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Bonjour Millionaire, 

Did you hear about the comedians posting fake AI ads in NYC subway stations? The people have had enough slop!!

Was this email forwarded to you?

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Sponsored by Shipfusion Inc.

Your BFCM promo plans are stunning. Sophisticated. Nearly locked.
They also could end up biting you in the keister in a few months.

Why? That's gap #1 in this report: 4 Performance Gaps to Close Before Peak Season. I recommend you bookmark now (it's interactive).

It summarizes the strategies of 18 ecom brands during BFCM '25: where they overlapped, how (some) stood out, and insights on what's changed since.

Also inside & worth studying:
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Personally enjoyed the peek at Remedy's strategy.
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GET THE 4 PERFORMANCE GAPS

ON THIS EPISODE OF GO-TO-MILLIONS 

Are you shipping slop?

By now, it should be well-established that I’m anti-slop.

Not (only) anti-AI slop.

Anti-slop of all kinds.

Back in February, I wrote that I’m “pro-humans are better at creative.”

I still believe this.

Humans have taste, nuance, and subjectivity. Some of them. 💋

ACTUAL INTELLIGENCE to make sense of the information we receive and to send messages in return.

When customers see a trusted brand try to sell them something in the laziest, messiest, most obvious way, it backfires.

🪨: It could be mild trust erosion. A new crack in a once strong foundation.
🕳: Or it could be a trust sinkhole. Sudden, fatal, everything gone in an instant.

You can avoid this fate by paying attention, doing the hard work, refusing to ship slop and settle for less mess.

Start by being honest about everything you’ve already got out there…

5 THINGS THAT SCREAM SLOP (to me)

1️⃣. Em-dashes, “it’s not X, it’s Y,” and other telltale AI signs.
Maybe you wrote like this before AI (I did!!) but now everyone reads it as a slop signal. STOP.

You’re a brilliant human. Time to get more creative.

2️⃣. Same, same, barely different.
In the age of AI, what was once merely average creative now reads like slop. Perhaps it's a predictable copy rhythm, or the same tired design, or not enough variation between 1 and the next.

It makes customers feel like they’ve seen it before, and NOT in a good way.

3️⃣. If you removed your logo or product, creative could be from a competitor.
In an industry where you can be anything, DON’T be generic.

4️⃣. It’s a little too perfect.
This is a tough 1.

Elevated, great. Gorgeous, I love it. Gorgeous and witty, bookmarked!

But when the messaging and creative are TOO slick, with every edge sanded off...I get the ick.

5️⃣. Doing too much AND too little.

The only thing worse than font soup (where a half-dozen different fonts are competing in a single pop-up, for example): font soup used to say nothing but meaningless buzzwords.

OKAY. Now that we’re aligned on slop, we have to acknowledge the elephant in the room email…

Slop often happens in PURSUIT of creative velocity.

Many good brands find themselves on a slop-pery slope as they try to keep Andromeda and all our other hungry ad channels fed with more and more creative assets.

It's true, the algorithm demands lots of options as it searches for the best audience for your ads.

But WE have options, too.

5 WAYS TO STOP THE SLOP

More eyes, more partners.
No brand is an island.

You need multiple partners and trusted tastemakers brainstorming, creating, testing, and shipping.

Do a regular show and tell of what’s working and see what different creative minds do with it. Let it get a little competitive. Creativity begets creativity.

Keep updating the standards.
When something hits, metabolize that info quickly with internal and external stakeholders. Do the same when something tanks.

Slop evolves, so regularly review and retire anything that feels cliched, out of touch, or like AI drivel.

I heard the colon might be the new em-dash, and I really hope that’s not true, but I’m staying vigilant.

Have a reason for every asset.
Let’s not forget that we’re spending real dollars on all these ads. As such, each 1 must have a specific purpose, angle, hero product…

If a final asset is just okay, it’s not good enough. Work on it, until you’ve got something you believe will scale. It doesn’t mean you’ll be successful, but it DOES raise the odds.

Use AI for systems, so you can do the creative thinking.
See? I’m not anti-AI. I just did some bitching reporting with it, in fact.

And it freed the human brains up to get creative on assets we think are going to kill it tomorrow - and during Q4.

Know that creative isn’t always the problem.
Plot twist! Yep, not all flops are slop. Sometimes...

That extra tag or app you added for tracking might be messing with your data.
Bad data = bad targeting = great creative getting blamed for bad performance.

I'm actually hosting a free BFCM ad strategy prep session next week, about how to solve this very mystery.

When slop-portunity knocks…Don’t answer!

Keep doing the hard, good creative work. Then send it to me for my swipe files.

GO-TO-MEME

More of those fake AI ads.

Yours,
Ari

P.S. The aquired style wedding really was everything. Agree?