, give me five different ways to say this thing, or if I feel like, you know, you fall in the trap and this is true, even when you’re marketing someone else’s product and you do it for long enough.

You start feeling like you’re just saying the same thing over and over. And you’re like, I sound like a product marketer. I’m not really thinking like the consumer. It actually gets harder and harder to think like the consumer. So I like it for that to kind of be like, these are the benefits of this thing.

How would I sell this in a really funny way? And it just, It’s not that I necessarily use what it comes up with, but it really helps me get, like kicks my butt into back into the mindset of being the person that’s going to buy the thing. Um, I just find that it helps me shift the mindset. If I feel like I’m just, I’m too close to the product and I’m not having an easy time figuring out like a lot

Frederick Vallaeys: of people talk about where it’s like an intern who comes in, who’s not that familiar with your company and they can have a conversation that leads you down the path of

SUSAN WENOGRAD: as a typical consumer, someone to brainstorm with, you know what I mean?

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, uh, a fun one that you might enjoy based on what you just said. So you’re not very good at drawing. There’s a system called Alpaca ML. And it’s a plugin for Photoshop. And one of its capabilities is to take a doodle. And so you can literally sketch like stick figures on a napkin. You take a photo of it, you give that to it.

And then you’re like, now turn this into a photo realistic, like in the style of Pixar or whatever. Um, and it does a fairly decent job. Wow, that’s creepy.

AKVILE DEFAZIO: That’s so cool

SUSAN WENOGRAD: though. I love that. It’s like, it’s, it’s so helpful for people like me that like, I have a very creative mind, but it’s like, I can’t create what I’m thinking of.

Like I might have this really great scene in my head. I can’t translate it into anything. So I’m like, it’s actually, you know, things like Mid Journey or Dolly, they’ve been a godsend for people that are like, I had this thing in my head, but I was not gifted the ability to. Translate it through my hands.

So it’s been nice to have nice.

Frederick Vallaeys: How about you? Oh, yes.

AKVILE DEFAZIO: I would add copy as well. It saved me a lot of time. I usually use Jasper. I’m also been playing with copy dot a I know it’s really good as well. Uh, imagery playing a mid journey, not putting anything in production yet, because hands, I know that My Photoshop skills are a little lacking these days, so I haven’t been refining it that way.

But, um, Canva also has a new chat GPT plus account, um, plugin. So you can, I’ve been playing with that. That’s really great to just make it more efficient to what I want to make in Canva for quick things. And then, um, my favorite one, actually, before I move on to that one, um, Meta always started rolling out in the ad level, uh, different AI text variations.

But what’s interesting is that we’ve been conditioned to not say click next, or start, it started telling me, um, in the suggestions to add click, blah, blah, blah below. And I’m like, well, it’s supposed to be intuitive to know, to click the ad, right? We’ve been conditioned to not include that in ad copy. And it’s also adding

SUSAN WENOGRAD: hashtag too.

It’ll be, it’ll give, it’ll give things where it wants me to use the word you and Facebook does not like when you say you and your, and your ad copy. So it’s, yeah, yeah. It’s a good

AKVILE DEFAZIO: point. I think they rolled out a little bit too soon, but, uh, I was going to say my favorite one, and speaking of. I love that you’re here, Susan, because you taught me how to do, uh, I remember back in the day, you’re the one that taught me how to do, uh, view lookups and pivot tables.

You were one of my early mentors on this, but I’ve taken all that knowledge. And now I’m using rose. com, which is really great. Have you used that yet? Not yet.

SUSAN WENOGRAD: Like I have to.

AKVILE DEFAZIO: But, um, it has a lot of the same capabilities of Excel, but you can also use it’s AI to summarize the data for you. You can even ask it like, Oh, um, which ads got a three X return or higher.

And it’ll just tell you. So it’s saving me a lot of time. Good tip.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. Yeah. And a couple of things I picked up in there. So it sounds like you don’t use the word you don’t use the words click here. So custom instructions from a chat GPT in case anyone listening hasn’t used that. That’s a great way to just not have to say it every time when you ask for new headlines, just put it in.

That’s a one time thing. every next set of headlines. It’ll keep that into a factor that in. Um, and then I’m also hearing like picking the right model to do the work for you. So you’re using Jasper and one of the premises of Jasper is that it basically, uh, sits as a middle layer on top of the different, uh, Large language models, and it knows which one is better for writing a resume, which one’s better for writing ad text, et cetera, right?

So I think that’s a skill that all of us as we explore these different models, that’s great. And I think the customization of the model, that’s something I’ve been playing with. So how do you basically ingest a core truth? Of your business. So like, what’s the brand guidelines, how do we like about ourselves?

How do you ingest that? So that the large language model becomes a little bit more grounded in the way that you like to do business. Um, and in fact, alpaca that, uh, image model, you can train it based on your images, so you could just give it like a hundred sample images from your website. And then it starts to create images in that same style.

So that’s very much

AKVILE DEFAZIO: crazy.

SUSAN WENOGRAD: I could save a lot of money on product photography.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. Well, you know, we’ll put the photographers out of business and then I

AKVILE DEFAZIO: know.

Frederick Vallaeys: Um, no, I mean, I mean, how do you both think about the progression of your careers? Gen AI doing so many of the creative things that honestly, one to two years ago, like I didn’t think we were going to be

SUSAN WENOGRAD: here. Yeah. It’s crazy how quickly it happened.

Like we, I feel like we’ve been talking about it for years. And so then you think it’s going to take that long to get there. And it’s like, no, we talked about it for 10 years and it happened in one and a half. You know?

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. And the things that frustrate us today, like by the time this episode actually airs in like one or two weeks, it’s probably

SUSAN WENOGRAD: like, Oh, they’re going to fix the hands.

They’ll fix the hands and do a

AKVILE DEFAZIO: journey by the time

Frederick Vallaeys: this airs. Hey, has anyone tried this? Like putting in the prompts, like, please give every person five fingers.

SUSAN WENOGRAD: No, I should. I feel like, I feel like it would give them five, but then it would put them in their forehead or something. There’s been so many times where it’s like, it’s made everything in the picture is beautiful.

It’s just the hand is completely jacked up. And I’m like, damn, I’m like, the rest of this is so good.

AKVILE DEFAZIO: Hopefully you’re selling blankets and you can just have them covered up. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, seriously.

SUSAN WENOGRAD: Put it in camera, just put a white box over it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay, well, um, what else is interesting? So Q4, right? And this is the biggest time of the year for selling stuff online. Yeah. What’s the take on social? So on search? Microsoft is talking about how the combination of the display network plus search boosts conversions like 11x. Yeah. Like conversion. What are you both doing?

AKVILE DEFAZIO: Um,

SUSAN WENOGRAD: I guess on the social side, I mean, I think, I think what’s going to be interesting this year is. It’s just kind of a strange time where it’s like, are we going to be in a recession? Are we not? There’s inflation. So I, like, I’ve sensed a lot of retailers wanting to start their deals a lot earlier. So I’m very curious to see, like, we’ve started to see that last year.

Cause it was kind of the same thing where it was like, is it, are we going to be in a recession? Are we not? Like, there’s just been this weird teetering for a while. Um, so I’m interested to see for me this year, how early do people decide to start? Because last year I had. You know, customers like they were starting their stuff on November one and they’re like, we’re not doing anything different for black Friday.

We’re just going to run it all the way through. So I’m very curious to see if that’s

Frederick Vallaeys: kind of, I mean, prime day or prime big deals day, which I think is a sub flavor of prime day. So that’s already happened now. So that seems to have been Amazon’s reaction to, Hey, well, we’re not quite sure. So let’s do some deals.

But then as a consumer, the deals weren’t quite as good as like the actual prime day. Um, so I guess they were testing the waters.

SUSAN WENOGRAD: I was going to say, I think, I think it was kind of a test for them to see like, how much did people go for it or how much did they hold off? I mean, and it’s because they still have time, they can adjust, right?

It’s like, they’ve already put in, I mean, the buyers have already bought whatever they’re going to do, but it’s like, from a pricing standpoint, they can still play with those models up until, you know, the Back in the day when I worked at a retailer, we were changing the prices the night before. So, um, there’s still a lot that could happen between now and then, but I think that’s, I think that’s gonna be an interesting thing to see this year is how early did they start?

‘cause they’re gonna do the cash grab early. Um, and I’m, I’m that it’s always tied into when am I gonna see the first Christmas theme commercial? Haven’t seen it yet, but usually sometime towards the end of October, you see the first one. So well, we need, we need to let

Frederick Vallaeys: Halloween play out first. Right? Like, we came ,

SUSAN WENOGRAD: we didn’t last year.

I saw my first Christmas commercial in October. I was like, wow, really?

Frederick Vallaeys: Um, yeah, I mean like an interesting point too to get Microsoft study that they just put out but the clicks that you get in October 67 percent of your conversions in November will have started with a click in October and 50 percent of conversions that happen in December will have started with some click event In october, um, so kind of making the point that the shopping behavior is there and people are looking for stuff and still holding off For that better deal but putting them on your remarketing lists now putting them in your audiences now Like that’s going to help you down the line, right?

So make sure your budgets are dialed up the other interesting thing

SUSAN WENOGRAD: To capture emails too is something that a lot of places don’t I mean they kind of treat his business as usual You know what? I mean? They’re like, oh, yeah, we do email but i’m like but focus on it now, right? Because those are less people you’re going to have to pay for to try and reach You When the holidays hit.

So I always try and encourage retailers, like if they’re running ads, it’s like, make sure you’re also tracking how many of those people that came through ads, sign up for emails so that you kind of know what’s the eventual ROI if they don’t buy today, but they signed up and they buy during the holiday.

Yeah. It

AKVILE DEFAZIO: makes a lot of sense. Yeah. We’re doing something like that for a few of our clients. We launched like a week ago saying, you know, sign up for our email is to be the first to know when our biggest sale of the year drops. Yeah. So we’re just trying to feed the email funnel, drive more sales that way before CPMs go up.

And then the rest of them, we are launching November 1st with a lot of our sales. And then the week of Black Friday, we’re going to bump it up by another 5 percent sidewide, no promo just to make it. Really easy to shop

Frederick Vallaeys: great anything else that we haven’t covered. I think we’re gonna Finish up here soon But want to give you both a chance to talk about some other thing that you think is exciting or that people are missing out On and of course plug where people can find you and if they want to work with you It is not too late at this point You

AKVILE DEFAZIO: need

SUSAN WENOGRAD: help if

Frederick Vallaeys: everything

SUSAN WENOGRAD: I think um I don’t know, you were saying before about like watching the difference between gen AI and all of this stuff.

And it was really funny because, um, I do, I’m, uh, doing some head of paid media kind of strategic advising. And, um, one of the guys on the team, it’s become this running joke that I call myself the paid search fossil. It’s just like all of this stuff at this point that I remember from 2007, but it’s wild.

Like when you look back at all the things we either used to be able to do, or we had to do. That we don’t really have to do anymore. I was thinking that the other day, I was like, like where I spend my time, whether it’s in paid social or paid search has changed so much. Like in Facebook, it was, you know, we used to have an act.

If you’ll remember this, we used to have like a bazillion campaigns. Like we had to be so specific and now it’s weird because you go in and you’re like, there’s not really much for me to optimize. Like you really can spend more time being creative.

Frederick Vallaeys: I remember a presentation you gave in Italy, and I think you gave it in, but I saw it in Italy, and it was basically about how to have consistent naming conventions so that you can keep track of all the many, many campaigns that you have to run.

AKVILE DEFAZIO: Yep. Not anymore.

SUSAN WENOGRAD: Now

Frederick Vallaeys: it’s, it’s a lot. Do actual marketing now, not just like

SUSAN WENOGRAD: spreadsheet. Well, I think that’s, I think that’s part of the thing is it’s like when I see people get really upset about it. I mean, I, I, I did a keynote about this in June where I was basically look, look, these changes are not necessarily a bad thing.

Right. I mean, it’s like I pulled and I was like, do you remember when we had to go through, like, I still remember in paid search, we would export. All of the bid data and the CPA data from editor. And we’d have to make a formula in the Excel sheet to adjust all the bids and then re upload the damn thing.

And I’m like, I don’t know if you liked doing that. I did not like I’m okay. Not having to do those things. Like there’s a lot of things I don’t have to do anymore that I’m really happy about. Because I rather spend that

Frederick Vallaeys: love doing that Optmyzr has a built in capability formula. It’s in and out, it’s easy.

There

SUSAN WENOGRAD: you go. . But it’s, it’s like, I just, so to me it’s like, I like being able to spend more time being a marketer and I, so I feel like a lot of the. The things that are changing are allowing us to do that. Um, is it perfect? God, no, but I’m okay that they’re taking steps in that direction. I’d rather spend my time on stuff that is meaningful for humans to have an impact on.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, and that’s another interesting point that I’ve sort of seen in the context of Gen AI. Which relates to what you just said in that we’re all perfectionist, right? And we’re like, well, we could probably get like 3 percent more performance out of this. So we could do that. But how many hours do you have to put in to achieve that?

Right? And it’s the same with like, okay, well, Jenny, I doesn’t write quite as well as I do. Um, you know, it gives me ideas faster, but ultimately I’m always massaging the text that comes out and I But is that really necessary? Because we think about it from our perspective, but like someone here was saying to before, like, think about the consumer, right?

It’s not our perspective as writers. It’s what is the reader? What is good enough for them? Where do they get value? Um, and so not being so stuck to like, That level of perfection that we desire. Yeah Um, but be good enough and like actually have time at the end of the day to go home to your families and play with your

SUSAN WENOGRAD: dog I had a boss that once told me a 90 is still an a and i’m like, that’s that’s damn true

AKVILE DEFAZIO: It’s true,

Frederick Vallaeys: all right and Susan, uh remind folks if they want to get a hold of you

SUSAN WENOGRAD: Yeah, sure. Um, you can just drop me an email. Susan at Susan, when a grad. com, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Um, I have a podcast that drops every day with an amazing content marketer. Um that we have a blast doing so if you want to keep listening to people gab about marketing you can do it there

Frederick Vallaeys: Fantastic.

Akvile Any, uh anything that you think we should be talking about before we wrap up? Uh

AKVILE DEFAZIO: Get everything lined up for black friday holidays any sort of sales set it up schedule it get it to the review process We’ve seen in prior years where You know, we do launch last minute where some assets come in and then, you know, there’s a, there’s a bug that happens or the review process is prolonged.

And then you might not launch on time. So I know it’s kind of rudimentary, but do that, set it up, let yourself breathe a little easier that weekend. Uh, and then you can find me on, um, Twitter, X, whatever you want to call it these days at Angela DeFazio. You can go to akvertise. com. That’s probably a little bit easier with my name being a bit more

Frederick Vallaeys: complex.

Akvertise, with a K, not a D,

AKVILE DEFAZIO: right? Correct. It’s like advertised, but also my name. So Ak, so Akvertise does advertising.

Frederick Vallaeys: Um, yeah, I was stressed out in August, I think, because I was like, Oh my God, Christmas is literally tomorrow. And then I counted, I was like, No, it’s actually six months away. We’re right in the middle of, uh, But I was already stressed because I hadn’t been able to tell my Optmyzr customers, like, here’s the strategy.

Here’s what we expect because Bing didn’t have their data. Google didn’t have their data. Um, and now we’re, now we’re in Q4. Like we said,

Good. Well, hey, it’s been fun talking to both of you again. Um, to everyone viewing, thanks for watching us. If you want to see more of these episodes, hit the subscribe button at the bottom right there. And of course, if you need help with tools, uh, you can find us at Optmyzr. com. We got a two week free trial full feature, so check it out and we’ll be back with another episode soon.

Thank you both for being here. Thanks for watching. Thank you.

AKVILE DEFAZIO: Thank you.