Episode 260: Creative Is the New Currency: Winning Smart Marketer Ad Strategies for 2026

Hey, Star Marketers, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Anthony, Creative Producer here at Star Marketer. And until this episode, you'll hear from our CEO, Molly Pittman, as she breaks down the most important meta-ad strategies you need to know to stay competitive in 2026. This session is packed with tactical insights from dozens of ad accounts we manage across Swarmarketer and our agency. Molly covers what's changed inside the meta-platform, how to approach creative in the meta and drama-data era, and what's working right now when it comes to structure, messaging, and media-biting strategy. If you're running pay traffic or getting ready to, this episode will help you simplify your approach, boost performance, and make smarter creative decisions from day one. Let's get into it. But first, here's a quick message from our founder, Ezra Firestone, about a tool we use, Omni Send. Hey, Ezra here with a quick note. You may not know this, but I just bought a new company. And you know what the very first thing I did was get them set up on Omni Send. I migrated them to Omni Send. That's how much I trust that platform to drive email and SMS performance. You know, it's like Omni Send isn't as well known as some of the other brands out there, but I really believe in what they're doing. Not just the product, but the people behind it. Their support team is next level. And the platform gives my brands everything they need to drive real growth. So if you haven't heard about Omni Send for email and SMS, I think you're really going to love them when it comes to comparing them to other things out there. Check them out. They're offering a special deal to smart marketer subscribers. So you can go to smartmarketer.com/omni send. And you can use the coupon code smart to get 50% off your first three months. I don't think you're going to find a better platform that's going to help you get set up and integrated and optimized. So go check them out smartmarketer.com/omni send. Use the coupon code smart for 50% off your first three months. Thanks for listening. What's up everybody? Hello, hello, how's it going? Today's episode is all about meta ads. So whether you're a beginner or you're advanced and you've been rocking and rolling on this platform like me since 2012, there is something in this presentation for everybody. And what's exciting is this stuff is constantly changing, but I really haven't seen a shift with meta ads as significant as we've seen in the last year versus the last 14 years. So there's always something exciting changing. There are always new features, but fundamentally there is a completely new way to buy media on meta that was not available to us a year plus a go. So we're going to be talking about the old school way of doing things and how that still works in some of our accounts. And we're going to be talking about the new school way of doing things, the end drama it away, which is a fun galaxy. So we're about to cover a really cool stat that one of our meta reps shared with us at our event last October in Denver. That's really going to shift the way that you think of meta ads in 2026. We're going to talk about what has changed, especially during the summer of 2025 up until now January of 2026. We're going to look at the new structure, what meta is recommending, what is working in about half of our accounts, but we're also going to show you other approaches because as you guys know, there is no one way to do this stuff. There are best practices, there's information that meta puts out, and then there's what actually works in the sandbox. And the sandbox are the 30 plus accounts that we are running every single day in different markets, different business types so that we can actually tell you what is working. And I will say it is different in each account, but there are some underlying principles that are the same across the board. All right, the first part of this is the really cool stat that I told you came from Sammy at meta. And she calls this the creative cost multiplier, the 50% creative cost multiplier. And essentially what this means going into 2026, if you have really good creative, which we'll talk about what that means later in the show, meta will actually subsidize your cost up to 50%. So when we're talking about CPM, CPA, all of these numbers, of course, factor into things like cost per click and ultimately the row as that you're seeing on the platform. So what this means is the better your creative, which we know is the future currency. It is the currency of success on meta nowadays. You can pay up to 50% less than your competitor when it comes to your ad traffic. This just has to do with creative. So if you have really bad creative that's not well thought out, you are haphazardly using AI. You are not thinking about foundational marketing principles. You could be paying 50% more than your competition that is actually doing creative right. And this is straight from meta and I love that they even use the word subsidize. It really shows how much they are weighing the success of the creative and how much the creative plays into who your ads are being shown to really down to very small details that we're going to cover. So 50% decrease possible with really good creative or you could think about it as a 50% penalty on your ad costs without solid creative. And as most of you know and we've covered a bit on the show, creative is the new targeting on meta. Have you guys seen the 2016 trend on social media looking back 10 years, people are sharing what was going on in their life in 2016. I think it's pretty cool to look back. It's also funny how fuzzy the pictures are. We were all taking in 2016. But I looked back 2016 to a podcast that I had at the time and what I was talking about on that podcast when it came to meta ads and like 80% of the podcast was all about targeting and different strategies for finding really obscure interests. And that was the conversation 10 years ago. And that can still come into play a little bit as we'll talk about later, but it's honestly could not be more opposite nowadays. I think 2016 Molly would be very sad about this, but that used to be my favorite topic. But creative is the new targeting when we think about who we want to reach and how we want to scale. All of that needs to be reflected in the targeting versus what we are actually telling meta. Now a lot of you guys know this, but meta is indexing things like ad copy, your thumbnails, your video content to try to figure out who they should target with your ads. We are going to have a free course in February that you guys are going to love all about meta ads. And part of that is going to be a really cool matrix that we just built that shows you guys how you can optimize your creatives to give meta more of these positive signals so that they know how to scale your campaigns. They're even looking at things like accents. How quickly does the person speak or how slowly does the person speak? What region does that best line up with in the area in which you are targeting? This isn't just what is the age of the person or they have a dog in the videos so we should show this to dog owners. This is so nuanced guys. It's so nerdy. It really, really blows my mind, but it's also exciting. And this doesn't just include the creative you're uploading. This is also the Facebook page in which you are running ads from. We just had a big conversation. We're launching a new e-com brand this year in the pet space. And the conversation was okay. The Molly Pittman Facebook page back to 2012 has always targeted marketers. And we now take this Facebook page and enter the pet space. What will meta think about this? Will this change the results for smart marketer? What will this mean for this new brand? So this isn't just about the creative. This is about the other assets that meta can see even on the inconsumers standpoint. Even from their side, what they're browsing, what they're looking at, how long they watch specific videos. So this isn't just about the assets that we give meta. It's also about watch time. Of course, click behavior, what they are or aren't doing on the side in which they click to. And how long they watch the videos and what is the substance of that particular video, even if it's an organic video on a Facebook page. So all of the strategy that goes into the who and the avatars and marketing 101 that we know is so important. One of our senior media buyers, Attila, today on our mastermind called mentor table, he showed how he was able to take a brand from two to five and then $10 million within a year by just scaling to different avatars and what we needed to do, what we needed in order to get those results was not necessarily a really complex complex campaign structure in meta. We've really needed new creative and new verbiage that was going to speak to those groups of people. So creative is the new targeting. Okay. This just in. This is where we share what we think is the most exciting news in this space. And we actually changed it. We had something different, but there was a really big announcement a few days ago that has our entire team and community talking and us figuring out how the heck we're going to jump on this wagon. And I'm sure a lot of you have seen this, but chat GPT ads will be rolling out in 2026. So last year we got app 11 ads, axon, whatever you want to call that. That is a paid traffic platform that we are scaling in a big way in 2026. We'll be doing a show all about app 11 here in a few months. And now as a gift to all of us marketers out here on the internet, we are now going to have the opportunity to run ads via chat GPT. These are our estimates, but late January, early February, we should, if you are a free user of chat GPT, start to get this ad experience. So I need to create a separate chat GPT account where I'm actually able to see what this ad experience is going to be like. We do not believe it will be similar to Google where someone searches a keyword and then they are shown a particular product. I think that's too basic for chat GPT. I think that that would really infuriate users. We think that this will be more like a meta or Instagram experience that is contextual. Chat GPT, these different tools have so much information on us way more than meta does at this point. So they will be able to contextually make recommendations based off of things like interests or concerns and any information that we're giving these particular platforms. So we should start to see these ads as consumers over the next month. Then of course they will go into limited beta testing. This will probably be with huge brands like Walmart and Target, not us. We don't think we'll probably get access to this until Q3. We believe that the ad platform, if it is successful, will be fully launched for everyone by Q4. It seems as though a chat GPT and the parent company is in quite the financial spot right now. So it would be very smart of them to launch this before Q4, which you guys know is the quarter with the most spend. So this is an exciting time. We will be doing a show in a few months once we know more. We do have information on what the placements are going to look like. I don't have time to show that to you here in this particular episode, but get ready. This is going to be the next meta. I think in 10 years, I will be sitting here on the smart market or show sharing best practices with on chat on chat GPT ads and other platforms that have to do with AI. So get ready. There are some tactical things that we'll cover in a few months that you can do to get prepared. Just when it comes to the technical structure of your site, it's very similar to old school SEO practices, but there are some more organic things you can be doing right now to start to prepare for this moment and to start to improve how you show up in a E O search. So pretty exciting. We'll see what happens. We also want to share something for this just in from Sammy at meta. And this really gets into and drama that's going on right now with meta in 2025 and 2026. Most of you probably noticed a big change to the platform last summer, especially June through the end of July. This is when a lot of these updates started to take place that really changed the way that we do things. So everything became at Vantage plus sales. That's what meta is calling this in June meta began rolling out at Vantage plus sales campaign, replacing the shopping campaign format. And then by the end of July 2025, they had completed this role, this complete rollout. So sales leads, app installs, all of those objectives unified under one particular campaign. And again, this is when we started to see a lot of the changes. Of course, now meta was also rolling out updates when it comes to AI, their algorithm, how ads are actually shown to the end user. It is really nerdy. It's not worth going through everything. Most people look at 2025 and they say, oh, it was andromeda. That is what changed everything. But really that is one small piece of a bigger puzzle. Meta rolled out more updates last year than we have ever seen before, not just to the ad side of things, but also on the consumer side. So this is created a big change and a big opportunity for all of us as marketers. So when we start to think about this new way of doing things, and again, I'm also going to present the old way of doing things that is still working in some accounts. Most of you know this, but the effort here is to make things more simple for the market for media buyers. We have actually even changed what we call media buyers in the smart marketer agency. They're now paid performance specialists because the actual act of pressing buttons and media buying, it is becoming less of a role every single day, which is exciting because it makes more space for all of us to be more creative and to create assets that are better than our competitors. So every month, every year that goes by, there will be less required in platform from all of us when it comes to button pressing or the actual tactics. Looking back to 2016, we were recommending a campaign structure. One of the campaigns had over 200 ad sets. That would just never be the case in 2026. So in a sense, this is getting easier, which is wonderful news for all of us. So what does this mean? Broad audiences. That's probably the term that you are hearing the most in regards to this big update. Mera is saying, "Hey, no more targeting. You don't need to select interests. You really don't even need to do much at all. Just throw some creatives into a campaign and let AI determine your audience." You're even saying that you can have one campaign where you throw everything into and they will facilitate the entire customer journey. It doesn't always work that way, but we're hoping in a year, this will be what is working in every single account. This also relates to placements. Most of you, a lot of you probably remember when we would manually select placements. That was the only way to do things. Now Meta is recommending that we let AI choose the placements that are going to get us the best results. And then of course, campaign level budgets. Meta is recommending, "Hey, just give us a big budget for each campaign. Let us control the budget to get you the best overall results." So these are the three big themes that we're seeing from Meta when it comes to Andromeda. So the difference between your campaigns should be business objectives. Again, this is up for debate and this is not always the case. But Meta and this new way of doing things is really recommending that you look at your different campaigns by business objective. There have always been many different ways that we look at why we would have separate campaigns. And Meta is essentially saying, "Hey, best practice would be one campaign for each business goal." So maybe your setup would be campaign one. The goal of this campaign is new customer acquisition. So this is my top of funnel campaign. Some people say that you should put multiple avatars in that one campaign. Some people say that you should split out those top of funnel campaigns by different avatars, right? You're selling to moms, you're selling to teachers, you're selling to grandmas. We are finding that splitting out those campaigns is working better. But in some accounts, we are seeing that literally one top of funnel campaign with everything squished together is working best. Really interesting and actually fascinating. I wish it would have been this way 10 years when I was super in the trenches. Campaign two, this is what I mentioned in regards to avatars. So maybe in the first campaign, you're targeting moms and then maybe in your second top of funnel campaign, you're buying gift buyers, right? So this is the same product that you're selling, but it's a separate campaign because you're assets, you're copy, you're creative. Maybe even your offer landing page will be different. My God says to keep out. and separate top of funnel campaigns. I feel like that is the cleanest way to tell meta who you were going after, especially if you have separate pages, copy, and creative for each of these avatars. And it seems to make it easier to scale once you figure out what's working. Then meta's recommending a third campaign, a win-back campaign, a simple retargeting campaign, and this is used to retarget all of your warm audiences with whatever your specific retargeting campaign is. So we do have some ad accounts, guys, with literally three campaigns or five campaigns, set up exactly how you see here, and it's working. Some accounts and specific businesses, it's not. And we still have 10 plus campaigns, as I'll show you later. But this is working in some accounts, and this is the future. This is what meta is recommending. And back to the avatar conversation, with this new setup, right, this easier setup, one thing we do still have control of are avatars. And meta does not know to go after another avatar, unless you give it the assets to do so. So this is marketing 101, but it's something that most people are not paying attention to in 2026, one of the best ways to scale is always going to be opening up new avatars. So keep this in mind, even if you're what we would call a market-centric business, like smart marketer. You know, we serve marketers in the broadest sense, right? All of you on this webinar are interested in marketing, and for some reason or you would not be here. But we still have sub-avatars. We have team members, we have business owners, we have agency owners, we have mom and pop shops. Some of you are more in the software realm. There's so many ways we can break up our sub-avatars. And we are more conscious of this than ever before when creating our ad assets so that we can get meta to open up those different avatars for us, even though they're very small sub-avatars. So keep this in mind. This is one of the levers that we still have at our disposal. And once you unlock an avatar and you know that it works, it is absolutely worth it to create specific landing pages with imagery and messaging just to that person. Because meta is going to index that and really know who you're going after. So it doesn't matter your business, even the local restaurant down the road that my husband and I own. We are using this line of thinking when it comes to organic social and paid avatars. And then another tip before we dive into the next segment. If you do test this new way of being or doing ads, which I'm sure a lot of you have, one of the biggest responses we get is, hey, this didn't work. And what we're noticing is when you test this consolidated approach, it does take longer than the old school approach where you have everything broken down. So you do want to give this at least seven days before you make any decisions. It is very, very, very unlikely that you are going to test this consolidated approach and overnight or in two to three days, like it used to be, you're going to see completely different results in your account. Remember that we're consolidating because of AI and what does AI need? It needs data. And to get that data, we need spend over at least a week. So if you're going to test this, make sure that you have at least a week's worth a budget to do so. A lot of times we're seeing that it looks really awful out of the gate. And then by the end of the week, after some time has gone by, we're actually seeing good results. So this new way of doing things needs a longer tail on the back than the old school way of doing things in a more manual fashion. So keep that in mind across the board period as we move forward with meta advertising. Okay, next up, action of the month, something that you can start to do with this information, with a picture from SmartMarketer Live, which is a live event. We have every October in Denver. We just locked down the dates for this October and we'll start selling tickets soon. So if you love nerdy marketing talk, definitely get that on your calendar to come see us in Denver. Okay, so here is exactly what the campaign structure is looking like and what is recommended down to the ad set and ad level. So we already talked about one campaign per business objective, the only nuance there being if you want multiple top of one old campaigns per avatar with that campaign level budget objective. Now when it comes to the ad set level, broad targeting, no detailed targeting. This really hurts me in the chest, but this is the setup. This is very important guys. When you are setting up your top of funnel campaigns, you want to make sure you are excluding its existing customers. This is an issue that we are seeing with this andromeda setup for a lot of clients and people in our community. They squish everything together, results are looking really good. Like Roaz is looking good, CPA is looking good, volume is looking good, but then a few weeks go by and the high level metrics in the business aren't looking so good, especially things like percentage of new customers acquired. So this is a downside to this setup is that a lot of times it can look really good, but really what Meta is doing is just retargeting a bunch of people in your warm audiences and not going out and getting new customers. So there are a few metrics that we're also measuring and things we're doing that we'll cover in a few months to help you overcome this, but make sure you are hyper aware of the new customers coming into your business if you try this approach. You don't want to look back in a month and not be aware of that. And then it's like, oh my goodness, I didn't bring many new people into the business. So be very aware of that. Automatic placement's enabled. We already talked about that. One ad set per campaign. Again, tough for me to digest that. Just being an old school marketer, but this is the setup. At the ad level, I know a lot of you guys ask this question, how many ads? There is a lot of crap out on the internet and YouTube that's saying you need 50, 75 ads and in each ad set for this to work. That is absolutely not true. Our sweet spot right now is 15 to 20 ads, but they're very, very different. This is not, okay, I built this ad and now I'm gonna change a background color and this is a different variation. We are talking about absolutely different concepts. This is something we're gonna cover in great detail in the free class that we're putting out on meta ads next month and really exciting drum roll. We have a piece of software that we've been working really hard on the past few months. Zach, I can actually see has been using it during this show to create organic posts. How cool is it, Zach? - It's insane. - It's a game changer. And this piece of software will allow you to input different data points on your business in particular account and it will build AI static ad images for you. It is better than anything else out there on the market because it leverages our data and all of our Intel. We partnered with an amazing developer to build this software. So we will be releasing that next month and all of the different concepts that we recommend are also within this software. So using a tool like that will help you not just have slight variations between your creatives but actually new concepts that speak to different angles and diverse creative approaches. In that free class, we also have a really cool creative matrix that our director of advertising, Dennis is building right now on that we're using in the agency that will help you guys with this side of things. But I know you always ask how many ads in an ad set and 15 to 20 is what we're finding is best January 2026. But again, make sure you have very different angles and creative approaches there. Okay, also seeing a lot of mistakes when it comes to creative testing in 2026. With this new approach, it's of course changing the way that we test creative or even test new offers. And if you're still using interest or different audience, which we are in some accounts, it is definitely changing that too. We don't have to go time to go through every single creative framework that we have right now. We will include that in the class in February. But I just wanted to run through some mistakes and some fixes when it comes to creative testing. So you do need to run for five to five minutes. to seven days like we talked about, but you don't want to run really for more than that. So you don't need to have a creative test running for 14 days. Some people swing to the other side of the pendulum there, not necessary. Meta recommends do not add brand new ads to the same ad set. We kind of see this going both ways, but this is Meta's recommendation. As we've always seen on the platform, you throw in new creative, new ads into something that's running and especially something that's scaling. Why would Meta give budget to those new ads that you've uploaded if the other ads in that campaign already have momentum going? So it does make sense from a logical standpoint. So Meta saying test new ads and separate ads sets or separate campaigns allow new ads to run for seven days. We already talked about why that's important. Move high performing ads into your main campaign and always keep cold and hot ads separate. We don't always necessarily see that works. Sometimes we can take a retargeting ad probably because it has a lot of social proof and a lot of positive signals assigned to that particular post ID. Sometimes we are able to take that to cold traffic or we can take a cold traffic ad with a lot of social proof and use that for retargeting. But I think this will become more and more important under this new setup with the simplified campaign structures. This is what we've already known, but it's interesting to reiterate. Meta's AI and algorithm, they are going to favor historical data, which makes sense. And Meta's eyes, and this has never changed, they want the best experience for the end user. They know if the end users leave, advertisers have no one to advertise to. Meta is not making money. So all of this is set up period to provide the best experience for the end user. So it makes sense that they are going to look at historical data that they have and try to show the right ad to the right person. Hopefully an ad that someone actually enjoys and they take whatever action that advertiser wants. New ads without social proof that have never been run before, of course, are going to be seen as risky or a little bit lower priority. So keep that in mind, whatever your creative testing strategy is, keep in mind that Meta is always going to prioritize historical ads with social proof. So we need to set things up in a way that gives our new stuff, our new assets room to breathe and actually see if they're going to work. This change has also affected our weekly cadence when it comes to media buying. So this is from the smart marketer team. And what this is really saying is if you have a weekly cadence around what you're doing, it respects those seven days that we talked about. And that is a lot better than daily changes or treating this platform like a day trading platform, like maybe we did in the past, me included, I'm completely guilty. So what we need to do in this regard is pick one day and time each week. So maybe it's Monday at 10 a.m. That's where we're going to launch all of our new ads, especially new tests that we want to run. We're going to wait seven days and then we are going to optimize scale, launch new stuff and that is going to repeat. The AI learnings refresh every seven days and Meta's back end. So this also acknowledges and respects the way in which the platform is running. If you're launching new ads every two days or once a day, kind of haphazardly like we used to, it's really just not using the platform. In the way in which it was built. So this is really important to understand. And honestly, this makes life a lot easier as a media buyer goodness. If it would have been this way 10 years ago, when I was just starting, this would have saved me a lot of time. But here we are. So this is our current cadence. Now, this doesn't mean that we're not in the ad account every single day. Of course, we are making decisions, monitoring, increasing budget, seeing what's going on. But when it comes to the actual submitting new assets that we want to test, this is the weekly cadence here and some hipster looking marketers just to reiterate this. Because of all these changes, we're also leaning more into seven day click as our attribution window. I see this, I wouldn't say is a mistake, but attribution windows cause a lot of confusion between media buyers, teams. It's a little bit different for each client, but this is our standard best practice. So default settings are seven day click attribution. This allows full purchase cycles to complete. Like we just talked about this gives AI the time that it needs to figure out patterns, predict conversions to do its thing. This is what we use for all evergreen campaigns. So campaigns that can run into perpetuity, they do not have a specific date end. The time when we do use one day click, of course, is during flash sales. So if you're launching a campaign and you know that it has to end five days from now, because that's when the sale is over. That's when the giveaways over. That's when the free opt-in expires for your launch. That is when you are going to use one day click. And this also forces AI to learn fast. So this doesn't mean you need to use this for evergreen campaigns to try to force AI to learn more quickly, but that is a cool feature of this. And of course, we use this for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, anything that has a promotional ending. Okay, so what to remember from this particular section? When it comes to Andromeda, the galaxy, the new way of doing things on meta, we have a new campaign structure. One campaign per business objective. Think of it almost like a customer journey. Broad targeting automatic placements, 15 to 20 creatives per ad set. With creative testing, meta says, do not mix new ads with proven ads. Test new creative in separate ways and wait seven days before decisions. Attribution setting recommendation is seven day click forever green and one day click for promotions. And like we said, the weekly cadence one day, one time on that particular day where you're launching all new ads. And we are seeing a difference here, the more consistent you can be with this cadence, the more stable the particular ad account is. So this matters even more than just from a testing standpoint. This is a great way to feed metadata on a regular cadence that allows the AI to actually do the work that we need it to do. So this can help provide stability in your account. Okay, and then we have a bonus action of the month. This is a big theme for us going into the new year. As I said, we're launching a few new brands this year that you guys are going to get to follow along with here on the show. One of them is going to be a pet supplement brand called longer together. If you guys know me, you know that I love dogs. I have a dog rescue called field to freedom. We were able to partner with an existing client and create a really amazing supplement for dogs that will be releasing in the next few months. And as we started to build out this new brand, of course, the question came up, what tools are we going to use? And when we came to the email SMS, more of the monetization portion of this conversation, it was actually a no brainer. A lot of you know that we have a partnership with Omnesend. Omnesend is a newer email and SMS tool on the market. And it is a huge rival to Clavio. We cannot recommend it enough. And this is a really good time of year to migrate over to a new email tool, especially if you want hands-on support. And if you want a cheaper bill, which I think is very important to all of us, then what we are seeing with Clavio, we still have good deliverability. We have all the amazing features that Clavio has. Omnesend is just a cheaper option. And when you look at these companies, Omnesend is still young. They're still scrappy. Their support is amazing. And they will actually help you with your migration from Clavio over to Omnesend if you're not starting from scratch, just to make this a complete no brainer for you guys. So if you're looking to save on your email and SMS bill, definitely switch to during the low season, right? Try not to do this during Q4 when things are chaotic. And don't let the word migration scare you again. Their team makes it really easy to do so. So we also have a special offer just for the smart marketer community. If you're looking or just interested in chatting with them to see what's up, we could not recommend Omnesend even more. And as I said, these new brands that were launching one of them being longer together, longer together will be built on Omnesend, which is pretty cool. And I can't wait to share with you guys even the branding of longer together. The logo is a dog paw and a hand high-fiving, really showing that relationship between owner and pet and how much we as pet owners want our dogs to live forever, who doesn't want that. So that will be the goal of the brand is to help dogs be healthier, to help them live longer. So again, we'll be showing you guys behind the scenes of that. We are recording everything from the initial idea to logo branding creation, getting everything set up structurally. It's going to be a really exciting year for smart marketer. Okay, that's Omnesend. Now we have copied this win. So this is where we are going to show you the kind of two ways of doing things. And there's actually more complexity than this that we will cover in the free class in February. We have named in the free class these different approaches actually based off of our media buyers because there are so many ways to do this. So we have the Attila, we have the Marianne, we have the Dennis. But for the simplicity of this episode, we really lumped it into two approaches. And again, there's no one right way. There never has been. If a marketing guru tells you there is only one way to do something other than the initial balls of this stuff that we know to be true, have a good product. Really care about your audience. Speak to their pain points and desires. There are many ways to do all of this. So there is not one right way. These are just the two different styles that we are seeing work the best across all of our accounts. So you really wanna think about this in terms of sure you could think of it like, oh, I wanna try both of these, right? Like, oh, I wanna test both of these and see what works for me. And that's what you're really seeing out on the marketplace. But another way to think of this is, where am I inside of my ad account and which approach best fits my particular situation? I think that's an easier and more actionable way actually to look at this. So let's look at approach number one. This is the forest gump sprint. This is more of the old school way of doing things. So this is really what you want to do if your account is working really well right now. If you have momentum in your account. So for example, you have clear winning creatives that are maybe converting two times better than everything else in the account, right? You have momentum and you want to do more with that momentum. This approach is more old school where we're gonna scale aggressively through multiple ad sets and things like manual bidding or other small details that can still make a big difference in the account. The second approach is what we've been talking about. The Andromeda portfolio. It took me months by the way to figure out how to say Andromeda correctly. (laughing) When doing these things. So I feel proud of myself for that. This is when you need a reset or things are not going well. This would be the least risky time to try this new way of doing things. It's like, well, I don't have much to lose. Things in the account are really going downhill or I just feel like I need a reset. The way that I've been doing things or the old school way I've been doing things, they just, they haven't been working for a while. That's when we will take the risk to consolidate all of this together, go super heavy into creative. Everything we've been talking about the last few minutes. So this mindset is more feed AI your greatest hits and historical things that have been working while balancing that with testing new creatives. So the Forest Gun Sprint. So more of a box of chocolates. We got a lot to choose from, a lot to do. This comes from Attila, one of our senior media buyers who we love, what's up Attila? He had a cool stranger things sweatshirt on earlier. Anybody else into stranger things? My cousin, Zach was trying to sell me on stranger things a few days ago, but not quite sure I would like it. But he didn't just scale the budget. So he was testing multiple manual bidding strategies to find the optimal combination. So again, more of an old school way of isolating something like bidding strategies to figure out, okay, is this gonna help me get a lower CPA? Is this gonna help me get a higher row as? Is this going to allow me more volume in this particular account? So this way of doing things is looking for multiple bid strategies. So we're testing CossCap, bid cap, target row as, amplified budget strategy. Basically every option that meta gives you, isolating those and seeing what works best. Of course, advantage plus broad targeting, letting AI find your audiences without constraints. That's pretty much always the case nowadays. There's some, some, sometimes where we will still use interests, but not that often anymore. Rapid combo testing. So testing different bid strategy combos simultaneously to see if that's gonna allow us to squeeze more out of that particular orange. And then this is very old school and very not andromeda, but duplicating winners. So something works. Let's duplicate it into a new asset or a new campaign. And let's see if that will allow us to scale more quickly. This is still working. This has allowed us to still double brands over the last 12 months. So here's a great example from Attila. He's skilled from 5K a day to 35K a day in profitable ad spend. He was starting at 5K. So things were going well. 5K a day in spend is still wonderful. And he wanted to throw some gasoline on the fires. So he did what you saw on the last slide. We were able to get to 35K a day in spend. This happened over the course of only 10 days, which is crazy. That is over a 6X increase in spend, which is really hard to obtain. So it shows that this metric still works $413,000 in revenue over that 10 day period. Pretty exceptional. This got this brand to an eight-figure brand for the very first time, which was obviously very exciting for them and for us. And what was cool, CPMs actually went down. You guys know that that is counterintuitive and really rare. Most of the time when you're scaling an account, especially with the new and drama that away, the more that you spend, the more that CPMs go up. And it makes sense for nerdy reasons we don't have to get into. But because Attila was controlling all of these variables like the different bidding options, and because he was duplicating and scaling fast, we were actually able to see a decrease in CPMs, which is very, very rare as you scale. And obviously speaks back to the initial staff that I shared with you guys about the creative in this account being really, really strong. So you can see a decrease in CPMs as you scale that is possible. But again, only approach this when you have clear winners in the account, right? So you have a 2x winner. So it's not just an ad that is, oh, this is slightly better from what I've been seeing in this account. We want to see double. So either half the CPA or 2x the row as that you're normally looking for it, depending on the benchmarks that you use in the account. Another note that he put in here is you want to make sure the numbers hold for three to five days before you continue to do this. So this isn't something that you're doing every single day. He waited three days to see what was going to happen if the numbers held. Then he started to scale really aggressively. And of course, because you are using isolation here, like we've always done with meta ads, you can test more aggressively. So Attila says the mindset here is don't let anyone tell you there's only one right way to scale when you have winners push it hard. So thanks to Attila for that. OK, now on the other hand, approach number two, the end drama to away. So this was for a client and mentor table brand called clean ease. First off, these are amazing people. This is a family run brand, a mom, a dad, and a son. They're great people. Their products are exceptional, y'all. Just as a consumer, especially if you have pet stains in your house or pet odor, I recommend all of their products, but the stain product works exceptionally well. They came to us a year ago in a really bad place as a business. They weren't quite sure how they were going to continue forward. And the last six months, they have consistently been hitting their best days ever. It almost makes me emotional. Like, this is why we do this. And it's cleaning products. Their products are amazing, but this isn't some crazy novel product that the market has never seen before. Right? This isn't a crazy product that only applies to one niche. Yes, their products are exceptional, but they're cleaning products. There isn't anything, any crazy novelty here that you might look at with some of these examples and say, "Oh, I know why that worked." It was the product. This was just darn good marketing. And them never giving up. They literally never gave up. They're also using the new AI ad creative software that I showed you guys. And they just sent us some stats where the new creatives that our tool made actually have doubled the row as as their historical winning ad. So they are a great sandbox for us across the board. We also run TikTok shop for them, which is really scaling. There's a lot of cool things going on with this brand. But in August, they were having trouble with meta ads. And especially having trouble with more of the old schools set up that we've talked about a lot. So this was an opportunity where there wasn't a lot of risk. Let's just try this andromeda, this new consolidated way of doing things. So performance crashed mid-August, which is surprising for their market. A lot of moms buy this product. So you would think going back to school, that would actually be a really beautiful time. But mid-August was bad for them. CPMs were up, CPCs were up, CPAs were not profitable. They couldn't scale. They were running eight separate campaigns. Again, more of the old school way of doing things. So what did they do? Consolidated the eight campaigns down to two campaigns. So one per offer that they run to pay ads, they loaded every winning ad that it ever worked from the past year so that good historical data that we need. They even added old fatigue winners back in. Ads that they thought had died long, long ago. And they let AI pick essentially from their full creative library. What happened? They were back on track. CPMs dropped 20%. CPAs dropped 35%. So they were back in the game of media buying. Before with the more consolidated approach, only one to two ads were getting about 90% of the budget. So fatigue was just happening very quick. With the new setup, the budget was spread across 15 ads very much in the way that that meta recommends. So the AI test, you know, AI was pulling from this full creative library. Yes, found winners and old ads that have been turned off. But also were able to find winners with some of their brand new creatives. So this is an amazing case study when it comes to this new way of doing things. And especially if you're in a rough spot, if you are aware, cleanies was in the middle of August and you don't have a lot to lose testing that setup is highly recommended. So a few things to remember here guys, creative quality is everything. Good creative can reduce cost by 50%. We have an entire creative class at smartmarketer.com. If you go to our courses page, it's only $47 right now that's been an eye teaching our process for solid ad creative. There is nothing more important other than you having a good product that people want and the product actually making a difference in their life. There is nothing more important in direct response marketing nowadays than creative. And I remember 10 plus years ago when we could get away with two creatives in an ad account for months at a time, that is not the ballgame any longer. Even so much so, we have been constantly hiring creative strategists at smartmarketer. If you are a creative strategist or you know someone that is a great paid media creative strategist, please refer them to us at smartmarketer. We are adding creative strategists on to every single account to work hand in hand with the media buyers to ensure that meta is getting all of the assets that they want. Number two, when running this new way of doing things again, you want one campaign per objective, top of funnel, if you are running ads to a separate avatar, just keep that in a separate campaign. And number three, this is really important to understand guys, do not have in your mind or listen to people that say there's only one there's only one way to do this stuff. I know we covered this, but I want to reiterate this with two huge explanation points. Every account is different and time changes things too. You might be doing things more of the old school way and hit a rut in a few months and then it is time to change things over. You might be someone that's been running the consolidated approach for a year and you're like, yeah, Molly been doing this and it's working great. That's amazing. If that quits working, there might be a time and place to go back to the old school approach too. So every account is different and time changes things in an account, especially depending on your level of spend, your product line, how many front and offers you have to work with. So especially if things feel dull in your account right now and you're not getting the results that you want, it never hurts to test something new and there is no right way of doing things. Even on the smart marketer team, right, we have over 10 media buyers. We have amazing SOPs. We have amazing best practices and they are all doing things a little bit differently depending on the account. So it's important to understand these high level themes and then start to test and figure out what works best in your ad accounts. And if you run more than one ad account, you're probably seeing the same thing. Hey, what I'm doing here is actually not applicable for this other brand. So really keep that in mind, guys. As a reminder, we always put the recordings and clips of this show on our YouTube channel, smart marketer by Ezra Firestone. We also upload other videos there. So if you ever want to see past replays or future replays, definitely check us out on YouTube, share with other people that are nerdy marketers. Like we are, that helps the show grow. This is something that we like to do for free every single month. The topics we have coming up on the show are really exciting, AEO and what we all need to be doing to really prepare for things like Chatchee PT ads and to rank inside of these AI tools. That is a huge topic and something we're focused on in a big way at smart marketer. We actually plan to roll out a service all around AEO and Chatchee PT ads in 2026. So that is a topic coming up. Another is app. Love and app. Love and is a huge paid media platform that if you have any success on meta is really easy to get set up and to get scale on that platform. We will be doing a show all about app. Love and it is something we are launching for almost every single client right now that's running meta ads because it's easy and there's a huge opportunity. We are also in the process right now of shooting a course in partnership with app. Love and that shows you everything you need to know about that platform and what you need to do to get approved set up and start to scale on app. Love and so those are two topics that are coming up here on the smart marketer show. But as always, thank you guys for being here. Thanks for hanging out in Kentucky with me. It's like seven degrees here today. So we didn't bring Larry or a dog he refused to leave the house today. So hopefully next month it'll be a bit warmer and I'll have my co-host back. Thanks for being a part of the smart marketer community. Remember above all serve the world unselfishly and profit. I promise you if you come at business and marketing from a place of service where you actually want to help a group of people, you will in turn profit from those efforts. So thanks for being here. Thanks to Ariane as always for producing an amazing show. Thanks to the smart marketer team and we will see you next month. Bye y'all. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the SmartMarketer podcast. If you enjoyed what we shared today, please help us by subscribing to the show. Not only will you be notified when we have new content, it also helps get the show out to many more people. We appreciate you and thank you so much for listening. [Music]