Meta Reveals Its Plan For AI Media Buying

This is our first episode of Two of Me, Connor Cody, live in New York.

Today, we are with Nick Kettkar, who's a director of product management at Meda. We go super deep on what the future of automation looks like at Meda, building connected systems, and how marketers can future proof their programs today. We're excited you're listening. Thanks for joining.

We are here at the Meda office with Nick Kettkar. One of the things I want to start with here is we've talked at length. We've been hundreds of hours on this content basically on how media buying has changed over the last couple of years and how historically when Cody Connor and I really started, there's a lot of value to create, you know, setting up the ad account, doing very manual

lever buying within the ad account, and it feels as if Meda is moving towards a more sort of

autonomous, automated, connected system. But I would love to hear your perspective and your experience at Meda and how you guys are thinking about that shift for media buyers.

“So yeah, let's talk about it over the last few years, right?”

I think for media buyers for a lot of what they did previously, you can think of it as equal parts, executionally oriented tasks, campaigns set up, how do I get the structure right, what should my campaign configuration be, what should my ad sets be, what ads do I need? So there's a lot of what level should I use, how should I think about budgets, how do I think about audience, so a lot of it was executionally operational in nature about 50% at least.

And I would say the other 50% was very strategic and directional, like how should be build up, how should we be thinking about our campaign, where do we want to go, what are the right signals, what are the right metrics, how do I keep optimizing those metrics, and so does like think of it as 50/50. What we wanted to do with the last few years and I think we have done pretty successfully, but the advantage plus is take away some of these operational burdens away from

our ad sets, so we want to make it very simple for them to be able to create a performant campaign without a lot of set up tax and that was kind of the intent behind banish plus,

“that's where we've been going over the last few years, I think last year we rolled out a project”

which we call the unification internally, but it makes it very, very easy for folks to use advantage plus products as the default option, and of course it doesn't deco any of the controls, they can still go and interact with the controls that they need, but it's simple enough if you don't need those controls, and I think in the future where they're going to go eventually, is the ratio is going to eventually more completely towards hopefully, where media buyers are spending

100% of that time on the strategic tasks, more about direction, how do I give you guys the how do I give met other right inputs about their goals, about their constraints, about their creative direction, brand needs, voice tone, all of that good stuff, and so that's where we see it about 100% so I wanted to sort of unpack as I was doing research for this episode and this idea of like connected systems, you brought up advantage plus as one example of maybe what you would consider

connected system, I'm curious if there are any others that maybe advertisers are working with today, where you guys as, you know, the meta product team, think, they're good examples of where the platform is going. A lot of the products that you can you can think of as any place where you're adding any sort of input is going to be a connected system in the future. Value rules are really good example, value optimizations, for example, because you're sending us signals in some

four, catalog is a good example of precisely this particular connected system, because even if it does feel a little discrete today, the idea is we can use all of the data in the future to connect all of these different different levels and give advertisers one sort of solution, and so I think those are all examples that come to mind of course advantage plus being the easiest example for media companies because it was focused specifically on solving the problem that you're speaking

off which is a connected system. But I think all of these products eventually are going to come together under one system. And my understanding is these connected systems where we're inputting certain goals and, you know, expressing certain values allow meta to over time begin optimizing for like more nuanced situations. Maybe like containing two goals at once, can you speak a little bit to that? Can you give an example of it advantage plus campaign but it's

just to pick on a product right? As long as an average of a few weeks ago and they're an apparel seller, a focus on variations of t-shirts, those t-shirts are all very similarly priced. They use advantage plus campaign budget today, works extremely well for them because under one campaign many different assets, each being a variation, they able to let the system

do what it does and they get amazing performance, both wonderfully well. Now where would it not work

cut, it is an example? Where would not work currently is an example where the average order value between those products is very different. The goals may be more nuanced. You could have differences in inventory, skews between those products and you could have very specific budget limitations for that. You could say hey, I'm selling stocks and shoes, very different margins,

“very different products and I want to be able to express to you how you should operate for those”

two very distant products. And that type of nuanced signal, we cannot capture today's yet,

now quite easily because everything can just tell us all of these expressions in simple language

just like you would just like we're speaking right now and the system can actually be correctly figured out the rights I think for that particular goal. I mean that's that's like music to my ears because if you were to go look at our ad account right now and I swear every like three months

“it gets more and more just there's more breath to our, you know, you need to, you need two scrolls”

to get through all the campaigns because we're just launching more products, we're launching more ads, more angles and like ultimately you just end up with this this very messy ad account where to your point earlier like we're kind of splitting out the the product and the goal at a campaign level. So now you know you take you know your creative testing times your scale of campaigns time is your you know different like optimization settings that you have that are working for the

brand times the product categories and now you end up with like 15, 16, however many 20 campaigns

live in your ad account and you know we're always trying to consolidate whether it's in platform

or whether it's the tooling stack that we're using we're always trying to consolidate it get more data through less things and what I'm hearing is that soon that will be the reality that like we don't have to necessarily make the the 12 piece set funnel its own campaign and it's in the knives it's own campaign in the hex mills because right now we feel that they are very different customers in order for us to give the right signal to a matter we have to break them out but what I'm

hearing is that soon will actually be able to have a more consolidated approach and that the tooling will just be smart enough to know that hey 12 piece set ad and knife ad yes they might be under the same campaign but like we can go and choose to optimize for value or lowest cost or whatever the objective is based on the product in the day that we're getting. That's precisely it I think you put it really well and and if you think of um I think of the example that you get whether all

these different permutations and you're trying to get it right it's also pretty lossy and inefficient right because you're you're not going to be able to make real-time decisions it's only as fast as you can act or or your process that information and we definitely want to like reduce that

“burden and I think again to be able to do that you have to be able to capture these nuanced”

tools and then the system is to be able to interpret it very precisely I think that's where we are we are now I think the technology allows us to do that and now you should see the product of all the kind of support these just cases. I think one one area I'd be curious to your take on that we've struggled with is when we've tried to consolidate sometimes you just end up with you know I have you know in my role I'm I own the revenue the spend the efficiency target but we have

in you're the same I don't know Cody maybe Jones Roy was somewhat similar like we've this is from business units as well that we are beholden to hitting certain targets right so yes of course we're trying to hit an overall revenue at spend MDR target but I'm also trying to hit a target in knives and hex mills and aprons and one of the one of the struggles we've had what we have tried to consolidate is you just don't have that budget control right and even if you know hex mills

might not be in platform as efficient as a different category we'll met as in it see that and say hey let's spend less on hex mills and more on this other category of ads that's performed me better but then I'm getting a call from eyeball saying hey why are we not growing hex mills and I go in the ad account and I go well we're not really spending enough on hex mills so is that is that

“like variable gonna be part of this like more connected system that you're talking about?”

Yeah absolutely and by the way we've heard the problem that you're talking about from other days as well so it is something we're actively working on and we think we have a path to address so if you think about that the use case that you just spoke about related budgets right where you have you have some very clear constraints on your budgets and those constraints can be really hard constraints where it can be here I can only spend a thousand dollars on this particular product

it can be as hard as that or it can be even softer than that you can tell us yeah I can you know I generally want to spend between 800 to 1200 bucks and let the system figure it out so that you stay within those guardrails but make sure that you give me the best performance subject to that constraint where we're going is our system will only be able to act on those nuanced codes but you'll be able to express it you'll be able to just say that like yeah these are my three

products here are the different values that each product has and here's what I need to do minimum

here's my maximum and go for it and in the cool part about the product that we are trying to build is you want to make sure that we are not taking away any control so every time we are going to make a decision we're going to review it by you we're going to provide transparency and say hey this is what we're thinking of doing this is how we are moving things in your like yep make sense I think good and we keep going down that direction and then close the loop with reports that kind of

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“operator sent you and you'll get a thousand dollars and free credits. That's exciting because I think”

great right now they you have the other decision to make and they kind of oppose one another you can either say hey we're going to be less consolidated but we're going to have more control but if we have more campaigns more assets that's you know data going through more things which is probably not ideal for optimizing overall account performance and then you have this consolidated

approach which is probably better for account performance but then we don't have as much control

over growth or spend or whatever and in certain categories that we have responsibilities to hit so it sounds like you guys are like closing that gap which is very exciting exactly and you know the the one thing I should add to this is like some of these features exist today like min max is full budget sorry they're not right new features exist today but to be able to do that at scale across your entire catalog or yeah you know series of skews and have more nuanced goals there in addition

to just min maxes yeah that's that's the hotpot and which is precisely what we're going to solve then yeah well we're we're dealing with this with our our European markets right now where you know Europe is such a tricky problem because you have a European goal and then you have a European out within within you know all the a lot of the the larger EU countries so what we're struggling with right now is really no different than when I just describe with our product consolidation

or lack the rub is we can try to we can break out a country let's say Germany and give it its own campaign on ad set and have more control over the budget but again that's the less consolidated approach or we can loop a bunch of these countries together probably get better performance in the ad account as a whole but then we don't have as much control over the German budget or the P&L or the growth of that market so it's really you know the products is one

use case but I'm thinking a lot about it this year for like how do we how do we balance the country spend in some of these European the European Union where there's you know 40 countries that

“we're trying to you know grow yeah I think in some cases with countries it is going to be”

there are going to be some limitation restrictions you know of course policy and other decisions which brands might have and so there you know we treat that as a hard-consuming we want to make sure we don't violate it we want to make sure that be adhered to all few goals but in other cases it's a little softer and so I kind of go back to this idea that like consolidation is is one part of it but the other is kind of getting this input on how much flexibility do you have at the

goals and that really gives the system the room to be able to drive performance without like having to give up some of our objectives one of the questions I have we brought up a couple some are available to advertise you stay like min max or you mentioned value rules where I can say I can target you know men and women but I can put a higher bid on women because I I understand that they have a higher LTV things like that so there's like light controls here you know you guys are

ingesting cost information so we begin bidding on margin more which I think is really interesting and I'm just curious as we build these more connected systems which require advertiser input like where does that stop you mentioned inventory will that end up being some sort of input at some point and like if you have any other future examples of what you guys plan on building these connected systems around yeah I can give a couple of examples but let me answer your first question

“which was like where does it end and and I really think that if we get this right there should”

be no end because some of the objectives have such nuanced use cases and that that's been one of the issues building and scaling such a product is like how do you build something that scales across all these different advertisers who have such different needs you have larger that has a pretty nuanced needs you have smaller there's just trying to drive performance really quickly and how do you how do you capture of this well the good news is now with AI you don't you don't

have to worry about some of these more nuanced use cases because the system can actually interpret

a lot of these nuanced schools quite accurately and of course update is always there to help

us if it's not perfect and so I think the answer to your first question is hopefully the system is not limited you can go for it with whatever goal you have and the more nuanced it is the more Tesla system would be built towards it and I think your second question was examples of it I think one example that we hear about a lot me and give a couple of different ones one is a value optimization and commotion optimization and how should I think about that all of

advertisers like you how do you get that balance right between you call it B and C or internally how do you get that balance right well we want you to be able to express your goals express your numerical goals if the rewards goal if the constraint goal and let the system decide

is inefficient it just changes your time based on you know your goals and so that's kind of

the direction that we eventually want to go another example that comes to mind is creative today one problem that a lot of advertisers tell us about is how do I structure a campaign so all of my creatives get a fair distribution of impressions how do I allocate budget to each one of these different ads in the net sets and and one of the features that we're working on is this idea of making it very easy for advertisers to give us all of their creatives at one goal

and we'll be able to get them fair distribution, allocate the right amount of budget tell them what's

“working and what's not working and I think we're going to touch upon this a little bit during”

creative studio but that's another example by the system can do a lot without any constraints

one of the reasons I'm really excited for like this more nuanced goal feature is too actually one is

I think the ability to optimize between like multiple different product lines and product categories will be like industry defining in a way I do think so much of like direct response D to C brands as we know them is defined by met as extremely good ability to acquire a certain type of conversion and I think we'd look at some of like the D to C Darling for a long time they were like relatively myopic and what they were selling and there aren't a lot of examples of like

huge category expansions from these brands online and I think part of that comes down to the Meta Mediavine so I don't have a question around that aside from I'm extremely excited about it well my question is actually I've been on the soapbox recently about my job as a CM of Ridge is not just to drive conversions at a certain target on a seven day click attributable window like a lot of my job is to generate someone who will purchase in the future and so we've talked

a lot about signal engineering and it's like what event what can we be optimizing for so that we can tell Meta hey we want someone on our site who has become interested in Ridge now and the way that we've done that is like you know we'll optimize for certain types of PDP views multiple page views add to cart some people will do this idea that it's made more top of funnel and we're introducing people to the brand by having a more upper funnel event I'm curious from your perspective like

what that might look like for advertisers over time who are optimizing for events that are going to happen far off in the future I think it truly comes down to the kinds of signals that you

“would share with us in the metrics that are most important to you I think ultimately our system is”

going to work based on what is important to you so you know you take the it's something is really importantly that's going to it's an event that's going to happen same many months from now or it's our repeat purchases it's description something of that's what which is just going to happen one time the more signal that we get from you on how that's working the mobile optimized towards it but I think the bigger question that you're asking is are are the number of goals that you

can optimize towards finite or is there a system in the future which can optimize towards a myriad of goals as long as you're able to actually accurately measure them and share them with us

I think the answer is yes I think that that's precisely the direction we want one to take

our automation products and advantage plus the ability to be able to handle all of these different goals and different metrics is probably going to be the the path to address some of these these types of views cases totally and that feels like the common theme here is like moving away from the execution operation layer and to the let's define what signals do we care about over some time frame feeding those systems or feeding those signals back to meta so that it can optimize

for what is truly along with our business you know the difference between hitting your numbers and missing them clear signal on what's actually driving growth it can get really really noisy there's so much noise you got platform data you got blended data mm m m all the acronyms MTA experiments all of it all pointing in different directions the more you're spending the fast

“you move the more the bad signal can cost you that's why we use house and we've been using it”

for years that's why the other marketing operators do as well they're the best tool on plan earth for measuring what we call incrementality which we talk about a lot on a podcast what is the true impact of your advertising dollars on your business we have causal m m for channel level budget calls causal attribution down to the add level and architect their AI agent tells you exactly where your next dollar should go and the results speak for themselves stockic saw 41% lift in i-ros using

house and you're not stuck with a help desk you get an embedded measurement strategy to actual help strategic better decisions their whole team is great we've worked with a lot of them they are world class there go to house dot i-o slash operators h-a-u-s dot i-o slash operators and start backing your budget calls with real causal data okay so you brought up um creative which i'm super excited jump in on years have the ads creative studio which is kind of just getting rolled out

we've all done product demos around it many people listening won't have experimented too much so how would you describe what ads creative studio is okay awesome super excited talk about this

hey we know a lot about our brands but what we don't really know well enough or we don't have access to is what works on matters systems and platforms what works in different um in different surfaces of what works with different users and we just don't have that insight because we don't have that

“insight creative and creative testing is become a chore you have to test so many different”

creative it's expensive it's time consuming it's a lot of coordination between different teams and we're not you know getting like a really clean answer and a solution and so really creative

studio is designed to solve all of these problems at first you know i'm going to talk about a few

features but one of the underpinnings of creative studios is the idea of sharing creative insights for what works and what doesn't work when we're shared with with with advertisers along with very relevant benchmarks so that they can they can get a feel of whether their performances in line with expectations in line with where they should be or whether they should be aspiring to do more um these insights are also going to come with very simple one-click

generation so you can visualize what applying that insight to a creative wood look like and the cool part about it is they can edit the generated assets right there or if they feel like hey um i'm going to take it back to my creative team and work with them a little bit they can do

“that too because we have some collaboration features built into studio another cool thing about”

studio that we're pretty excited about and it goes back to this earlier theme that we've been talking

about about capturing inputs and and building on top of it is this idea of brand memory brand memory really is a feature which allows advertisers to be able to talk about their brand and share all of their inputs about their brand with us in matter and they can do it with structured data examples are logos, fonts, all of that good stuff but you can even have unstructured data about voice don't things that things that makes sense for your brand and things that you want to

keep building in your brand and it's contextual so it persists it loans it keeps improving and it's going to keep improving generation quality as you add more and more input um and the last feature and I do want to talk about this a little bit because it's a complaint that advertisers have spoken about a lot is creative testing so you know a lot of advertisers tell us that like hey

there are solutions out there which help me understand whether a particular creative is better than

another one but I don't I don't know for you about that I just want to give you all of my creatives and you guys tell me what's winning what's not winning and take it from there and so creative studio is going to have creative testing in world where advertisers can just give us all of the creatives we can tell them what's winning we can even give them a budget recommendation for what they need to truly test it we'll tell them what's winning what's not winning where we don't have sufficient

data because it's not yet converged and they can set benchmarks for what they think is of an creative they can set different metrics CTR goals is an example and we'll be able to manage the delivery system to make it work and one last I would say a technical enhancement that we're making through creative studio is one problem a lot of advertisers tell us is like hey I'll when I test a particular creative it does awesome but then when I move it to my campaign

the performance just stops and part of that is this historical context and that data not moving through perfectly not system and it's one of the features that we've been working on for the last few years and we're pretty excited to introduce through creative studio weather performance will persist so you know of course subject to all of the the competition and marketplace and all of those good things all of those signals that you've acquired in one

particular creative will translate to your to your subsequent campaigns so super excited about studio I'm glad that you guys got to review it and and play around with that hopefully you guys expected yeah and nobody mentioned the persistent learnings at the creative level also industry defining we probably 40% of our jobs are figuring out how to do creative testing properly and it sounds like maybe we're that's getting solved in some way well we actually used to joke

like we could do like multiple podcasts just on creative testing like account structures because we've tried so many different ones and as you said it's been a big problem or it's like oh if I put this in the same campaign yes it'll store learnings but it might not get spend compared to the ones that are out you know that have all this data if I put it in its own one maybe it'll get spend maybe I don't want to do that and for spend in waste spend but I'll get

learnings but then yeah I can either scale it up in there and now I have all these account

“campaigns I'm not taking advantage of it or I put it over and lose it so I think that'll be”

that'll be really exciting one as well and I think just a the interconnectedness of all of the stuff together is really cool because I would imagine there's some type of a loop where it's learning and then auto generating as well yeah I'm precisely I think of it as a you praise it really well but think of it as a 5-bit right like with the insights are kind of motivating the generations the generations lead to more using engagement better performance that's been the 5-bit on the next

insight and so on and so forth so yeah super excited about that and just you know a point on this is like the complexity and creative it's a really hard problem because on one hand this goes back

so long to solve this problem is you're kind of balancing these trade-offs between fair exploration and things like that which quite budgets with giving advertisers really had performance where you can imagine that the models will gravitate towards a few creatives that are really performing and that's kind of the trade-off and that the challenge that we've been working on solving totally so Cody you did the demo of ad creative studio what were some of your like

initial thoughts and takeaways. Number one I think I was actually one of the earlier

“people that saw something like if I remember the name of like three years ago I think it was like”

A.I. Sandbox or something like that it was like when it was like early one right and it's just crazy to like think on just like the progression of it right and I think that's number one is like even with Janet Jen A. and now when I got wings we're doing a lot of it right like it's gotten so good and it's gotten so much better but it's also not perfect right and like for some brands and advertisers it might not live up to the standard but at some point it will and it is

getting like scary good really quick and it's been really cool to just like play with but you know right now I'm hacking together multiple systems you know you'll have your analysis skills you'll have your agents things like that then you have to upload them and like having having the ability to have it all in one place I think is really cool and really awesome be able to generate a learning right and then or an insight and have to system create an insight hey add to have this are performing

this much better and then it just goes in makes it and then you're just hitting a prove on it is like that's every advertisers dream you know and then you can spend more time on you don't have to spend as much time uploading ads are already up there things like that and you can spend more time on like you know we talk about like the exploration like net new ideas right just like that stuff that yes that's a creative thing but it's really not that creative of a thing it's really a little bit more

“like a administrative thing and so I think it's cool and it's just removing a lot of those like”

little bottlenecks and allowing like media buyers to actually do more of the creative themselves which I think is cool yeah all right this ad is technically a job posting for neon pixel but but stay with me here neon pixel is hiring performance marketers people who actually get in mentality they understand hold out the understand triangulation and really that's the entire pitch because when you sign with neon pixel these are the marketers that are running your ctv strategy

we've been with neon pixel at hexclif for three years now and they really do work like an extension of our team live on real living room TV and days helping with creative strategy same day and card swabs and measurement read in our stack not just some black box dashboard that we don't really

understand have insights into and that's ultimately what a managed service looks like when it's

staff I real operators and real marketers so whether you want to work on the sharpest ctv accounts in dtc or you want that team running yours go to neonpixel.co slash careers to apply I told you before we started recording I had almost a sort of existential crisis as a marketer I was like this is it's too clear to me how good this can become and we did the demo in our account and there are like obviously points of improvement when it comes to like product accuracy

or like building out the brand memory like you mentioned but there's just no data my mind at six or 12 months from now like we won't be able to do in enormous amount of we would call it creative exploitation let's take what's working in the account now and quickly iterate and launch that and it feels like what used to be many humans or to Cody's point hack together AI systems will just sort of happen out of the box within the ads manager yeah yeah totally and you know

we spoke about this a little bit but you know when you think of generation quality and yeah I agree this this is so much opportunity like keep making improvements but I had to think of it as like two separate kinds of problems right like the forces like the AI tech itself I would say two three years ago it was still evolving it was not there but you look at it now and improvements are

“very very observable it's it's it's so much so much better and I think we've just crashed itself”

it's going to be a lot lot better shortly I think the second part when when we usually see defects

in generation it's because we don't get the right input from advertisers and that is because we are not providing them the right tools to be able to get that input and then our systems are not able to use those inputs for generation and and so I was joking with you about this earlier but you know what we've seen is when we sit down with an advertiser and work with our creative or AI tools for generation we able to come up with some pretty cool creators now how do we do

the set scale is a problem we're going to solve feels like another very common theme to me this has been very true for a while but like meta works best when advertisers understand what information that needs and they give it that information and I do think we were spoiled a bit eight or nine years ago when there were there was less competition on the platforms consumers the ad experience was more novel you just had people more excited about buying things online

and discovering products via Instagram and as it's become more competitive like advertisers have

had to have gotten better and over the course of that time it's always been about well how do I

give it the information that it needs and it just feels like maybe the platform is more formally supporting that whether that's the value expression point or the inputs around inventory in the

Yeah I think you put it really well before when you said this is like a little bit of a connected problem like you've been solving these problems but maybe you've been solving them in kind of

“different locations and different levels I think it's it's all coming together now and kind of”

one place where advertisers are able to give us that input I think that's going to make it so much easier for them 100% um Connor what was your sort of initial impression with the ad's creative studio? Yeah well I think most I know for sure at Hacksquad and probably most E to C brands like our most our biggest budget outside of aspend is content production and our our biggest team and our biggest allocation of salary to team is producing ads it is you know across production

creative strategy like it's just the hardest biggest fly we'll to always keep running so my first

take was the my first thought was like wow these insights are really good um I think you know we have weekly often multiple meetings per week where we're looking at performance of recently launched ads in scale ads and we are making manual no sort of discussions or whatever about hey why is this working why is this not working and what do we want to do because of it that's a very time intensive thought exercise and again especially when you're launching hundreds of ads every week you have to be doing

that a lot and I think that was the first thing I noticed that I thought wow this is going to be really powerful to operationalize around because now we can come in here and a lot of that why is being answered by by the the creative studio and probably a more robust way than a human being could and now that team can go and focus on doing something about it and I think I agree with you

like the creative gen for us wasn't quite there yet but this was also like the literally the first

time we were in platform we haven't given it all the the information and access to some of our raw assets so I think it it will get there but even right now two day I think it just empowers teams

“to focus on like producing more ads but in a thoughtful way because I think the the worst thing you want”

to be doing is like not leaning into the why enough and then you're you're producing ads and a non-informed way I guess and I just felt like that insights tool two days is something that teams could be operationalized around in weekly by weekly where every week you're going in running your new ads through it having good reasons behind why things are or not working and then that will guide the next sprint whether that's a week or a month or two weeks whatever it is that

that caught my right away and I think that's insanely powerful tool I think the creative general

will get there I think we have a very challenging product for it but right away like I think we're going to be getting way more productivity out of our creative strategy team because they have a tool like this that can give those insights and a more just detailed way yeah I am super excited to hear that you guys all like the product and interacted with it and find the

“insights useful I think I'm sure you guys will be excited here like the team is working very very hard”

on getting new features out every week so even between the time you guys probably saw the feature to what it is now it's changed quite a bit and so we expect to like keep investing in it and investing in new insights so you know the one other thing I will say on creative studios one problem that we've been trying to solve the lot and you know we were talking to an advertiser about this a couple of weeks ago is this this this kind of this lag between when a a media buyer

reviews data and ads manager looks at that data and comes to conclusion shares of the creative team the creative team comes up with new concept they brainstorm about it and then they bring a new creative back into matter and that time can be really really long and one of the things we've been trying to solve with creative studios decreasing that time so one example of an advertiser that we has been working with us on our on our only test for creative studio we're

just talking about how like now we have these visualizations which are contextualized to a creative team as well as a media buyer and they can look at that data together and they can look at those creative together and it's brought that time down to in in this advertiser's case like an hour but if it's more complex generations I can still imagine that time decreasing a lot and so that that's another super exciting part of this product which is like how can we bring these two

teams together and decrease that time we've talked about that quite a bit at rich just with all of the automation available today whether it's within ads manager or other places like it feels like our big advantage is if we understand what we're trying to do we can get it done quicker and we can come to more informed decisions faster and act faster and it's just that acceleration that will really benefit from independent of like you know all the other efficiencies that we

can get it's like just a it's just a time component exactly and it's that time component that can add so much complexity to that right if you're trying to like go really fast that's when it starts to get extremely complicated across all of your different campaigns and products so yeah hopefully all of these products they would have like helped solve these problems.

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The other thing that really stood out to me about the creative studio was sort of meta explicitly unearthing some of the conner said insights but it felt like even more than that like one thing that happens within that's creative studio now is like ads are grouped and you guys are deciding hey these five or six or seven ads have a similar sort of message and it's

this message that's working and that was always done like I it felt like that was supposed to be

derived from the marketer or by the marketer I'm supposed to be looking at what's performing and sort of coming to my own conclusions and we haven't often had examples of medicine I'm thinking about these sort of collectively it feels related to the creative diversity point which is another one that has been preached for a long time to marketers but we haven't always had the explicit tools to understand whether our diverse is thought or our creative is thought of

as diverse by meta yeah so this felt like a little bit more visibility into like what meta wants which I found really refreshing oh yeah absolutely exactly heard that you know you can think of it as the way we think about it and don't like is like they're kind of exposing our internal delivery systems advertisers and saying hey this is what works meta like this is what's going to get trying to

hire and this is this is what's really performed and the cool thing about it is it's it's not static

right what works really may not work tomorrow day after or or three weeks from now and trends change constantly and so like a huge part of creative studios getting these refreshed insights to you guys as fast as possible because that makes it so much easier to just act on these trends which are changing and get ahead of the core totally the last thing I kind of want to dive in around with ad creative studio is this workflow that you talked about insights to ideas to generation

to launching to testing to more insights and like that flywheel that's being built and ad creative studio is an example of this like full connected system that you guys are building and supporting and I'm curious if you can tell us any more examples of like what other parts of the media buying process or the Facebook ads buying process that that might have a similar sort of workflow yeah this is of course not start but I'd love to talk a little bit about kind of

“the evolution of advantage plus as well because I think eventually all of these different products”

are all going to come together right like you think of creative studio you think of advantage plus today you think of some of the problems we spoke of before which is like hey I want to I want to capture some of your goals and all that good stuff and in our view all of these are going to come together in the the in the future of the North Star of advantage plus and we can envision this product which is really simplified to ideas was to use they can add their goals

completely unconstrained structured unstructured whatever form of expression that works for you shared with us and it need not even be campaigns specific it can be across a group of campaigns that typically have a similar objective a lot of advantages is tell us that he I don't actually manage a campaign I manage a portfolio of campaigns and and so they can give us that expression in the form of a portfolio they can give us that explicit goals through a star gets margins whatever whatever works

for them they can and then and then and we use those in in the product we run every decision by them we say okay this is the next decision we want to make we are thinking of moving budget series that okay with you guys it's not okay with you can make sense some of these creatives are

“look like they are for digging you should go to create a studio you should look at some insights and”

refresh it you know something of that sort and we also envision this product being coming with in-built diagnostic capabilities because a lot of advantages are that times you do see performance change and diagnosing why performance changes is another task today you want to make that simple we want to make it so simple that I'm just going to just reach out to the iSystem and ask the iSystem to actually diagnose what's wrong with a campaign or what's wrong with a group of campaigns

and come up with some resolutions if the resolutions are not very clear we also want to make it really easy for everyday users to be able to change their goals because maybe the goal is a little impractical and they don't want to give up on a bunch of conversions because the goal is to high and that helps them kind of regulate and modulate that goal and then of course it comes back to reports and insights which get generated in studio of all of this good stuff that's happening

and then it spins the flywheel again and so eventually we envision hopefully in a new future advantage plus I'm creative studio all coming together this new product yeah it's really exciting

if we think about more examples of common workflows that happen within a ddc brand I do think this idea around like we could go to incrementality testing whether it's with conversion lift studies or geolift studies informing strategies and then sort of like building out the system around that

“it was like that's what a lot of our brands are doing today so I'm curious you're perspective as you”

hear us talk through it now about how you might be implementing things like this yeah I think the the two biggest changes I'll say in the last you know a few years are obviously the media buying stuff getting more automated and the media buyers job changing to a lot of I would say it's creative insights is number one like to me any growth person media buyer like they're not just a media buyer like you have to be analyzing creative you don't have to be the person making it you don't have to be briefing

it I would love them for to be doing it but they have to be like driving the strategy in the insights

that's probably like one of the most important feedback loops um and again like Connor said like

there's weekly meetings for that there's often daily communications like there's just a lot that goes involved with that um there's also the table-stick stuff like there's even like you know add operations is like I mean we're launching thousands of creative so month at some time like that is a behemoth sometimes and takes often or in the past people to manage um that's not a good use of anybody's time I don't care like even a junior person and so like that's just

“table stakes and freeze people up to do better things um I think then definitely like a big”

focus is figuring out what works in our account because we're testing all of these things and because we're in disruptors we're often we're often testing things early and is it via or is it co or is a combination of them but like what is actually driving performance on our account where our businesses today because we'll find something that works uh I'll give you an example like we had a lot of success with we were obviously struggling to reach new people and I know bridge had you know

some similar tests and things and we changed things where we were less focused on one click uh our one day click or you know last click attribution and we actually accepted a lower row aspect we found in that cell in our income utility test like we were actually driving much better incremental returns right we were driving more real delivery which we think correlated with better search and direct and just these different things that didn't show up so like that I think is still

a huge huge focus is strategically structuring our account to our business goals um and I want as much time as my team can can spend there and it's good very nuanced to our business and it's not just what's our best row us today um and it's the thing is it's constantly changing like we made some changes to our exclusions and stuff like that and it was a great idea at the time happened month later it actually like tanked performance a little bit and when we changed and

we were heard it back so I need a I need people focused on that but be if there are a way to get a lot say automated insights right hey this has crept up or whatever it is like there was just so many different metrics that could go wrong or go right that if there I I sleep a lot better at night knowing that there's a system who's kind of looking at them and diagnosing them and it has

“truth so I think those are extremely important um and then obviously like the whole just creative”

you know flywheel creative feedback thing is is pretty much everything you know and so that's

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no it's funny because really the two things that could be described I think are what we spend to 85% of our time on something like that the media buying workflow of strategically aligning your not only your ad account but like all of the channels that you're running along and then the offline workflow of deriving insights developing hypothesis generating content launching those one more question I had a lot of what I'm hearing especially as it relates to the ad's creative studios

I described it earlier as creative exploitation identifying what's working in continuing to explore those ideas in new ways and it feels to me that as meta formally builds out systems to sort of contain more of this like iterative process that marketers spend so much time working on that their time will be best spent introducing new ideas and at Ridge we would refer to that as creative

like you know weird memes that we want to reference or just ideas or maybe I heard a podcast and it's like

it's really like sort of blank slate net new approach and I'm curious if you see that becoming a larger percentage of a marketer's role or is there a future where meta begins introducing maybe net new explorative concepts that aren't necessarily rooted in the exact insights that might be

“you know getting derived from the account yeah it's a really good question I think it's going to”

be a little bit of both so I think meta is going to share insights based on what is performing because that's the idea that we have that's going to be most relevant I think the the work that you spoke of the brain storming the really coming up with an insight which is novel and it's not something that our systems have seen anyone has seen is the is the part that we still want

right that that's in fact if anything will become more important so that's going to keep happening

will we suggest some themes to explore where you can take your brand absolutely but we expect those to be starting points for you to build on top of not even execution back end of Q3 beginning of Q4 you have brands they start freaking out they are oh my my customer acquisition costs the way up my row as is down my conversion rates down like what's going on here and you know if you don't have I mean you know I'm in my like fifth cycle at hex clats like you you understand the natural trends

in your consumers intent but when you talk to these whether it's a media buyer or a founder they start there and then they go into all the different things they've tried over to try to consolidate and we're trying you know one day click instead of seven day click we're trying lowest cost instead of value and clearly these people have just been like really spinning their wheels trying to like get their at account back to where it was and maybe a higher intent time and in reality it's nothing

that is wrong with meta it's nothing that's wrong with their offer or what they're doing in their business it's just the natural trend of consumer intent and every brand every product category has this natural I've been flow that like brands really have to adhere to like you can't really make your highest intent buying season in October like you're not gonna you're not gonna buck the

trend of consumer intent and I always tell these people and guys just wait like you're in September

and October like it's gonna come around like I was talking to this it was a Judaism based jewelry brand where they had like scripture on the drill it's really cool product but like it's jewelry like classic end of year like high purchase gift and I'm like guys just wait like it's it's gonna come

“I think you're spinning your wheels here and sure enough you know they they give you a text”

at the end of them and then if I'm like all things are going great we're doing it we're doing fantastic but the question always becomes like how many hours did you waste trying to rebuild the at account or like get back on track when in reality you just need to like ride the trend and set your expectations differently so all that to say when you're talking about trends here and like pulling that into meta I think that is going to be so helpful so brands can like get out of

their own vacuum and understand like is the performance of my business trending with other brands like are we at above or below and I think there's a lot of just inherent what do we do next based on that like if if you know your conversion right from that is down 15% but overall in aggregate the the industry is down 20% well there's really nothing for you to do you're actually performing above average there when if you didn't have that comparable data you might start freaking out and

rebuilding the at account every day and doing things that are really a waste of time if you knew how the trend was overall so is that kind of where meta's going like you talked about pulling in like benchmark data like is that what you're referring to yeah absolutely actually you'll see this in creative studio itself and creative studio will will provide benchmarks for agitizers to be able to gauge whether their creative is in line with expectations within their category or subcategory

or not and as well as actions that they can take to improve their performance and it anything that's that's really useful a lot that there's been asking us for these features and it's precisely to address that particular problem that the youth spoken of which is you know marketing and advertising is cyclical it's seasonal and and how should they think about their performance given a period of time I will say that like where to eventually close the loop on on kind of sharing

benchmarks and insights is providing very clear diagnosis of where we feel something is maybe off and some actions need to be taken versus something is just an opportunity to do even better

“and those are two very different things that I like so I think eventually they're not star that's”

what you will also see in addition to these benchmarks but I think benchmarks is definitely a starting point I think it's just one of the most valuable things in the of these platforms that have access to all this data from different brands can do you know you're seeing you know you guys are obviously investing in it but you see you know north beam doing

ban you know no commerce does it and it's just it's you talk you hear a lot of people talk about

“that we're at the agency and then go brand side but the one thing they often miss the most”

and I miss this too is having access to hundred Shopify accounts so I can go and see how is account a performing versus all the other brands that we have in our portfolio here like you really do end up in a vacuum at times and it can be lonely and in challenging to like decipher you know you're like looking around without any any contact so that context is just really valuable for brands we talk a lot about cack on this show you can't control what meta charges you

but you can control what happens after someone lands on your site that's where our sponsor after sell comes in helping you make every visitor worth more from cart offers and one click post purchase upsells to subscription upgrades and here's the best part rock thanks turns your

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earnings also offset your after sell subscription dollar for dollar and you get to keep your entire payout had to after sell dot com slash earn dash save to see what after sell could unlock for your business and how you could get the entire software for zero dollars a month. You know hopefully we can keep building on that providing different benchmarks out for data and the one thing I would add to that is in addition to benchmarks you know one of the

things that we are investing heavily and as the ability for our today is supposed to be

“able to specify their specific metrics which are most important to them and eventually be able”

to get more more data related to that commitment because that that also varies a lot for different artists sometimes was only one click through rate that's that's all they care about others are more very specific about draws and they care about that and so we want to be able to get that nuance in addition to benchmark so it is really contextualizes performance cool so where I want to take this is to talk about like agentic media buying so we we've talked about

one meta supporting inputs from advertisers in order to build connected systems so that things like media buying or the creative flywheel can become more automated over time at what point does it become meta acting on it on or like how how are you thinking about like what agentic media buying for the meta ad platform looks like it's a really good question so the mental model we have is our automation products are kind of anchored in two or three principles which

we build on top of rate the first is this idea of transparency what would be found is if this is our far more willing to engage with us and give us more freedom to make decisions if they know what decision we are planning to make and how it works kind of show us the math right like that's the first bug in creative you can imagine in expression of that being previews for all our products so they can clearly see what we're going to render so think of

that as the first principle of transparency the other being this concept of control right like

it's it's one thing for me to tell you I'm going to do this but it's even more powerful for you to

be able to make sure that you agree and accept each and every change before we make it and so we want to make sure that we do that or if you don't want us to run many decisions by you because there are too many you can't even ask us to like make those decisions for you but that's again the advertiser that's like kind of prompting us to make those decisions last a last kind of principle is reporting and so if we are making all these decisions which you have asked

us to make you do want to see the performance of those decisions you do want to see how they're performing is it meaning your expectations is not meaning expectations so as long as we are we are building our product on on this type of on on this framework and this system I imagine it's going to be automation which is which automation without losing control and in that world it's not not not a solution where updated is just like giving up control and there's some system that's

doing something and they have no knowledge of it so I don't I don't think we're going in that

“direction I think the direction we are actually going towards is putting advertisers more and more”

in control of their products right I think that makes total sense um one of the like interactions that I often have with my team is like we'll review the data like going back to this idea of the the flywheel or the the common workflow is like we'll we'll do some sort of review hey this with the numbers looked like last year um this is what our plan would be if we were to continue business as usual but there's often the instance where I say hey you know like it is October right

now we're going into Q4 let's get more aggressive with our goals let's you know drive up brand awareness will I would imagine meta has to be thinking about how to intake those like more subjective decisions that have found or a CMO or a brand marketer might have yeah absolutely and you know I would say that's cross creative as well as just campaign creation as a whole because a lot of the problems that use book off uh creative is it's definitely one part but media buying in general campaign

structures uh goals which vary by product skills like that's one of the top requests in fact that be your balance so yeah that's absolutely the direction that the future of a genetic kind of buying

solutions it feels to me like a little bit of like a chicken in the egg and same thing with like

“any like a AI agents or coding system where it's like actually giving more control up front”

or more context up front is actually like how you lean into the automation more and almost contrast that it's done properly and so that's like hooking up your connectors having you know like a like a AI coding thing like hooking up your connectors having your your goals and your

rules and way to verify then you can like almost trust that when you do go a little bit more hands

off it's like got the right inputs so it's not going to make decisions or as your info is that like the same here where it's like value rules or things like that whatever a brand can provide actually

“like almost gives them the confidence and again you can prove stuff if you want to but hopefully”

I can give you the confidence that you don't need to be as involved yeah precisely I think the

data fundamentals catalogue information uh pick so capy um you know any value rules value expressions

all of that stuff that that just helps kind of go on the yeah yeah so all these things are kind of coming together that like brands might not perceive as like actually connected things and it's like oh you have a value real here whatever but it's like all really important part of the same system exactly okay so you said two things I want to dive in on quickly you said catalogue and capy and like my question is going to be how marketers today can sort of future proof there they're marketing

programs so that they can be as AI native as possible as metabildethy systems and my understanding is it really comes back to catalogue and capy so maybe you could just expand on why something like investing in your catalogue and the information allows meta to build a more you know high functioning

“system yeah I think you know in the simplest sense the catalogue is the best art best understanding”

of your product your skew and we go back to this idea that a lot of advertisers have different goals which vary by product type well it's going to be very hard for us to be able to ask the right right questions of our advertisers and then use it in our systems without really understanding those product details so the product kind of really is that best representation of product skews and that helps and everything from just how we manage our delivery in which creative and which act to show

to all the way to our ranking systems so the more more information we have the better we want to help our advertisers perfect all right so what listeners can take away with here is dive in ad's creative studio begin automating your creative workflow and begin enriching your catalogue we've got great next steps Nick thanks for coming on over super fun thank you it's a pleasure