Happy Sunday!

If you’re reading this I hope you’ve had a relaxing and rejuvenating weekend. These weeks feel longer lately... maybe it’s the excitement going into the busy season, or the feeling of being right in the middle of it right now, even though we aren’t. Either way, I hope you got some time to rest the brain and you’re feeling great.

Before we get into today’s newsletter...

Vendor of the Week

The Q4 Summit in NYC — The room where your Q4 plan gets real.

Most brands enter Q4 with a pile of half-decisions. The promo calendar is almost done. Inventory is mostly locked. Creative is moving, but nobody knows if there is enough of it. Cash planning lives in one spreadsheet, retention lives in another, and the BFCM backup plan is basically, “we’ll figure it out.”

That is exactly how expensive mistakes get made.

The Q4 Summit is a one-day working session for ecommerce founders and operators on September 24 at Capitale in New York City.

The product and offer calendar. The nine-week cash and inventory plan. The creator and affiliate engine. Live storefront teardowns. The 45-day second-purchase plan. Plus a room full of operators to compare notes and share what’s working.

One day. One room. Five decisions you can take back to your team.

Use this link for a free brand ticket to the Q4 Summit.

The Reason You Have High CPMs

Today’s newsletter are some thoughts that have formed as I spend a week with people really deep in the trenches building brands. First, you need relevance. You can’t just go out and say “I’m here, look at me!” You have to generate that awareness. You have to get people talking about you, or excited about you. Why? Well, that’s what you have to figure out, but you have to make it a game, such that the consumer is excited to become a part of the brand and its aura.

Brands need a reason to exist, a customer to service, a problem to solve, a reason to provide. Almost like a sense of belonging, but also, a sense of... what are you doing, and WHO are you here to do it for? This is the piece that often just gets overlooked.

The brand gets shipped, often times an incredible product with great benefits, but the second it goes live, it has trouble finding any path to success. Out the gate you’re met with high CPMs and low engagement. This is something I see happen so often, especially to brands who are now just trying to launch and get out the gate. Meta isn’t the same game as it was before, and what its really missing here is a persona or reason to go after someone.

With Andromeda, Meta doesn’t want to be given 25 variations of an ad format that worked well... instead, it wants you to pick an angle/persona/pain-point, and build a creative pack around that. Let’s say you’re selling a preventative pain relief cream. You might first think, “Well everyone has pain, let’s advertise pain presentation with our cream.” Go one layer deeper.

Take the specific pain-point of plantar fasciitis (foot pain) and build a whole pack/ad-set around the plantar fasciitis (PF) angle. 15 individual creatives speaking to the PF angle. Videos. Statics. UGC. Advertorial. Customer testimonial. Motion graphics/animation. Podcast clips. Creators. All of the creatives that speak to the same angle get thrown in here, and tested. Whatever survives this ad set goes to your scale campaign.

It’s no longer about finding one format and trying to rip different variations, it’s finding a variety of creative around an angle/persona/function/pain-point, and letting Meta push it. You might test 30-50 new packs per month and a few of those will quickly rise to the top of the ad account.

More brands are taking the leap into the world of creators and affiliates (it’s about time). You want to know why that works so well? Because with creators, you’re creating micro-persona-based targeting, at scale, without even realizing it.

If you take the same preventative cream example from above and apply it here with creators, here’s how that would translate. Let’s say you even have only 300 individual creator-affiliates you work with to start. Those 300, which first of all will be coached by you, have 300 different reasons they need the cream to prevent pain.

One uses it before basketball practice. One uses it for elbow pain before tennis. One uses it to make sure their knees don’t hurt from a long run. A mom uses it on her low back while she’s pregnant. See how there are all these different reasons, personas, pain-points, reasons, WHY’s that exist? That’s the benefit of working with creators in this case, you’re going after these micro-personas and hoping that their content hits the wave within that micro-culture. Maybe Angela’s video yapping about how she fixed her heel pain resonates well in the plantar-fasciitis micro-culture in the social platform... that’s exactly what we want!

Regardless of which path you go, you have to accomplish the same things for this to work:

• good product

• awareness

• social proof

• trust

• reasons to buy

• proof its worked for someone else before

Now when you think about all the things your creative needs to do, creators start to feel a lot easier to check all the boxes, versus standard Meta creative. Why? Because instead of ideating different personas and angles, your creators naturally use your product differently, and share how/why they do that. You’re not fishing for angles that work, you’re letting your product be used the way it’s supposed to be, and creators are able to demonstrate that well.

That's all for this week

Reasons to buy, personas, avatars, whatever you want to call it... that is what you need to constantly create content around. The organic algorithms have preferred it forever, now the ones behind paid media prefer it too.

It’s Sunday night, so I plan to get a full 9 hours of sleep going into the week and I hope you do too. Stay hydrated, get a sweat in, let yourself wander. Have an amazing upcoming week!