Welcome to March!

March is off to a wild start. They call it March Madness for a reason, right?

By most “boots on the ground” accounts, Q1 2024 has been challenging. Anecdotally from brands, agencies, and tech companies alike - revenue & growth has been difficult to come by and sales cycles are painfully long. The stock market might disagree, but we all know that stock market performance and business reality are not always in total alignment.

I want to remind everyone of the following:

If everything was always easy and smooth, you'd never improve. You'd stagnate. Tension and pressure forces adaptation and evolution.

Don't shy away from challenges, embrace them head on - you'll be better off in the end.

Also, don’t excuse performance on things you can’t control - it’s unproductive. There will be always something within your control that you can improve upon.

Identify what this something is by stopping & asking yourself: “What are the current constraints that are preventing my company, my team, or myself from growing or improving any core KPI?”

This simple exercise will give you a nice priority list to start chipping away at. Once you’ve identified the main issues, work on building the solutions.

From Last Week — The Votes are IN!

Kicking it back to last week’s poll on if Meta will add back the Shop tab to Instagram - 74% of you believe that the Shop tab will return in 2024. I do too.

Onto this week’s new topics!

1. CPM/CPC Trends - Google, Meta, Pinterest, Snap

Public companies report on their platforms’ advertising costs quarterly. This transparency gives us the perfect view into how paid media impacts our businesses. You may notice TikTok is missing from this infographic, but ByteDance (TikTok’s holding company) is not public and does not divulge this information.

Here are the main takeaways:

- Advertisers largely enjoyed YoY decreases in CPM/CPCs for last 2 years

- Seems that 2024 may be the year where YoY ad cost trends INCREASE (especially due to the China/Temu effect & election year)

- Pinterest increased ad load, which has contributed to CPMs trending in an outlier/favorable state. They’re still significantly negative YoY for 7 straight quarters.

If my prediction is true that ad costs in 2024 will be largely rising YoY - let's see how elevated ad costs will impact performance.

Consumer is on the course to getting stronger in 2024 with rate cuts on the horizon.

If rise in ad costs is matched with proportional rise in consumer sentiment/spending, we could be looking at a favorable scenario where performance is not affected if conversion rates and average order values increase.

2. Google’s Gemini in the News for All The Wrong Reasons!

AI bias and dishonesty is a real threat to society.

Google’s Gemini is a red-hot example of how AI can be destructive to society. The companies (and people) training AI models essentially get to influence the LLM “knowledge base.” This is a slippery slope.

Humans, by nature, are filled with bias, whether conscious or subconscious.

This must NOT bleed into AI/ML. If it does, AI can simply rewrite history and objectivity as we know it.

If bias and agendas creep into AI/ML, society as a whole gets caught in the middle of an info war and brainwash campaign, especially for impressionable minds.

Google’s Gemini blunder this month is shockingly bad. How Google feels it was ready to present Gemini to the world is beyond me.

After criticism flooded social over the past few weeks, it decided to block its image-generation feature.

That being said, apparently “they’re dedicated” to fixing the issues that caused some of the following instances:

- Refused to write ad copy for oil/gas industry

- Inaccurate images of race/ethnicity in historical events

- Prompt asked the AI model who has negatively impacted society more: Musk tweeting memes or Hitler. Gemini said it isn’t possible to “say definitively who negatively impacted society more.”

- It effortlessly wrote toasts praising Democratic politicians — including controversial ones — while deeming every elected Republican too controversial to praise

If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that AI is only as smart and objective as humans make it.

Things only got worse and weirder for Google this past weekend at Gemini’s Hackathon.

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, led a Q&A at Gemini Hackathon this past weekend. An interesting character with a very “creative” t-shirt asks Sergey the inevitable question related to Gemini’s image generation issues.

Sergey hangs in there, cool as a cucumber, doesn’t laugh at this guy’s shirt, and delivers an other-worldly response as to why his $2 trillion company dropped the ball so hard on AI image gen.

“Mostly due to just, like, not thorough testing.”

Not sure what part of this exchange is weirder: the shirt or the bizarrely lackadaisical response.

Based on everything happening over the past month, I'm not exactly inspired by Google and its ability to compete in the AI race.

3. Meta’s Bid Multipliers as a Competitive Advantage for Media Buying

This might be the least sexy topic I’ve covered, but one that should pique a ton of interest. If you don’t yet know much about Bid Multipliers on Meta, be sure to read this.

I won’t be digging into all the granular details, but you should understand the value of Bid Multipliers by the end of this.

Simply put, Bid Multipliers will give you a competitive advantage as a media buyer.

WHAT are Bid Multipliers?

Advertisers can now assign different values to specific categories of people through applying a “bid multiplier” to each group. Generally, brands will leverage 1st-party data that Meta doesn’t have access to (like LTV), and assign a different value to those people that they deem more valuable and willing to “bid more” for.

As you may know (evidenced in the image below), Meta’s auction relies on the “total value” of an ad to determine if it’s shown to a person. By increasing your bid on a certain pocket of an audience, you are more likely to win the auction for that pocket of the audience thanks to the bid multiplier you’re leveraging to drive up the “total value.”

WHY Bid Multipliers?

Meta’s AI/ML thrives in the presence of more data. Meta doesn’t have access to some of your store-level first or zero party data. By giving it more food, it gets stronger.

Data breadth is magnified through account consolidation, and bid multipliers make account consolidation even more effective. By making the algo “smarter” and looking for potentially higher LTV individuals, you increase the success rate and efficiency of a “broad” audience. However, by suppressing certain pockets of an audience, you might actually be limiting potential scale at the cost of efficiency.

Bid multipliers enable account consolidation while still maintaining a level of manual control previously only available through account segmentation.

5 Ideas for Bid Multiplier Utilization:

1. Custom/Lookalike Audiences

2. Geographic Location

3. Age / Gender

4. Device & Device Type & Operating System

5. Platform/Placement

Example: If you want to suppress existing customers (reduce bid multiplier) or express lookalike audiences (increase bid multiplier) that you specifically want to target, this is something you can now control more precisely.

Other Considerations:

• Bid multipliers max out at 1x. If you want to increase a bid, decrease your multipliers for the other segments.

• 3 Methods Available to Start Deploying “BM’s”: BM Dash (marketing API app needed), Meta Business Partners, Direct integration (requires media buying through API and allowlisting)

• Thanks to iOS14 restrictions, performance breakdowns by segment within Ads Manager is limited.

• Lean on 10% bid increments as a rule of thumb.

This highlights the importance of 0- and 1st-party data collection. Also, it’s not just the act of collecting data, it’s also about ensuring that data is accurate. If you’re using LTV numbers that are inaccurate and adjust your bid based on bad data, you’re actually doing far more harm than good!

If you need help extracting, transforming, and/or visualizing your data, reach out to us. We spent the better part of 2023 refining and perfecting the entire first party data process.

Klaviyo Enters the Services Arena: Right or Wrong?

Klaviyo has entered the services business. Over the past 24 hrs, agencies/marketers have been pretty loud about it.

Lets start here:

$KVYO reported earnings a week ago and fell 6% - their revenue beat was underwhelming to the market.

This has them searching for answers on where to turn next for revenue. To me, it's pretty clear: this move was triggered by their search for revenue.

It's hard to truly blame them. But, the move may be shortsighted.

This blurs the line for them between being a tech vs services company.

It also alienates its partners that helped spring them to the top of the mountain. Partners I’ve spoken to feel a sense of distrust and were blindsided by this move.

Two quick examples that will inevitably occur and create issues between Klaviyo and its partners:

1. Klaviyo starts recruiting directly or indirectly from their service partners. Not saying it is their intention, but an inevitable complication that will arise.

2. Klaviyo salesperson with Pro Service sales targets steps on toes of partners and outreaches their clients.

✅ Here's what Klaviyo is now offering today:

Implementation, Email Flow Build, Email Template Designs, & Support services.

❌ Here's what they're NOT offering today:

Full campaign deployment, Optimization, and Retainer-like services that agencies bank on most.

While it's a saving grace that they aren't offering full-stack management, to me it's only a matter of time.

Agencies/marketers: this should be a push to get better at your craft. See it as a challenge to further develop your work. Control what you can control. Marketers will always be beholden to publicly-traded tech/SaaS companies that do not have priorities aligned with its partners at all times.

Klaviyo: don't forget that your partners were the most integral tailwind for your growth and rise to IPO this past year. I hope there are no issues between partners and Klaviyo's priorities on how to best serve accounts. There will almost certainly be overlap and gray areas that can truly tarnish the partner relationship.

What I’m Listening to 🎧

Beats of the Week: MAGS | Afro House & Tribal Tech Sunset Mix

This guy MAGS is an unknown commodity, but he’s caught my attention on YouTube these days. His mixes are energetic, melodic, and really easy to listen to while working. Guaranteed to get you in an upbeat mood. Perfect sunset/beach music too if you ever need to throw on background music at a get together! Here’s one of my favorites that I’ve had on repeat.

I welcome all feedback. Good, bad, everything in between.

Hit reply, and let’s hear it! 👂

📧 Share your thoughts or what you want me to cover next!