Looking Back, Looking Forward: 13 Years Of Running Facebook + Google Ads

How Ai is going to change the advertising landscape

13 years ago I started running ads on Google and Facebook, navigating Facebook’s Power Editor, looking at spreadsheets of long-tail keywords for Google Adwords…it was a simpler time that makes me nostalgic for things like MySpace, learning DOS command prompts, and playing Number Munchers on my parents’ Apple IIc.

But time goes on, and things evolve.

Here at the Dawn of Ai, people are waiting around for their jobs to go away, for the robots to start painting houses and raking leaves (it’s Roomba, but for leaves!). Zuck is telling the world that businesses will just connect their bank account and website to Meta and tell them how much money they want to make. Oh, and Ai is looking good enough to generate ads that run primetime!

So what about ads and agencies? What happens to the people who use Meta and Google Ads? How do agencies and businesses compete in this new era?

Technology will always change; we don’t have a steno pool anymore. We don’t have TV repairmen with boxes of vacuum tubes. But things still get typed, and we still have TVs. The fundamentals haven’t changed, even though the technologies have.

With this, as the ad platforms change the way you build and generate ads, but the fundamentals remain the same. Marketing 101 isn’t going away. You can’t ask ChatGPT to write you a marketing plan if you don’t know what needs to be in it. You still need to be a marketer, you’re capacity is just going to increase via these new tools.

So how do you use these new tools? You need to get back to the fundamentals.

Here are the fundamental questions you need to be asking yourself, or your favorite LLM, and a few things to consider in automating your marketing. We will use the Roomba for raking leaves as an example:

1. How do you provide value to the world, solving a problem with a product or service? What is your unique value proposition?

   1. Roomba for leaves! No more spending my time on the weekends raking leaves in the fall.

2. How is your product or service better than what’s out there?

   1. Roomba for leaves has a 10-hour battery life, doesn’t start on fire like the ones they sell on Temu, and is self-cleaning.

   2. It has a 5-year warranty and is made in the USA.

   3. We have over 100,000 reviews from people who love it.

   4. It’s backed by 2 of the Sharks from Shark Tank, so you know you can trust us.

3. How do you sell it through ad platforms with Ai?

   1. You talk about the things mentioned above. The great quality and reviews, etc. But you might use Ai to cut together clips of you on Shark Tank along with UGC clips of real customers, being narrated by an Ai voice, and have the Ai iterate 20 versions of it for different consumer personas with different needs, and create 20 different opening hooks/headlines to talk to those 20 people’s specific needs.

4. What works with Ai or no-Ai?

   1. A great offer: Free Shipping and a Free Second Charging Station.

   2. Better creative than your competitors: the competing product on Temu has a blurry photo that doesn’t show you the quality details of the product. There are no real reviews from real people in their UGC content. There are no videos showing the product in action, and you can’t even tell if they are going to send you the product, or a photo of the product (like the guy that just got a photo of a drill he thought he was getting from Ali Express).

5. Should you let the ad platforms just spend money for you and make your ads?

   1. HELL NO! If you have ever had the nightmare of turning on automatic adjustments to budgets and bidding that you were talked into by a junior ad rep, you know that what the ad platforms really want you to do is spend more money, regardless of the results. This could mean automatically spending your money exponentially, and you wake up with a $50k advertising bill on your credit card for one day (your previous budget was $100 a day!).

6. Should you let the ad platforms build your ads and write your headlines?

   1. HELL NO! You should let the ad platforms suggest headlines, Ai-generated backgrounds for product photos and the like - but you still need to MANUALLY APPROVE the suggestions. It will only take 1 or 2 bad ads to have your ad client fire you, or if you are running your own ads, for a few customers to be confused or offended at the low quality janky ads you are running for your products - are you even a real company, or just a Russian hacker with a ghost store that never actually ships product?

At the end of the day we have to remember that robots don’t dream, they are tools we can harness, but we still need to keep our hands on the wheel to keep it on track, and we need to have the marketing fundamentals in our minds to know what that track should look like.

Alex McAfee is the co-founder of the marketing agency Fast + Light