A lot of dialogue lately about FB arbitrage.

It's not all doom and gloom.

Adapt or die.

So how? 1. Your biggest biggest BIGGEST hire is a creative director. Not a media buyer. Not an agency. An in-house creative director. DIAL THIS IN ASAP

2. Next biggest? A team of creative editors who live, breathe social trends. Who understand every ounce of this industry.

This is what running ads on FB in 2020 looks like. You get amazing results on a 1 day, then it dies completely by day 6/7. Rebuild, get great results on a 1 day, then dies. Rinse and repeat. Every single ad account has this same experience, either spending $25k a month or $600k. And here is why this is my concern….

This tells me it’s an audience / auction issue more than anything.

Is it?

A. FB’s attribution loss post 1 day is affecting who it serves to?

B. FB’s pocket for each advertiser is that small forcing terrible auctions by day 3-5?

It’s going to be 108 today in LA and the homeless on Skid Row have no shelter. Since covid, the missions can’t have as many folks at them by half.

This is a critical day to save lives. We are gonna pass out water on Skid row DTLA. If you wanna contribute, Venmo: @davidherrmann There are thousands of homeless down here, and it’s gotten even worse since covid. Our city services have neglected these people. It’s time to step up. At least for these hot days we gotta be out. Covid or not.

FB just credited me for incorrectly serving over 97,000 impressions in June. The week following this our results tanked.

This continues to happen. This coupled with random banning of accounts for so many of us….

https://twitter.com/herrmanndigital/status/1296831355708248064

The company along with Google and Apple need an independent council of folks from different sectors monitoring advertising practices and ad fraud.

It’s so prevalent and things need to change.

At this point I’m sure there is not enough quality media buyers for the demand of work out there. If you’re looking to get into this field know this….

You must be ok in high stress environments and know you will work many many hours, including weekends and holidays.

The pay is good. But you must have both a creative mind as well as an analytical / strategy mind.

To be honest, the best fit for Tiktok is a conglomerate led by Universal Music Group. But they don’t have that kinda money....

Took over the account on Monday. Lowered the CPA by 36.32% week over week spending $25k a week.

Expanded out LLAs beyond 1%s, set up exclusions, and of course, all new creative. Key points here, creative they were running lacked thumb stop. So that was first goal. We converted 16:9 into 1:1 meme style videos.

We got a chaseeeee and this person is INSANE! Get on it guys!

https://twitter.com/CBSLA/status/1285734462123368451

Driving a Honda Coupe at 90mph in Woodland Hills. GET YOUR POPCORN OUT

I should create a newsletter where I break down the best police chases of the month. Each month I could do a Q and A with the news helicopter journalist that shot the chase.

Not to minimize my work, but I don’t want to be known for it. I want to be known as someone who deeply cares for his community, people and justice.

Right now I’m deeply alarmed by how our inner cities are going to handle another year of virtual schooling. I can’t stop thinking about it. Trying to figure out how I can use my skills to help figure this out.

Thousands of kids do not have access to broadband internet. And yet, they are supposed to learn at home?

If you’re in the e-comm space selling home goods, I’d start heavily targeting new home buyers, cause there is a LOT rigth now according to the data.

They are looking for discounts, and they are hungry to make their WFH lives permanement in the suburbs. Creative, hype up your ads with moving boxes in the creative.

Hype up “new home buyers” in your ad copy.

Hype up “new home buyer bundles” in your ad copy.

As many of you will start ads on Tiktok I have some key learnings over the past 5 months of ad buying there I would like to share.

1. Tiktok is awareness, major key here.

2. Create Tiktoks in platform for ads. 3. If you use models in your ads don’t show too much skin. Tiktok will reject.

4. Optimize for easiest conversion first and work your way down. Each stage needs roughly 100 conversions for optimization.

Look similar? This is this year’s stock market performance vs. the Great Depressions.

That blue line is us in 2020. The redline is 1920s/30s.

Funny thing about history, you learn. Many things are coming together that are earily remisicent of this same time almost 100 yrs ago. The reality is as a marketer I’m preparing for the worst (maybe that’s why I’m so exhausted), but hoping for the best.

Recovery is looking more like an L shape instead of the V shape we’ve discussed.

If this holds up our jobs just got THAT much harder.

An interesting thing is happening…. since I’ve excluded CA from my campaigns I’m noticing higher performance in states we’ve never done well in.

And FYI, I’m not excluding them entirely. I built out landing pages, tagged CA product and hid those lps from our site for FB ads. I’ve set up separate campaigns to just test CA on super tight budgetts to give it a shot.

I get this may not be the most efficient way, I get that. But I am about data, and if I can’t see it I need to find my own work around for better decision making.

As a reminder, CCPA goes into effect TOMORROW. If you’re running FB ads, you’re going to start noticing CA targeting’s performance drop.

Why? FB is limiting the data you get from, well, me and other Californians like me. Why though? Cause CA is a law infested waste-land. The CCPA is similar to the GDPR, it’s confusing.

However, this is checklist.

✔️ Yearly Rev > $10m
✔️ Receive, process/transfer data from over 50k CAs in a year
✔️ At least 50% of rev comes from selling CA data

I just made a FB video ad in less than 20 min. I’m launching it right now. Tomorrow if this works, I’m going to share it with ya.

I’m kinda proud of it. But performance is what matters. Woke up to it 4x’ing.

It’s still early and could tank. However, looking good.

While @MikeBloomberg is getting the headlines and think pieces this morning on his meme strategy, his FB ad strategy seems to be far behind.

A thread on why... Bloomberg has spent more than $1 million per day the last 2 weeks on FB ads. Here is some of his creative.

💥 Creative Thread 💥

So lately I've been going back through Ogilvy on Advertising. It's incredible on how this book is timeless for advertising. The same sentiments that worked in the 50s and 60s work today. Why? Because people don't necessarily change, the medium changes. Oglivy gives the reader 16 tips for building creative for TV that sell. These same 16 tips can be applied to today's digital advertising. So I thought I'd share with you 14 of these tips, and link to a piece of creative online that nails it. So without further adieu....

So, it seems ROAS is WAYYYYYY down this BFCM. Will tomorrow line up to at least better numbers? Let’s wait and see.

Account 1:

Spent: $126,761.76
FB Rev: $213,439.95
ROAS: 1.68x (3.37x in 2018)
Website $412,275 Account 2:

Spent: $392,716.09
FB Rev: $576,815.15
ROAS: 1.47x (3.66x in 2018)
Website: $1,013,270.59

Want to scale on ads? Hire people who know how to do it. Not everyone can. Came on at the start of this to help an account be profitable at scale. Welp, 2.3xing Biz ROAS and have FB at a 2x while increasing ad spent by 77.22%. It’s not easy, it takes a TON of content to do this. We hit $25k in revenue on a $9,712 ad spend yesterday. Our goal was hit $10k a day (up from $1,500 a day) within two weeks, we’ll do it just under that.

It shocks me how so few brands think about creative first. How so few understand that what they think the customer wants, and what the data says are so many times misaligned. Yet, they keep pushing messaging that is only hurting their brands. I launched a brand a month ago w/my friend. We do everything in-house. I made the video ad on “in-shot” w/iPhone and did copy that would align with our audience, 50+ females. No pixel data, no email data, we’re profitable after a month.