8 Things Learned in 2020

And how those learnings can be evolved in 2021

Hello and welcome to another free dispatch with me, Jake the Ad Nerd 🤓 (< not me)

What a crazy year for eCommerce and Advertising!

2020 proved a few things out for me and more importantly, it helped me uncover a few larger learnings. Hopefully, these learnings can help you.

Today, I’ll be uncovering the 8 Things I Learned in 2020 and then see if it’s worth innovating on going forward OR if it’s something that should be ditched for 2021.

I’ll also be following a new format this year for the dispatches. Essentially, every dispatch will be a list of sorts and then throughout the month, I’ll be expanding on key items from that list.

We can touch on that a bit later.

You may have also caught on from some recent tweets, that I’m going to keep a few more things closer to the chest this year.

Why?

It was a harsh realization that maybe, just maybe, I was contributing to this layer of contrarian bullshit within the advertising community where I would speak without providing the level of context needed to adapt that to your scenario.

All too often this is the case with “advice” in eComm and paid media.

Some larger profiles and agencies are very good at this. Ie. Here’s the only way you should think about XYZ. Well… I call (you guessed it) bullshit and I’ll be distancing myself from those conversations.

Anyhow, let’s dive in.

I'm recommending a block of 10 minutes to consume everything here.

If you're new, I always provide two disclaimers before we get into everything:

1. There is no one unicorn source (including this one) that will teach you everything you need to know about advertising. If that’s why you’ve decided to be in this community, you’ll soon be disappointed.

2. What works for one advertiser, might not work for you. These are merely observations on what myself and others see working across platforms, accounts, and verticals. And, our interpretation of ideas. You need to test responsibly, at your own discretion, and ideate individually.

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⁉️ What Are We Nerding Out On?

Here are the 8 things that we saw work in 2020 (BFCM included) that I believe we can innovate on in 2021 as a paid media and creative agency.

1. Changing and Adapting. It’s Not Hard.

2. Buying Habits Are Evolving.

3. "Hacks" Are Still Disgusting.

4. Consolidation Matters. Not Power 5.

5. Avatars Are a Path Forward.

6. DCT Can Be So Much More.

7. Accounts Should Build a Journey.

8. Offers Need to Grow with an Account.

Of course, this isn’t everything learned (remember, close to the chest…) but I feel these are the 8 things that can be innovated on going forward.

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🍯 The Good Stuff

If you’re new, “The Good Stuff” is where we break everything down. If at any time you want to reference this again, just head straight to this section.

Right, let’s break it all down.

1. Changing and Adapting. It’s Not Hard.

Wow, what a brash statement. Did you JUST say that you won’t be speaking in absolute truths? And how is this a learning?

Stick with me on this one. All of these learnings are what I see. No abolsute truths here, just observations that you can build upon if you wish to ;)

Speaking specifically to paid media professionals (not brands) and the upcoming updates: I believe that my team and I will need to test feverishly, evolve, and shift success metrics if needed. Period.

In my opinion, this is honestly the sole reason why brands come to us as an agency. Because the testing never stops and the learnings from those tests lead to the next steps forward.

We can either position that as a hard thing to do or we can call it for what it is. Hardcoded into our daily lives after years of operating on these platforms.

How can we innovate on this?

I think innovation is simple on this one, for me. Keep this at the forefront of conversations and be sure this remains a priority for partners going forward.

The moment we stop testing, evolving, adapting, and shifting success metrics, is the moment we’ll be dead in the water and our service(s) will be of no value.

2. Buying Habits Have Changed

I touched on this a while back. There was a true shift in 2020 in buying habits, and for good reason. But I did start to notice that things that were once deemed seasonal, kind of blended into the fold year-round.

There was also a shift in essential purchases vs. frivolous spending. But that buyer psychology is returning to a new normal as work from home takes precedence, people are getting back to wanting the things that they had before.

However, the biggest learning here was during BFCM.

For the first time in several years, we saw that consumers were doing more window shopping than ever before. It became less about this small time period of sales and more about consumers KNOWING that the deal would most likely be around when they hopped back on, thus they built their carts and came back when the time was right for them.

It wasn’t anything new, in reality. But to see it play out was rather fascinating. I thought about it heavily. Why is there so much intent with little follow-through?

And to be clear, partners had some of their best BFCM periods in the last two years, so it wasn’t a negative. Just more of an observation as to how that can be addressed in the future.

There was so much window shopping because the primary generation for driving eCommerce sales has grown up knowing exactly what BFCM is. We’ve literally cultivated a sales period where urgency isn’t a thing anymore. This shift happened 2 years ago when more and more brands began running month-long sales.

How can we innovate on this?

I think the biggest innovation here is not relying on BFCM as heavily for the brands that we partner with. While it will still be a massive sale time, I’m challenging myself to think through, how can we get back to that just being BFCM and capture what we need to in the months before that? I’ll touch on what our approach for that is in number 8. Hint, it’s offer launches.

I also think that sticking to a traditional sale cadence for BFCM is the way to go for us in 2021. We had a healthy mix of month-long sales and specific BFCM sales. And I think the most important thing we’ll be looking to accomplish in 2021 is bringing back the urgency around the sale.

3. Hacks Are Still Disgusting

The key learning here is pretty damn obvious. Avoid these at all costs. There isn’t a single piece of advice, labeled as a hack, that I’ve ever seen work at scale. It might sound good to continue speaking like this in our community, but my $0.02 which is worth exactly that, is that this talk only hurts our profession and leads potential or current partners to believe, there really is a hack.

How can we innovate on this?

Avoid this nonsense. Let’s get back to the prominent days of treating paid media for what it really is. We’re not hacking things and finding shortcuts. We’re extending what a brand is building, testing, evolving, and providing them with further momentum to continue growing.

Any “shortcut” to that is not only dangerous to us as advertisers but detrimental to brands in the long-term.

4. Consolidation Matters. Not Power 5.

This is a touchy subject, I’m sure. But the way I think through this is pretty simple.

If you can’t tell a story via paid media and drive purchases in 7 campaigns or less, there’s most likely a problem. All too often during audits in 2020, I would see accounts spending very little and spreading that over 15-25 campaigns. That’s a budget completely wasted, in my opinion. The amount of time it will take to deduce any learning from those is entirely too long, especially now that your attribution windows are shrinking.

Chunk it all down, consolidated where you can, and be vigilant with where every, single, dollar is going. There’s most likely something running in your account right now that can be turned off and that money can be reinvested somewhere else with more impact.

The biggest issue I saw with the Power 5 was the auto-placements. After seeing breakdown after breakdown, it became pretty clear that some brands do absolute shit on Facebook compared to IG. Or that Audience Network hadn’t converted a single purchase in the last 6 months, yet it ate 6% of spend.

While the data is there, and before they remove placement breakdowns, please go look at where your spend is going. If ZERO fucking people have converted from Messenger in the last 180 days, then maybe you can remove it.

Another key area here is that CBO simply does not work across the board, for me. I cannot willingly give money to Facebook when they flat out tell me that the adset with the largest audience gets the budget. That’s why I prefer, ABO for tests and CBO for scale on similar (large) audiences.

So again, while I don’t subscribe to the Power 5, I do believe there’s a thought process behind that structure that can help everyone. That being, consolidate anywhere and everywhere that you can.

The faster learning times (your learning time, not the bullshit learning phase) are what we’re after here. The quicker you can see what’s working and what’s not, allows you to scale an account much more efficiently.

5. Avatars Are a Path Forward.

I’m going to talking about this a lot this year. Especially with new updates rolling out. Avatars were one of the most important learnings for us in 2020. While we had always focused on this, we never really leaned into it in a way that made it a core service offering of ours.

Now, you don’t need to go do shit tons of research to unlock this. You can simply look at ad breakdowns, customer demo breakdowns, and survey data.

The easiest way we scaled accounts in 2020 was by unlocking new Avatars, at least, every 3 months. This allowed us to ideate new creative, create new funnels and landing pages, and target new audiences (with creative).

How can we innovate on this going forward?

By proactively thinking through who is on the other end of the ads that we’re serving.

If my top Avatar is a 20-35yo Female that’s into mountain biking, then my creative should address that lifestyle FOR HER. Not the mountain biking community as a whole.

See what I mean there?

Again, much more to come on this as I build out a playbook for Avatars.

6. DCT Can Be So Much More.

Dynamic Creative Testing got some massive love in 2020. And of course, I went the other way with it. Only because I wanted to challenge what I was seeing and because I wanted to incorporate it into the other tests throughout the year (Avatars and Offers).

The biggest issue I saw with DCT during audits was people overusing it outside of it’s intended use-case. And what I mean by that is, when a clear winner was evident, they’d still keep it running.

Why? Probably because it continued to pull in purchases.

Instead, the way I think about this is, that the clear winner from DCT should have been pulled and then scaled out. The entire intention of the function IMO.

My caution to others is, I wouldn’t rely on the functionality of this feature outside of its intended use (testing).

How can we innovate on this going forward?

I plan to get even more concise on DCT. Ie. Instead of 4 images, x headlines, 5 primary text, etc. I’ll be using DCT to start large, find two winners from that, and then pull into another DCT and find the winner from there.

I don’t see that get talked about and I think it will be a new use case for this function going forward, especially when tied to Avatars and Offers.

DCT is probably one of my favorite things on the FB Ads platform right now, I just want to be more intentional with my use of it.

Especially with the previous #5 there. With each Avatar defined, I want to fully understand what creative and copy is speaking to them and then evolve on that as the account scales.

7. Your Account Should Build a Journey

Another favorite for 2020. It’s been used in previous years but we leaned heavily into this in 2020. Using the accounts to build a journey.

So, not just slapping something TOF and then duplicating into MOF with a new offer (yes, we see this often and it does work).

But instead, being more proactive and thinking about every touchpoint along the way.

If a consumer saw this ad first, what’s the second ad they should see. Can it be a branded pr piece, should it be a UGC testimonial? And then breaking that down further for each step of the funnel.

And then breaking that down even further by Avatar and Offer.

How can we innovate on this going forward?

It might get a little more tricky depending on what data is being passed back for retargeting but leaning into the Avatar piece will allow us to tailor creative at each stage. With each of our partners, this will become a much tighter focus in 2021.

Creative cycling not just for the account but for the stage and avatar as well.

I think this will speak more to the landscape changes as well. As data privacy becomes more adopted, advertising will need to do a better job of thinking about the end consumer. That starts with creative and the journey we send them on.

8. Offers Need to Grow with an Account

Probably the easiest thing to overlook in 2020 was not evolving offers as account spends grew. Ie. Just scaling spends and creative.

While that works, there comes a point after a certain spend threshold per day, where you’re going to need to inject new offers for the Avatars that you’ve built.

For us this year, that consisted of “Offer Launches” every 3 months.

I started to think about it a bit more. If the brand we’re partnered with can’t or doesn’t necessarily want to, launch a new product (this takes investments)… how can we launch new offers?

Thus, we started focusing on Offer Launches and tied that into product launches as they came.

These new offers coupled with avatars and journeys were a huge unlock for us as a team. We were able to ideate on something 3 months out, plan, and execute. And the consumer was happy and converted because they were’’t seeing the same ads for a bundle that’s been live the last 8 months.

This allowed us to continue scaling accounts and creating new creative on a cadence that led to more efficiency for accounts. Especially accounts where we scaled from $500k to $1M.

How can we innovate on this in 2021?

I think the key thing that we’ll be looking to do is test the cadence of these Offer Launches. While we’re currently on a 3-month cycle, I’d like to actively test if a 1 month, 2 month, etc. outperforms that or if just provides more noise.

This will undoubtedly result in a shit load more work, especially on the creative and tech side (yes, I believe your lander should match your offer), but it’s completely worth it in my opinion and the exact reason why our partners choose to work with us.

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🏁 In Closing

Well, there you have it.

8 learnings from 2020 and how we can innovate on them in 2021.

I didn’t deep dive into everything here because I’ll be doing micro-dispatches breaking down 3 of these learnings (once a week): Avatars, Offers, and Journeys.

I’ll be giving a little more insight into how I’m thinking through each one for brands in 2021 and specifically on our primary platforms (with updates coming).

By expanding on the micro, I hope to add another layer of value to the community and shed some light on the macro:

aka Why I’m doing something, or even why I’m saying something.

That will lead us right into the next “main” dispatch.

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With gratitude.

Keep an eye out for each micro-dispatch on those three learnings every week this month (next on 1/12).

And then your main-dispatch will be delivered on 2/2 (the first Tuesday of every month at 5pm PST).

I’ll be diving into how myself and our team think through paid media ideas/themes.

If it makes sense to put it out before that dispatch, I’ll release a dispatch about the iOS update. For now, there’s already enough noise there as it is and some amazing pieces of content as to how to think about it all.

My biggest piece of advice here is, be mindful of what you consume.

For me, and for this newsletter, I’m going to provide my thoughts on the next steps when more data is available to me.

For our partners, we’ll make sure that’s taken care of for them. And I would encourage you to look into server-side tagging.

In the interim, I did put out a tweet with my thoughts and who I think has the best resources for this as it continues to evolve.

That’s right here: iOS14 TWEET w/ RESOURCES.

Until next time.

Cheers to 2021,

Jake the Ad Nerd 🤙

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