Happy Sunday! Hope you're having a good weekend and enjoying this real fall weather. Novemeber is almost here! From what I'm hearing, brands that have offers running are doing pretty well, but it can be pretty slow for brands whose haven't started yet. But most brands will have them starting soon, so get ready. It's almost here.
Today I want to talk about some Meta platform trends I'm seeing. This is not the first time I've talked about them here, and I'm not the only one talking about them. But I believe there are the two current biggest shifts in paid advertising that we all should be acutely aware of.
The first of which, is reels as a placement. You should really think of Reels as a standalone platform. But there is a reason why your CPMs are either flat YoY or marginally up, and you can thank reels for that. The CPMs are often lower there, and Meta is starting to deliver more there. The problem is, a lot of us (myself included) are still focused too much on feeds. It's really easy to get stuck in the old way of doing things, both on organic and paid social and not adapt to platform trends. But we really need to, and reels is the one we need to focus on.
You can and still should focus on feed, but if you're reading this there's a good chance you should focus more on Reels. Meta is making it a top priority. I'm not suggesting running campaigns as Reels as a placement. Instead, you just want a good portion of the ads in your account to be specifically designed for this placement.
This means they should likely be more native than less native. They probably should be shot on an iPhone, but don't have to be. They need to respect Reels safe zones, and most importantly they should understand and follow the language of reels. Creator content will often be the way to go here versus brand content; but even your brand content needs to be created with Reels best practices in mind.
To sum it up, don't get stuck in the heyday of feed-only advertising. The feed still exists, but Reels are a growing focus. It's like when things shifted from desktop to mobile and making websites mobile first because best practice; now it's Reels first for vieo ad creatives.
The second trend I want to talk about is more of a mental model for creative testing and scaling ads. Most media buyers think about finding winning ads and scaling them. Often testing is done in a separate ABO campaign to force spend to get learnings, and anything that is deemed a winner is scaled up in budget, either by scaling budget in that campaign, adding it to a main campaign, or duplicating it and doubling the budget or more. It seems media buyers got a thrill off of this when they got a winner, and wanted to see how far they could run with it. It felt like getting a hot hand in poker or blackjack and being aggressive with it. I just no longer think this is the right way to do it.
Instead of forcing spend on one ad for a short period of time, I am advocating for a more sustainable approach. I think the end goal is to have ad many different kinds of ads in the same campaign, likely an ASC as that is where the platform is headed, and getting spend on as many ads as possible. Not only will this approach be more stable and less volative, but it will likely also reach a much wider audience.
I've had to work hard myself to undo the old way of thinking and finding winners and best ads. It was a very either or mentality. Instead, I now try to think of creating as many different styles of ads with different formats, concepts, angles, value props, and offers and like I said putting them into one or a few campaigns and seeing where the system wants to spend. But I prefer when spend gets distributed more evenly than less evenly.
To sum it up, think Reels first and think more ads versus finding winning ads.
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