Happy Sunday, Everyone!
I hope you all snagged some Prime Day deals, are enjoying the seasonably warm weather and have had a chance to get some R&R before the 2nd half of 2025 kicks into full swing.
For this week’s issue, I wanted to try something new & different: a mailbag issue, dedicated completely to answering questions for you all. I’ve received several dozen over the past few weeks, and have consolidated them into 7 questions. For the sake of privacy, and to make each one as valuable to everyone as possible, I’ve removed any identifying information (company names, specific scenarios, etc.).
Without further ado, let’s get to it:
Question #1: What are the uncomfortable truths about paid media / marketing performance that most brands don’t want to hear?
There are three that immediately come to mind:
1. Great Media Buying Will Not Save a Weak Offer:
media buying is a catalyst. If the reactants are present (an unmet need/desire + a compelling offer), paid media can accelerate the rate at which magic (sales/leads) happens. On the flip side, if those elements are not present, no amount of audience segmentation or campaign structure refinement or bid tweaks will magically unlock profitable growth. The reality is that paid media focuses and catalyzes existing demand into concrete action, at scale – it allows you (the brand) to reach audiences who might need your solution (whatever it is), understand the value of it, and acquire it. But, if you find your CAC increasing/ROAS decreasing, aMER spiking, it might not be a media problem - it might be (and it more than likely is) that your offer isn’t compelling. If your primary audience does not want what you’re selling, optimizing ads is like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
I’ll be the first to admit that, in some cases, degrading performance is a paid media problem. That being said, the vast majority of brands would be wise to first rule out the possibility that their offer is not as compelling as it once was (either because they’ve changed it, competition has entered the marketplace, or consumer’s needs/desires/priorities have changed) BEFORE assuming that the media buying is the root cause.
2. Some of the Most Valuable Marketing You Do Will Be the Most Difficult To Measure:
I (along with many of you) have grown up in the “measure everything” era of marketing; for as long as I can remember, we’ve been able to track every click, attribute every conversion (wrongly, in most cases - but attribute nonetheless), assess the efficacy of every dollar deployed. That has conditioned an entire generation of marketers to assume (for better or worse) that the measurements of marketing performance we are given - by platforms, by tools, etc. - are accurate representations of what’s actually happening.
Unfortunately, the reality is less clear than the data might suggest.
I’ve spent years thinking about this - and the inescapable conclusion I’ve reached is this: an entire generation of marketers has conflated trackability with performance. Attribution with incrementality. And - to be very blunt - that’s exactly what platforms like Google, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok want! That’s how they get more ad dollars – some of which will be wildly incremental, and some of which will go to people who were going to purchase anyway.
The challenge is this: some of the most valuable marketing you’ll do can’t be quantified in any robust, scalable way – but it is absolutely worth doing. Examples of this range from conferences/events to PR, content marketing, SEO (or AEO now?), thought leadership, co-marketing, traditional ads and the like. Each one of these is incredibly difficult to measure – but could be quite effective. The best thing you can do in this case is to find acceptable proxies for how you expect the hard-to-measure channel/tactic to impact performance, then start measuring those things + correlating them to the things you really want (sales, leads, bookings, etc.). It will be wildly un-scientific, but that’s OK – at the end of the day, you need to ask yourself if you’d rather have a p-value suitable for publication or profit suitable for a very, very nice vacation.
3. Some Waste Is Good, Actually:
This one often makes both CMOs and CFOs cringe, but hear me out: if you’re not wasting some money, you’re not taking enough risk with your marketing. No one - not even Barry Bonds in his steroid-fueled prime - bats 1.000. If you’re even getting close to that, you’re not being nearly aggressive enough with your marketing decisions.
The best marketing takes risks. And risk is not free – some of the bets you make will work out fantastically well. Others will flop. Still others will end up in the middle or unknown (see the hard-to-measure point above). On balance, you want the wins to outweigh the losses, but if everything you’re doing is “working”, then you’re probably not taking big enough swings.
Note: this is not me saying to go light money on fire hither and yon, just to make sure you’re wasting some. On the contrary, I’m saying to be intentional and strategic in taking bigger swings – trying new tactics/platforms, investing more in hard-to-measure channels, experimenting with differentiated creative, deploying new post-click experiences, rolling out new offers, etc.
No waste means you’re playing it safe. Safe might feel good in the short-term (and make your reporting look much nicer), but growth (personal, professional and in ad accounts) requires doing uncomfortable things.
The best way to balance the two (efficiency + growth) is to allocate a percentage of your budget to experimentation – we typically use a 70/20/10 model, which means 70% goes to tried-and-true, proven tactics/channels; 20% goes to experimentation + evolution in those channels (i.e., new post-click experiences, different creative, new partnerships, etc.) and 10% goes to moonshots – things we have no idea if they’ll work, but think they could be massive wins.
Question #2: What is the single-biggest opportunity for most brands running paid media right now?
A year ago, the answer to this question would have been to scale creative variety, velocity + volume – but, for (for better or worse) that’s a tactic that has reached the tipping point. Most brands know (though fewer embrace) that creative is one of the most robust levers we have to drive performance across platforms.
The opportunity is in the post-click experience. While more brands are launching more creative than ever before, the vast majority of those brands aren’t directing those creatives to tailored post-click experiences; they’re sending everything from a UGC-style ad to an influencer post to a static to a founder video to the same lander or PDP. That’s a recipe for suboptimal performance – if I click on an ad with an influencer, but that influencer is nowhere to be found on the LP, that’s a red flag. You showed me one thing in an ad, but an entirely different thing on the lander.
The most successful advertisers - whether B2B or B2C - are the ones that have created seamless paid media journeys, from the ad to the lander to the next step to the post-conversion experience. In the past, doing this was wildly difficult + resource-intensive – but thanks to GenAI tools, that’s no longer the case. The marginal cost of asset (i.e. lander, funnel, post-click experience, post-conversion experience) creation is declining at a precipitous rate.
Tl;dr: there’s a massive opportunity for brands willing to do the work to create better post-click experiences that drive outsized performance gains.
Question #3: What is the right way to evaluate agency performance in the current ecosystem?
My criteria for this question is simple: the best agencies should do three things fantastically well:
1. Execute at an Exceptionally High Level:
Every agency’s single-greatest asset is their people. If those people are not able to execute whatever it is they have in their scope (email, creative, paid media, SEO, content, whatever) at an exceptionally high level, that’s a massive red flag.
A caveat here: “exceptionally high level” does not mean perfection; everyone - you, me, everyone in-between - makes mistakes. But not all mistakes are created equal – some are far more problematic than others. A minor violation of brand standards that’s caught quickly and rectified is not the same thing as a wrong URL that’s allowed to run for months on end. At a minimum, my test is this: if you can’t convincingly say that your agency can execute their scope of work at a higher level than you (or your team) could, that’s a problem.
2. Make Your Organization Smarter:
The best agencies don’t just execute at a high level; they help your organization learn + evolve. They share learnings and ideas from other industries. They challenge your assumptions. They push back and call out your biases (i.e. every brand thinks they’re the bees knees or the greatest thing since sliced bread; great agencies will push back and show where you might be weak, or where you could improve). They sharpen your thinking and broaden your world view. There’s no test for this, but a good proxy is how you feel after a call – do you walk away thinking, “that was a waste of time / another useless data dump?” or “Wow - I never thought of that, but I can’t wait to execute X?” If it's the former, that’s a big problem.
3. Implement A System + Process:
The final component of agency value is the system they build around the execution + insights – having incredible talent is wonderful; sharing great insights is often eye-opening. But consistent, long-term growth comes from marrying those two things with a system that creates predictability.
The best agencies are judged by the repeatability of what they do. A few (non-exhaustive) questions you can ask:
- Does the agency have a repeatable system for creative testing that’s pushing X new ads every week/month/quarter without you having to chase them?
- Are they tracking ad-level fatigue, audience decay and offer saturation, or are they just recycling top performers until they die?
- Do they proactively spot trends, recommend new ideas and/or identify areas for improvement?
- Do they have a process for translating insights into iterations, or is it all reactive and anecdotal?
- Can they spot incremental lift or channel cannibalization and do they have a way to show it that you understand?
If the only thing you can point to is “they got us a killer ad in Q1,” then you're not working with a growth partner - you’re working with a one-hit wonder. That does not scale.
Great marketing isn’t about one-off wins; it’s about building a flywheel. The best partners will help you systematize performance at the intersection of creative, media and insight.
Question #4: What is one thing you’d emphasize to a junior media buyer or marketer that doesn’t get talked about enough?
This will be controversial, but I’m a huge proponent of understanding the landscape where I’m operating. I grew up playing way too many real-time strategy games (Command & Conquer and Starcraft were my primary two) - and it was always easy to deduce the quality of my opponent by how quickly s/he started scouting. If you watch games with pro gamers (yes, that’s a real thing that makes real money), you’ll notice one of the very first things any world-class player does after getting some basic operations in place is scout the map. They want to know where the opponents are, where the resources (i.e. opportunities) are, where the dangers/pitfalls might be.
I think this is a wonderful parallel to advertising.
The best advertisers obsess about the competitive landscape. They want to know what their competition is doing - not to copy them, but to out-smart them. They want to understand what platforms are doing, what SERPs look like, what content is trending so they can tailor their strategy to maximum effect. The skill here is one that anyone can learn (but most do not): spend time understanding the landscape BEFORE doing stuff. That can be as simple as keying some high-quality KWs and actually looking at the SERPs, then clicking on the ads and assessing the LPs in a methodical, dispassionate manner or reviewing the ads your competition is running in Meta Transparency Center.
I’ve found that if you understand the environment, the right strategy tends to follow in short order.
Question #5: What are the biggest issues you see in ad accounts?
This isn’t even close: it’s whiffing on the fundamentals. The honest truth is that there is no “right” setup in accounts – there are better practices and smarter starting points, but ultimately I’ve seen accounts perform with hundreds of configurations.
HOWEVER, there are commonalities across the under-performing accounts, with the most common one being a lack of attention to the fundamentals. A few examples:
- Not excluding current customers where appropriate
- Not restricting URLs
- No negative KWs or other audience exclusions
- Incorrect location settings (presence + interest for something that requires presence)
- Optimizing for the wrong event (i.e. optimizing for traffic when the goal is sales)
- Not managing placements (or excluding low-quality placements)
- Too many campaigns/ad sets for the budget
- Allowing remarketing + branded search into prospecting efforts
- Not adjusting default settings (i.e. attribution windows, targeting settings, auto-apply recommendations, etc.)
While the specifics may vary, the thing that ties them all together is that they come from the same place: not being brilliant at the basics. The world’s most revolutionary account structure does not matter if the fundamentals aren’t in place to support it.
I’d even go one step further: nail the fundamentals and you’re immediately better than 80% of advertisers.
Question #6: How do you balance going all-in on platforms (like Meta or Google) that are working really well right now, vs. trying to diversify into new platforms?
My controversial take on this is that most conversations about diversification arise when brands are bored, scared and/or frustrated. The question those brands (or agencies!) should ask themselves instead are:
- Are we seeing diminishing returns on marginal spend on our primary platform?
- Have we exhausted our primary audience /ICP on our primary platform?
- Do we have the resources available to scale another channel?
- Is the anticipated marginal return from the new channel sufficient to justify the incremental cost of bringing that channel online + managing it?
If the answer to all four questions is a resounding “yes” – then it might be time to diversify. But if the answer is that you’ve hit a plateau at $50k/mo in spend on Meta, then there’s no world where diversification is going to help you get to where you want to be.
I’m a believer in focus and in going deep before you go wide – every channel you bring online adds exponential complexity while splitting your focus. It’s almost always to your advantage to pick a channel you believe is most likely to work (Meta, Google, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, whatever) based on some credible data (audience research is good!), then obsess about nailing it. Once you have repeatable systems (creative, offer, landing page, audience) that lead to predictable performance over a long period of time AND you can no longer scale those systems on the core platform, then think about diversifying. For most brands, there’s no way you should be thinking about trying some other channel until you’re spending >$250k per month on Meta or Google.
If you aren’t at that level, the cost (money, opportunity, energy, data, focus) of diversification is so staggeringly high that it is not worth it. It may seem fun or exciting to open up a new channel, but novelty and excitement fade quickly – and if you don’t have the system in place to handle it, a new channel will either become a massive time-suck OR a forgotten money pit.
Question #7: How do we diagnose what’s going wrong – is it a failing offer, a failing creative strategy, a failing message, a failing media buy?
This is a question I get far too often (most people don’t just want to chat for fun – they’re usually calling when something is broken). What I’ve learned is this: when performance tanks, most teams (in-house + agency) panic and start pulling the usual levers: bid caps, campaign consolidation, creative swaps, new audiences, adjusted budgets, new exclusions, the works..
Unfortunately, those things almost never work - not because they’re inherently bad, but because most problems don’t live where they show up.
ROAS down? That’s not the problem. That’s the symptom. The real issue is almost always upstream.
After looking through hundreds of accounts, I’ve come to this conclusion: you can’t fix what you don’t understand. So instead of guessing, I run every performance issue through this diagnostic framework:
1. Environment / Market Context
2. Your Offer
3. Creative Execution
4. Media Buying
I always work bottom-up, not top-down. Because if your market context is off, it doesn't matter how clever your ad or how clean your targeting is - you're going to lose.
1. Environment / Market Context
In most cases, when performance declines across an entire ad account or brand, it isn’t because the brand got worse – it’s because the competition improved. A new brand entered the space. A competitor rolled out a superior offer. The result is the same - you're paying more to say less to people who are seeing something better.
This is the layer everyone skips. They’re so focused on their own brand that they forget buyers don’t live in a vacuum.
Here’s what I look for:
- Has the caliber of your competition improved? (Better ads, more attractive bundles, improved messaging, more relevant influencers, upgraded product?)
- Has the environment shifted? (Signal loss, cost spikes, algorithmic changes?)
- Has the buyer context evolved? (Economic anxiety, purchase fatigue, seasonality?)
If the answer to any of those is yes - and your offer, positioning, or messaging hasn’t adapted - you’re likely headed for trouble. There’s a saying in finance that you can’t fight the Fed – and there should be one in marketing that you can’t escape the fundamentals of your environment.
2. Your Offer
If the environment is stable/unchanged, then the next question is simple: Does the offer still resonate with your ICP?
You can have great media and solid creative, but if your value prop is unclear or your pricing is off, no amount of “optimizing” will help. Strong CTR with weak conversion? That's not a targeting issue. That’s the customer getting to your landing page and saying, “meh.”
Offers drive action. Offers create urgency. Offers make people say yes. There’s a reason it’s called the “Almighty Offer” – it’s the single-most-important element in your advertising. The law of commerce is undefeated: as perceived value grows relative to cost, the probability of a transaction increases.
Your offer is just a presentation of that equation – and if the equation isn’t tipping in favor of “value” in the eyes of your target audience, you’re not going to get sales/leads.
3. Creative Execution
Now we get to the ads. The entire role of the ad is to get the attention of your audience and earn the click – that’s it. If your offer is still good/competitive, and the environment hasn’t changed, then (more than likely) one or more of these three issues might be at play:
(a) running fatigued creative,
(b) leaning too hard on a single angle,
(c) saying the right thing the wrong way.
There are three things to look for in your overall creative mix:
- Angle diversity (how many distinct ways are we selling the product?)
- Format variation (video, UGC, static, motion—are we mixing it up?)
- Ad-to-landing-page congruence (do people land where they expect?)
The rule is simple: if you’re running tired ads to a tired audience, it isn’t Meta/Google’s fault your ads aren’t working.
4. Media Buying
This is where most CMOs/CEOs start pointing fingers when things go wrong – but is rarely the root cause. Media buying is just an amplifier. It can enhance what’s already working or suppress what isn’t. But it can’t fix a broken offer or bad creative.
If you’ve validated the offer and creative, then check your media mechanics:
- Are you optimizing for the right event?
- Are exclusions, geo settings, targets & budgets configured correctly?
- Is your structure built to work with automation/machines and surface insights, or does it just look nice?
Paid media is not a slot machine. It's a system. And when performance drops, you don’t fix it by spinning more knobs. You fix it by working backwards to identify the root cause:
Market → Offer → Message → Media
If your first instinct when an ad stops performing or your dashboard stops going up-and-to-the-right is to blame media buying BEFORE analyzing the competitive environment or validating your offer/message, you’re part of the problem. Don’t waste time putting band-aids on bullet holes – get to the root cause of the issue as quickly as possible, and invest all of your energy in addressing it.
Have a question I didn’t answer? I’m going to do another mailbag issue in August! Just respond to this email with your question and I’ll make sure to add it!
Stay cool & enjoy the rest of your Sunday!
Sam
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