How Marin Scales Brands to 9 Figures
Marin Istvanic joins Scalability School for a deep tactical session on what it actually takes to scale e-commerce brands to nine figures with paid media on Meta. Marin is one of the most hands-on media buyers in the DTC space, managing upwards of 5 to 7 million dollars a month in ad spend across his agency clients and his own internal brand (and this episode reflects that).
The conversation launches right into the hard hitting questions with the debate around ABO versus CBO and when each actually makes sense. Marin's full whitelisting flywheel (300+ influencer profiles, authority pages, dark posts running through multiple handles in the same session), cost cap weekend scaling and what he calls the "gladiators arena" ad set, how he uses different attribution settings as a signal to Meta that a campaign is structurally different, and why he still manually picks every thumbnail across all his accounts. He also shares how he used AI to synthesize his full YouTube library into a 50-page media buying philosophy document and then how he fed his top-spending ads into a landing page template that outperformed the control by 10%.
Key Takeaways
ABO vs. CBO - is the debate actually settled, or does the right answer depend on something most people never measure?
Is whitelisting dead - or are you just running it wrong?
What does a "cost cap weekend scaling" actually look like in practice — and how to spend $25K on a Saturday without blowing up your CPA?
How changing this window actually tells Meta this is a different campaign.
Why Marin still manually picks every thumbnail - If the "hacks" everyone is chasing are mostly noise, this is what actually moves the needle at scale.
This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It’s a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they’re offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!
To connect with Marin, send him a DM at https://x.com/IstvanicMarin
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email Andrew@foxwelldigital.com
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com/
Learn More about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com
Full Transcript
Transcript:
(00:00) If your hit rate of the tests is high enough, I think you can squeeze more with ABO. If your hit rate is bad, then stick with CBO. It never happens that a good ad is not running. You know, it's always running somewhere. Maybe if it died in testing, it's running somewhere else. So like often the first thing that I do when I take over a new ad account, I go like a year or two back and I find all ads that are above the target ROAS that spend significantly.
(00:26) I take their post ID and in most cases, like seven or eight out of ten, like ends up being performers. People just forget that they had a winner like, you know, a year ago. That winner is a still winner. Obviously, it's not going to scale massively, but I have some ad accounts where like those old ads are like running for like a few years.
(00:43) It felt like I got a recognition when Facebook confirmed that a different thumbnail actually means different entity ID because like I was, I did not know why, but like four or five years went back in the day when I worked with Yudi, I realized that a different thumbnail can impact the performance of the same video in a different way.
(01:00) So still me and all of my media buyers and my junior media buyers, everybody are picking thumbnails manually. I think it has a positive impact. And now let's take a listen to the Scalability School podcast. Welcome to another episode of the Scalability School podcast, your favorite podcast for tactical advice on running your e-commerce brand or agency or agency accounts under that are brand.
(01:31) So here's the thing. We have a legend on the podcast today, and I'm going to pronounce publicly his name properly or attempt to. Marin Ishtvan Itch. Did I get close? This is perfect. Okay. Who I have been mispronouncing my good friend's name for three years since we've known each other or four years actually we've known each other.
(01:56) So I also, this is a theme of my life because I also have the owner of socio, Karen. I've been calling Karan for six years. And he recently just had the guts to tell me that I was mispronouncing it. So anyway, here we are pronounced properly. Everybody knows and loves this guy. I've sent so many people to your YouTube channel to learn how to do Facebook ads.
(02:21) And an absolute legend. Marin, welcome to the show. Yeah, I appreciate it. I'm not sure how I'm going to justify all these big words, but I definitely want to return the gratitude because like I was listening to your podcast, you know, 2019, the e-commerce influence, probably like I've stumbled upon it randomly during one of my, I know, searching on the internet for a good content.
(02:48) I was like, wow, how did I did not know about this guy? It was like in the early beginnings of my media buying when you were definitely a role model. So I appreciate that. I mean, welcome to episode one of Glazing the Podcast, where we glaze each other and talk about all the good things. Brad, Brad's really smart.
(03:08) Brad's smarter than me. So there's the pride glaze. So let's just jump right into it. By the way, Marin has spoken at three events now for the Foxhole founders in Europe. And everybody always comes to me and is like, that was so great. Because you're such a tactician, Marin, with your hands on the wheel. So as a tactician, let's get into the debate that everybody wants to know right away, which is ABO versus CBO.
(03:37) Okay. What are your thoughts? We're only going to spend a few minutes on this, but everybody wants to know. What are your thoughts? So if your hit rate of the tests is high enough, I think you can squeeze more with ABO. If your hit rate is bad, then stick with CBO. Yeah. I think I don't disagree with that for what it's worth.
(03:57) Like I know I'm on the opposite side, generally speaking, when it comes to the ABO versus CBO. I think if I had to add my little summary, I think the bet that you're making when you choose between them is that you are going to either be right more often than meta or at a bigger scale that kind of offsets maybe the downside of being wrong.
(04:19) And I think you've said this before, right? Like that's a function of hit rate, but it's also a function of scale. If you hit a winner that meta missed on and it can scale and weigh in excess of what you spent on the creative test that didn't hit, it probably doesn't actually end up mattering. The only reason I generally start with CBO is, and for a lot of people is maybe their hit rate isn't great.
(04:38) And it kind of prevents the downside, especially as brands are kind of getting to scale. Yeah, definitely. So CBO is like more conservative. And like when the budget is not high, when we have too many tests or the hit rate is low, I use CBO when I'm into scaling. And I know that like from 10 tests, I will get like at least three, four winners.
(04:57) That means I'm getting three, four winners every week from the 10 tests. If I test 20, I get seven, eight. Maybe I will not be able to scale them like, you know, from 100 to 2K. But like if I scale it from 100 to 500, and I have like seven of those ads a week, that adds up. And I don't need to scale every ad.
(05:15) I need like, I don't know, I need one, two great ads. And then I need like 10, 15 supporting winners. And ABO allows me that a bit more than the CBO. But I definitely agree. Yeah, sorry. No, I didn't mean to cut you off. I was just going to ask, like, have you, have you gone down the route or do you have a kind of a tactic for, I saw somebody on Twitter X recently say, you know, they will run their creative tests.
(05:40) And then if they don't work, they'll still maybe throw them in to a cost cap campaign or kind of keep it live somewhere else. Like when I go CBO, it's generally, I'm keeping the ads on. I just don't generally turn them off unless there's a good reason to turn them off. Maybe they do end up sucking or they're super out of season or something like that.
(05:57) But I'm just wondering if there's like small, little tactical things that you pull forward. Yeah, so I don't have that kind of like zombie campaign. The reason is anytime ads shows attraction, I would take it post ID and I would run it somewhere else. So I never, it never happens that a good ad is not running. You know, it's always running somewhere.
(06:19) Maybe if it died in testing, it's running somewhere else. So like often the first thing that I do when I take over a new ad account, I go like year or two back and I find all old ads that are among the target rows that spend significantly. I take their post ID and in most cases, like seven or eight out of 10, like ends up being performers.
(06:39) People just forget that they had a winner, like, you know, a year ago. That winner is a still winner. Obviously it's not gonna scale massively, but I have some ad accounts where like those old ads are like running for like a few years. Yeah. Do you have a cadence for like going back and revisiting old ads? Cause like maybe you guys even have turned things off in the past.
(06:59) Yeah, that's a good thing. As I said, like there's always, this ad that was decent, it's always running somewhere. So when I take over, I find those ads and they're always running with some kind of budget, with a different audience, with a different attribution setting, with a different bidding. You know, they're always running somewhere, at least with some budget.
(07:18) So I don't get into position that there's an ad that was good that is currently not active. Yeah. Well, you said something interesting there. I don't want to, you know, we can start to deviate off the ABO versus CBO a bit here, but you mentioned the different audience. And so I think some people hear audience and they're like, wait, you're actually doing, like you're doing more than just broad.
(07:37) And so maybe, maybe just want to spend a couple of minutes talking through that. Yeah, I know it's 2026. And like, if I said that, like I'm using interest, people are saying like, okay, what, why? But the thing is, like I find they can have cheaper CPM, they can get me lower frequency, and it's my way of amplifying the winners.
(08:00) So let's say if I have an ad in testing that, I don't know, it was running for two months, then it died, I would take it post ID, I would group it with some other winners that also died, and I would run them with some interest audiences. And as I said, like it's, it's a nice addition. It's not something that's scalable.
(08:16) It's not something that like, you know, is massive unlock. But let's say if I'm spending 20K in testing, I'm spending 20K in scaling. And then like, there's like 5K a day that's running in interest audiences where I badge the winners. Are these ads that you're running predominantly? So I would say 70% of my clients are US, 10% is Canada, 10% Australia, 10% UK.
(08:43) Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's, I, so it's interesting about the, the interest thing. I think I agree with you that there tend to be marginal wins, especially when you're spending at a really high level with interest. And I don't think that's necessarily wrong to do that. So I appreciate you calling that out. So let's talk, let's transition to talking about tactics that are working right now.
(09:05) There's a lot of things that you talk about on a regular basis. One of them is whitelisting at scale. This is talking about a ton of whitelisting profiles that are running, you know, not partnership ads, dark posts that don't show on the influencer's timeline, multiple influencer touch points in the same session.
(09:26) Yeah. So you went and said, whitelisting, you spent 1.2 million versus brand and the cheaper CPC, it was a dollar cheaper CPC and a way better North Beam ROAS at 1.29 versus 0.76. Talk about whitelisting scale and your sauce there. Yeah. So basically we realized that no matter the client, when we introduce whitelisting, especially from the authority pages, so let's say if you're in pet space and you find a veterinarian, if you're in, I don't know, pain, then you find a like pediatrician, if you're like in a skincare dermatologist,
(10:07) so like those people tend to have like bigger influence on regular users. They add credibility. The fact that when you're running through the multiple pages at the same session, you can see different ads at the same time, although it is the same advertiser just running through the different pages. When you run through the brand page, you can see one ad per session.
(10:29) So it creates that sense that everybody's using the product. So we then just like built a massive flywheel of these influencers that we actually put into our ad account. So like for our internal brand, I think we tested more than 300, 400 whitelisting profiles. So basically every week, I'm testing like between five and 10 new profiles.
(10:50) And like, again, it creates a sense that like every single authority in this space is using our product. Obviously, this is quite expensive at the scale because, you know, these influencers that are authorities, like I have some girls that we're paying like 20K per video plus usage, right? But those are like, you know, those are proven influencers.
(11:13) Those are authorities. Those are people that I know no matter the ad I launch, it will be a winner. So I pay 20K, but I spend 20K a day. So basically I offset that in a week, you know. Yeah, there's, and there's a bunch of different like levels to this. So I'm curious, like does the, does the partnership, whitelisting, however, like all of that, does that differ depending on the scale that the brand is at? Like if they're spending less than 2K a day or less than 5K a day, are you approaching in a different direction? It sounds like maybe
(11:42) you try to go for the expert and authority people first, regardless of scale. Yeah, obviously in clothing, you cannot, there's no expert. So you just go people that fit your avatar. Obviously the less you, the less you're spending, the less people you can actually have because they're sometimes more expensive. But we try, I would say like as you scale, you get actually more of those people.
(12:06) So that's the, that's the main, it kind of like goes with the volume. Yeah. And the two follow-up questions to that, how are you finding these people in general? And then the follow-up to that would be, how are you, and I know it depends, you just, you just said it depends based on the person, but like, what does the general partnership agreement look like with that person? It's fixed plus percent to spend, it's just percent to spend, who cares what that would look like? Okay, good question.
(12:29) So first question, how do we find them? So we have, for our internal brand, we have like four people in the influencer team that is just like finding people and negotiating. We leverage some tools like Facebook Creator Marketplace. It was a terrible tool until a few months. Now it's amazing tool and my influencer team tells me that like they find more people there than any other software.
(12:52) Also, we started using, I think it's Super Bloom. It's an agency that helps that. Basically, but like we're on that level that we can pay, you know, four or 5k for an influencer because we know there's a script that works. Obviously, when you're smaller, it's just like, you know, reaching manually to people on Instagram or to create a marketplace.
(13:15) Facebook marketplace is better because you know these people already know what that process looks like. They already have the pages set up. So it's easier in terms of the payment. It's mostly, so initially we have deals that we pay them for content and then we repurpose that content for an ad. Now we are just paying them to get the content.
(13:37) So you don't even have to post it on your page. I just want your handle and I just want to be able to run the ads through your page. They give us video, raw video. We chop it up into three, four different hooks. We send it for approval. We send the ad copy for approval. We send the access to get the, a request to get the access.
(13:56) Once they approve that, I have the access. I launch that ad as a new ad set in my testing campaign. And literally, there's no brand that we work with that did not have a positive impact from introducing whitelisting. Yeah. Do you see that there's, does the, does the type of influence or maybe type is the wrong question.
(14:18) It's like, does the scale of their following matter? Have you seen any correlation or not really? So, the big ones definitely work better, but smaller ones can surprise and can also, you know, get you some surprising wins, especially if the, if the video is good, but I still think the sauce is in the script. It's just like, this is like amplification.
(14:44) Why I don't like, you know, running partnership because when I see a person with brand, it screams that this is an ad to me. Like, it's just, I know this is an ad and I scroll past it. When I see just a person, okay, this like looks something that I could, I could engage with and I think that's why it works. Well, I forgot to ask and answer the question about the pricing.
(15:07) So, it really depends. Usually, it is, it is a fixed fee. We try to get them on an affiliate, like on a percentage of spend because that's better for me. There's a lower risk and I'm okay paying you more if you're actually getting me the results. It will be hypercritical for me because I charge percentage of spend. So, you know, I think that's a fair deal to get to the influencer, but majority of them are still like, I don't know.
(15:32) I would rather you pay me and then like in 30 days, we evaluate. If we have 30 days access, we evaluate whether the ROAS that they got and the spend is like revenue, whether that offset their fee and whether we actually made money. If yes, then we kind of like trade to negotiate. I have some person, I have some people that like we are extending rides from July last year, you know, because it just works.
(15:57) So, it's like running for like nine months and we're just extending every month. Yeah, I have one more question, Andrew, and then I'll pause and shut up for a second. But this might transition actually into one of the follow-up questions here or the next topics, but are you doing anything special with the account structure for these tests or are they just going into their own, they're going into their own creative testing campaign? They're just going into their own ad sets.
(16:20) So, each creator is in its own ad sets. So, if I'm launching 20 tests a week, I have 20 ads a week that I set and I launch tests from Wednesday or Thursday. I avoid launching stuff on Monday and Tuesday because my goal is to get at least one winning variation of these video that they get me. So, I know it can sound overwhelming because like, I know, in a month, I could potentially have 100 tests, which is 100 ad sets.
(16:46) So, someone could see that and like, okay, what is this? But actually, out of those 100, I'm getting like, you know, 40 that are decent performers. Very good background on whitelisting and how it's working for you. So, I appreciate you getting into that. One other thing you've talked about is cost cap weakened scaling, which is ASC with cost cap using different attribution windows.
(17:09) seven-day click versus seven-day click plus one-day view. And, essentially, the different attribution forces people kind of Facebook to find different types of people. And, with the cost cap, your point is like, look, Meta does the scaling for me. You talk about this strategy and what else is how you do it, how you set it up more specifically.
(17:30) All right, friends, quick break. This episode is brought to you by Northbeam, the marketing attribution platform that we love over here at Scalability School. If you're a marketer, I mean, you probably agree, right? Incrementality testing is broken. These tests require tons of labor, spreadsheets, statistical reference, and the designing of a test is slow and error-prone.
(17:49) How are you supposed to know what to test in the first place, right? There's a million factors that can make incrementality testing difficult. But, the good news is Northbeam has completely changed the game and they fixed this. Only Northbeam incrementality automates your incrementality test design and monitoring while protecting you from the major mistakes that plague incrementality testing.
(18:09) Northbeam builds tests using your own MTA data, launches them directly in ad platforms, and automatically monitors them throughout. If something threatens validity, you're alerted before it ruins the result. With Northbeam, you can launch tests in platform with a single click, saving you tons of time and reducing any chance for errors.
(18:29) And when the test concludes, your results flow straight into your MTA, meaning you can easily see results alongside the rest of your data. Incrementality was broken. Northbeam fixed it. Point is like, look, Meta does the scaling for me. You talk about this strategy and what else is how you do it, how you set it up more specifically.
(18:49) Yeah, so everybody knows that I don't like Cost Cap for testing, but I really, really love them for scaling. I realized that two years for one Black Friday and I was like, okay, I have this scaling campaign, but I realized that I don't want to have the same ad in a different campaign without a reason. So, okay, if it's different optimization, okay, highest volume or highest volume, value, yeah, yeah, so if I move that or if I change the attribution setting or if I add interest, that in my eyes tells Facebook, okay, this is slightly different.
(19:21) So, I'm okay with kind of like, I have the tests in my testing and I keep scaling them. Sometimes I get from 100 to 300. Sometimes I get from 100 to 5K just because tests work and I continue to increase the budget. When I move the winners into scaling campaigns, so my scaling campaign is on 7 Day Click, I call this winners of the winners.
(19:42) It's like a gladiators arena. It's just one ad set and all of the winners. I don't care which ad is going to win because all of them are winners and I'm comfortable using cost cap because all of them are winners. So, if I put cost cap of 50, Facebook spending 55, I'm cool because it giving me volume but I know it will never spend 80 because this is a proven ad.
(20:01) So, I'm okay, you know, leveraging manual bids for scaling. What you mentioned, Advantage Shopping Plus, the fact is that's the old Advantage Shopping Plus where we could define that percentage of spend for buyers. The thing is, like, I never turned it off. So, in 7 out of, like, say, 10 ad accounts, I still have that OG Advantage Shopping Plus running.
(20:21) If I do not, then it's just one campaign with one ad set. As I said, I limit it to 7 Day Click because I found that that old Advantage Shopping Plus was doing a bit more retargeting regardless, you know, similar setup. So, I don't want Facebook over attributing on view sales that is not responsible and what's the beauty of this weekend scaling? I realized that conversion rate is better because more people are on the phone.
(20:45) So, there's, I never knew to what extent I can scale on a weekend. I know I can scale but I don't know whether I can increase from 1K to 2K or from 1K to 5K and how to increase that budget without actually disturbing it. So, if you would, like, look a graph of my campaigns, Andrew, I think I shared that on the Elizabethan presentation.
(21:05) My testing campaign, like, goes like this because I, like, I just increased the budget of what's working. My interest campaign is, like, it's always steady. It's always on, like, let's say 5K but the cost cap one is, like, you know, it's like this. On Tuesday, it spent, I don't know, 3K. On Thursday, it spent 7K. On weekend, it spent, like, 25K just because it can.
(21:25) And I'm okay giving it, getting a higher, slightly higher CPA because it brings me volume. I have a million follow-up questions and, like, randomly specific things. So, I might be bouncing around a lot here. You mentioned the attribution settings. You mentioned a bunch of different things. Like, you could change something about the campaign or the targeting or whatever.
(21:44) Like, some of those settings to tell meta there's something different about this. Exactly. Do you actually scale by changing? Like, are you setting up maybe new ad sets with 7-day click, 7-day click, 1-day view, 7-day click, 1-day engage view, 1-day click? Are you actually playing with those as a scale mechanism at all? So, my first campaign is ABO testing on highest volume on 7-day click, 1-day view unless there's too many view conversions.
(22:09) So, basically, when I check into the ad account, if there's more than 25% view conversions and AOE is not 400+, I would use exclusively 7-day click. If, you know, everything looks fine, I would use 7-day click, 1-day view. Then, I would move the winners into that audience campaign as I mentioned. So, that's kind of like, okay, that's a different direction because I'm using audience.
(22:28) And then, the third direction is this 7-day click on manual bids, which is combining two different things. So, I think I pretty much covered that. Sometimes, recently, I started playing with incremental attribution or when the AOE is higher or there's, like, a lot of skews, then I would play with the volume. But I think I cover, like, four out of five things in those three campaigns of mine.
(22:50) So, you mentioned the OG AFCs and, like, the ability to set the percentage. Do you have, do you have, like, a playbook for retention campaigns or actually trying to go and reacquire customers? Most of my customers do not want to, like, reacquire customers. Some, I'd say, like, okay, but, like, if someone did not bought from you for, like, I don't know, six months, do you consider that person a new customer? If they say yes, then I would create a campaign, but I would create a separate campaign that's targeting.
(23:19) I would never allow that to be into my prospecting campaign because you can never trust Facebook with that if you just go for the lowest conversion. So, I would set up a different campaign going only for those customers. And that's mostly, you know, in some skincare or clothing. And also, during the promotions, people are, brands are okay, they're fine with going after those customers.
(23:40) So, then I would set up a campaign like that. Yeah. I have a question about just overlap in general. Like, you have multiple campaigns, you have a ton of different ad sets going on. Do you concern yourself with overlap? Or is like, hey, the number is going up, I'll pay attention to CPMR or something like that, but like, otherwise, the number is going up, it's fine.
(23:59) Yeah. So, I think, like, I definitely track CPMR and frequency and like, I'm cool with leaving an ad active if it has a bad CPA, but it has a very low frequency because it tells me that it's feeding top of the funnel. But I'm not going to turn off an ad that has a good performance just because it has a bad CPMR. And I think that it is healthy conversation that like, everybody are starting to measuring that.
(24:22) But I think we are going like in a bit like too extreme that like, okay, CPMR is better than the CPA. That like, that's not the case. Obviously, it is important, but it's also important that people see your ads multiple times. And when I have like, you know, 30 different influencer, I have 10 different angles, I have, you know, that creative diversification, they're not actually seeing one ad for eight times.
(24:46) They're seeing like seven different ads. So I think that actually also is beneficial to an extent. Obviously, I'm tracking that with a tool that Andrew and Kurt built, which is super helpful for net new reach. And that's obviously one of the metrics that I measure, as well as the percentage of new visits in Norbeam. But it's not, you know, I'm not going to turn off a good ad just because it has a bad frequency.
(25:09) Yeah. Okay. Then my last question related to this is, I mean, it's kind of overlappy, but are you using the actual like experiments tab in Meta at all for anything? No. Okay. Really interesting. So no holdout tests, no A-B testing directly in Meta? No, no. If you're doing holdouts, it's mostly through House or WorkMagic.
(25:29) When you've done holdout tests, what have they shown you that's been useful? Cool. I ask because there's a lot of discussion about this now and, you know, Northbeam has an internal tool that is doing this, which I think is actually pretty good. And it's, I think it's something that as, especially as budgets go up and complexity starts to get bigger that like, it's huge for people to understand like, okay, look, you know, so much of our traffic from YouTube is actually converting on Amazon or whatever.
(26:00) So like, what types of stuff are you, have you seen that's been surprising or helpful to you? Yeah, potentially I can touch base on the incremental attribution. Again, like I know this is like a hot topic now, but when I do the breakdown in my ad accounts, like incremental turns out to be 90 to 95% of seven day click attribution.
(26:20) So it's not really, you know, something game changing. I think it's like a tool in a toolbox, but I would not necessarily change my whole ad account to incremental just because Twitter is talking about it. In terms of the tests, so I did try, you know, add to cart and view content, never worked for me. Like I did five tests with two different platforms, never worked for me.
(26:40) So I'm not sure what, how come that's working for Ridge, but I mean, I guess it's working. In terms of the other channels, we found out definitely what you mentioned, YouTube has a way bigger impact on Amazon compared to just Shopify. We found that Google third-party pages, third-party funnels have bigger impact on overall performance than if it is visible in the ad account.
(27:05) We also had some success with Vibe on the CTV, but we realized that it's very hard to, you know, understand whether Facebook, which is spending like, you know, 20, 30 times more than the Vibe, has an impact on good performance of Vibe or Vibe has a good impact on the Facebook. So we are going to do some additional tests there.
(27:28) Besides that, still did not do app loving tests, but that's on one of my clients' maps. So interested to see that because I know everybody are, again, think how they scaled app loving. I never managed to scale it. No matter if I'm spending 50K a day on Facebook, I could not get app loving to spend more than 2, 3. So I'm not sure if I'm missing something or, but yeah, those are kind of like the main takeaways, at least from, you know, a couple of clients that are doing those tests.
(28:00) The only thing I would say on app loving, the only, we've seen, we've seen similar things to you where it's like most people just don't hit scale. But we had a conversation with Miranda months ago and that was like, I wrote down a whole, I had a whole notebook of notes, which I'm about to have with you. And I went back and I just like picked a couple of things and the thing that hit the best for us was changing the hooks.
(28:23) We did port over the meta creative directly and she said, she basically said, don't do that. But she says like, as a starting point, it's fine to do, but that's not where you're going to get the biggest bang for your buck. The biggest thing that made a difference for us from a creative perspective was literally just swapping out the hook to like be something about addressing the fact that we just interrupted their game.
(28:41) Like, hey, we'll get you right back to your game or sorry to interrupt your game or like something literally directly calling it out and it made a huge difference. Like the top performing ads were all starting with that hook and the rest of the, the rest of the, the video is the same. So interesting. I'll be curious to hear what you...
(28:56) How did you then try to get that creator to film a hook or was it the hook totally unrelated to the creator? Yeah. Because if you get like 20 winners and then like you get to, you have to ask like 20 people to actually refilm the hook. So was it just generic hook? Yeah, that's a really good question. In this specific case, the ones that stood out the most, it was an AI voiceover with creator B-roll.
(29:18) So we just, we were able to, the videos that were working in general were just kind of like B-rolled with voiceovers. So we were just able to swap out the messaging with an AI voiceover. That's... But I bet you'd have more success by like maybe taking your five best creators and asking them to film something really specific.
(29:36) That could be interesting. I haven't been able to do that yet. So if you do, you have to let me know how it goes. Sounds good. Yeah, you should start with like, hey loser, get off your phone. Yeah, you're just close to life. Yeah, exactly. Your kids in front of you, like why aren't, you know, make them feel really bad.
(29:53) That usually works. So let's talk about the hack segment a little bit briefly, which is like, what's the closest thing right now to a hack that you've seen inside meta? So you change this, it's like, and it is a dramatic shift. What are like one to two things that you, that you're adjusting that you're like, man, that's really an unlock? I mean, I like, I like hacks, but like, I don't think like hacks are just a nice addition, you know, like having a proper exclusion, having not reliance on existing buyers, no viewed conversions,
(30:22) like knowing when to scale, knowing how much to scale, that matters the most. And although I'm a media buyer, like, you know, product, offer, funnel, creative, they have way bigger impact than the media buying. I can make results when like client is spending, like everything else is dialed in, then the media buying again makes a difference.
(30:42) But you know, at like, at lower level, probably like focus on the offer, offer, like I've seen tremendous changes in the hit rates just by changing the offer. So that's definitely one thing outside of the ad account. Also remember, everything else outside of the ad account has a tremendous impact on the ad account. In terms of the ad account, I still pick all of my thumbnails manually.
(31:05) And like, I just kind of like, it felt like I got a recognition when Facebook confirmed that a different thumbnail actually means different entity ID because like I was, I did not know why, but like, I like for four or five years when back in the day when I worked with Yudi, I realized that a different thumbnail can impact the performance of the same video in a different way.
(31:26) So still me and all of my media buyers and my junior media buyers, everybody are picking thumbnails manually. I think, I think it has a positive impact. Although I must say, Facebook is getting better and picking that automatic thumbnail compared to, let's say, a year before. Yeah. It's funny. You basically don't like hacks and I agree.
(31:44) Like we put it in there intentionally because it kind of like pushes you to say, like pick, pick, have an opinion about hacks. And it's, it's hilarious because like you probably feel like you're repeating yourself pretty often and maybe the content that you make and you still get people that are like, they don't have exclusions.
(31:58) They're not using, you know, it's like you still see a million people who are just doing crazy shit and wondering why nothing's working. And sometimes it's just like those simple things ends up being the hack for them because they weren't doing in the first place. Yeah. So no, that's funny. One thing that we've, I'll throw in, I'll throw in one little hacky thing just as something that continues to work for us is just like customers that are uploading images as reviews, just taking them as is and uploading it as an ad
(32:24) gets you creative volume, gets you creative diversity. They're probably super blurry and that's the point. Like it, it just works really well and we just keep doing that on repeat. Yeah. Now that you mentioned that there's like something thing, like usually I found that for most problem solving product, images do mostly retargeting.
(32:40) We just do top of the funnel while like on, you know, on clothing, jewelry, images actually do the prospecting. So we found that like, I could not, like there's one client, like we're spending 50K a day, like 99% of my ads are videos. I could not get images to work and then we just replicated. It's a beauty client.
(32:58) We just replicated, you know, it felt like a story. It was like a text, organic text overlay, like what you would put on a story and it was just an image and like those ads are getting, I would say like 50% of delivery on story and reels and they feel organic and this is something that we finally managed to break out with images and got some traction.
(33:20) Again, I can't think because it looks organic. It's so interesting. I've been literally in the last, I mean, I've been thinking about it for longer than this, but like in the last two weeks, I've had this like weird obsession with like formats where like you can communicate the same message in a bunch of different ways, but also the type of content that somebody is consuming to your points, like stories and reels is different.
(33:42) Like Zach's a great example of this. Like they have compression socks for Holo and there's probably 80 year old dudes that are buying it and 30 year old nurses and the type of content that they're consuming is very different. It's like they expect a different format and so maybe it's the same, it ends up being the same message which your legs are going to hurt less or whatever it is, but how you communicate it and just even the style of creative can unlock different pockets of audience.
(34:06) So I like that. That's a good one. Nice. And those are easy to make too. Like those are easy. Yeah, exactly. They're super easy. Slap a question and answer on it. Exactly. So how are you just, how are you using AI by the way? Like, and by the way, if you haven't checked out the new Foxhole podcast, releasing or will be released by the time this comes out, AI D2C WTF, which is a new podcast I started up to talk about all this stuff even more deeply.
(34:33) But how are you using AI now? Is it with reporting or creating different variations or is it all that stuff? And if so, like what are you doing? Yeah. So I'm not on the level that Will is. Like when I see his conversation, Will, that was on some of your podcasts and like when I see the presentation that he did in this, I was like, okay, wow.
(34:52) Like I would never be able to do that. I did actually follow his template and I managed to get close, but I'm personally nowhere near that. What I like to do it is like for research, for like synthesizing the data. For example, I gave it my whole YouTube video for my whole YouTube channel and like I told it to create my media buying philosophy.
(35:11) It created like 50 pages document and then I uploaded that to Claude. And now like, you know, whenever there's a question, I can get an answer from that or like I can get a new script for YouTube based on my whole knowledge. That's one thing. The other thing is in terms of the ads, I gave it my top five spending ads and then I gave it one of my template of a listicle page that we are running and I told it to change the reasons based on the reasons, based on the angles from the ads.
(35:41) And that landing page is currently like that listicle is outperforming our current listicle, you know, by 10% of click rate and like it's getting a nice traction in Orbeam as well. So that would be one like practical example of me using AI. Besides that, you know, like when you're doing media buying, there's not much you can do compared to when you're a copywriter or developer or creative strategist.
(36:05) So it's just like mostly trying to kind of like improve my workflow and save some time either on analysis or on the reporting or synthesizing the data. I might be leaking something here. What do you use for creative reporting? It's mostly Motion or Atria depending on the client. Yeah. Motion has an MCP connector now.
(36:28) This is what I'm potentially leaking. I don't know if it's available to everybody, but they gave me access to it. It's awesome. It's like, I don't know if you use the chat feature inside of Motion at all, but it's really nice. You should reach out to them and just ask if they can turn on the MCP connector for you because it can pull all those AI tags.
(36:45) So like here's an example. You mentioned landing pages. You could say, hey Motion, can you go grab the top trending tags for me in the last 30 days for my messaging angle? Okay, so it's going to grab that and it's going to say, here's how the spend breaks down as a percentage of your ad account for this angle, this angle, this angle.
(37:01) You take the top spending one and then it can grab the messaging. So it can pull the scripts for those ads and it can give you the scripts and then it can synthesize it and write a landing page in the customer language from those top ads. If you wanted to, if you could set up a schedule in Cloud, like you could have that do it, just like present you a new landing page every week.
(37:18) That's a little overkill probably, but it's been fun. Yeah, basically that's what I did, but I did manually through Manus. Hey, here are the ads. Hey, can you transcribe me? Hey, here's the landing page. Hey, make it a landing page. So basically it was me involving, but if I can do that without me actually instructing all of that, that would be amazing.
(37:34) So I'll definitely check that out. Manus. I haven't played with Manus too much, but I feel like Zaka is going to ban me from the world if I don't start using it. You know they're going to be talking about it at the Meta Performance Marketing Summit quite a lot. So outside of the things that we've talked about, you know, I think one of the things that people look to you for is very, you know, deep tactical knowledge and deep understanding of this.
(38:03) How do you recommend people upskill themselves on these things? Like, I think there's so many sources. I mean, and, but I know that you sort of set out in building your name around education as well, right? Like you're, you're very good at that. How do you recommend people start to get better at this and really start to dive in? So, I mean, I don't know when I started, I went through the like whole Google and Facebook literature support to understand how the auction works.
(38:32) Obviously you don't have to do that. I did that like eight years ago, but like now I'm like spending five mil, seven mil a month and I'm still listening, you know, to five different podcasts on media buying. I'm going to probably not heard probably 90% of the stuff I already know, but you know, hearing Zach, hearing Brad, how he does, you know, that overlay of a testimonial image.
(38:52) Okay. That's a cool idea. Hey, doing this with MCP with Twitter, you basically just need one good idea because there's not much that you're missing. Obviously, if you're on a lower level, you have communities besides the podcast, obviously, Voxfield founders, shout out. If you're not there, you have to be there if you want to be serious about DTC and e-com and you have a library of free content on YouTube, like there's literally, you can start a brand tomorrow.
(39:20) You can start being, I don't know, whatever you want because the information is already out there. You just have to, you know, stay disciplined, stay consistent and try to like put it into action. It's not enough that you just like read about AI. You just have to try to build something with it. And I think that like, you know, transition from just absorbing the information to using information is actually what makes a difference.
(39:47) Well, Martin, thank you so much for joining us. A very rich episode full of so much knowledge and so much information. And, you know, I'm so grateful to you for all that you've taught me, all that you've taught founders and all that you've now taught listeners to the podcast. So thanks for coming on. And for those of you that don't know Martin, I recommend following him on all the channels that you can because I always learn something from your content.
(40:10) So thanks for putting it out there, my friend. Yeah, I appreciate you having me. I really enjoyed this episode. It was really good conversation. I think we covered a lot from the technical stuff and tactical all the way to the holistic. And yeah, if you have, if you guys have any questions, just hit me up on Twitter.
(40:26) I'll promise I'll respond unless you try to sell me your DM setting service. Maybe, maybe, maybe throw in a couple arguments on X as well. You know, a little banter back and forth. All right, take care. This episode is brought to you by the Foxwell Founders membership that Andrew and his wife, Gracie run. It has been absolutely pivotal for not just the Homestead team, but the Easy Street Brands team.
(40:54) We've had, I don't even know how many members are currently in there that are part of our ecosystem. But when it comes to anything from learning ads to understanding what's going on to building an agency to knowing retention, it's been absolutely useful for our team when they get stuck or they need help to just go there and resource all the other experts.
(41:11) So definitely would recommend it for anybody that's looking to, you know, take it a step deeper, try to get a little bit more knowledge on growth marketing and all the world DTC is. Yeah, I think one of the most incredible things about it is you can just like open up the Slack group every single day. You can pin your favorite channels for the topics that you care most about.
(41:27) And like every day, there's going to be somebody who just like, because they want to contribute something valuable to the group, you can go learn something every single day and it's going to be extremely useful. There's some ballers in there that you just get like the benefit of learning from that like for the cost, like you couldn't pay them that for their time, but through the membership, like you get access to some incredible people and tons of resources.
(41:48) Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest resource to me too is like the events that, you know, Foxwell Founders does. They've been able to do some, even in Wisconsin, even in the boring state of Wisconsin, which is pretty awesome, getting people together in person and able to have really just like honest conversations of what's going on, what's working for them now, you know, where they're at in their business and knowing that there's going to be, like Brad said, some real killers in the space in this membership that can help and are willing
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(42:38) Honestly, like reviews kind of don't really mean anything too much anymore. They're really meaningful, but they don't do a lot for the growth of the podcast. And so sharing YouTube links, sharing Spotify links, sharing Apple, whatever we call it under the podcast app now, anything you can share, the better we're going to be.
(42:56) Guys, anything else you want to say on this? Yeah, please go check us out on YouTube. Rack up those views for us. We'd love to see it. And then subscribe. Make sure to subscribe on YouTube as well. And I relentlessly refresh the YouTube comments because it dictates my mental health for the day. So please say something nice about all of us.
(43:11) Thank you, everyone. Thanks for listening. Honestly.
