bryan 🧉

I publish @northbeam performance marketing benchmarks every week in The Media Buyer. Join 124,000 other marketers 👇 themediabuyer.northbeam.io

The AI hack-pocalyse is here Feels like I get emails like this every week

look mom I'm finally playing sports @theisaacmed

It feels like Black Friday came early this year. This week's data from @northbeam: Nothing is moving like it's supposed to. This data is from right before Election Day, so post-political spending release isn't visible yet. Still, Meta conversion rates are dropping even while CTR is improving? This feels like people researching but holding off on buying until they see a BFCM discount. Why don't you just give them a discount, then? Why do we have to wait until after Thanksgiving? If Amazon can do Big Deal Days on a random weekend in October, you can start giving away your BFCM discount now, who cares? AppLovin performance has been chaotic since Oct 1, but I'm not really concerned about that. Usually BFCM on AppLovin is pretty decent because it's a more captive audience. TikTok is going wild, though. More people are on TikTok Shops than ever, and since BFCM is truly an Amazon holiday, TikTok benefits. The TikTok -> Amazon customer purchasing pattern is biblically powerful. Except this year, it feels like more mainstream advertisers are catching up. I expect TikTok performance to continue to improve through the end of this year into next. TikTok has my attention. It's capturing more share, Shops is taking off, and brands are starting to take it more seriously than ever. Especially as a source of high-quality creative and content. Next Thursday's charts are gonna look nuts.

In college, I took a long shot and applied for the IRTS Fellowship: an all-expenses paid media internship in NYC. For a random farmboy from West Virginia, this seemed unlikely. They pick 30 from more than 3,000 applicants every summer. Somehow, I got in. And it changed the course of my life. For the last twelve years since that summer, I've made a point to go back to IRTS and pay it forward. I meet with other IRTS Fellows, chat on panels, and do my best to teach about the wealth of ecomm/tech/SaaS opportunities for students. This week I had the pleasure of talking about @northbeam on a panel with a bunch of other former Fellows. IRTS surfaces some of the smartest, hungriest, and most under-represented talent in media. Every year I meet students who are more driven than the year before. This is truly an S-tier pipeline of talent. Sales, marketing, production, content, journalism: they have all the skills that ironically are more important than ever in this AI era. If you are looking to hire absolutely killer young talent, let me know.

screaming. this is the AI Golden Age of Memes

This hand was quite a jumpscare @elonmusk

If you've ever wondered "How are those @northbeam users maximizing their BFCM spend?" This is one way: teapaw.org/BryanBumgardner/status…

How to scale budgets, manage cost caps, and grow profitably on the big weekend:

Meta Ads conversion rates hit record lows this year. What is happening? 🧐 Short answer: the Meta algorithm is changing. ROAS is better than ever, but conversion rates are tanking. We're experiencing a philosophical change in how Meta's algorithm operates. I analyzed six billion dollars of collective ad spend across 1,000 @northbeam customers to find this trend. From speaking to clients, experts in the field, and studying the data, this is my opinion: 1. Meta is still the best-converting ad platform in the world. And it's getting better, not worse. 2. The philosophy of Meta's algorithm is changing. Y'all are complaining because it's changing faster than most people can keep up. 3. Meta is preparing for an AI-powered feed. An explosion in content volume means we need to clean up the feed somehow. 4. Focusing on high clickthroughs is a decent signal, as it selects for content that drives engagement. Worthless AI slop gets scrolled past and ignored, and the algo improves. 5. Think about it: how else are you supposed to make a high-converting ad platform when 50%-70% of the feed is suddenly low-quality AI clipping slop? You do it by focusing on CTRs. 6. Landing page optimization is suddenly existential. No more "hee hee ha ha my product detail pages kind of suck but it's ok." 7. As users begin to click through more, and the algorithm optimizes for CTRs, you need to use Meta's Custom Attribution (via Northbeam Apex) to tell Meta Ads to focus on new customer acquisition first and foremost. A new world of Meta Ads is coming. It's our job to keep up.

At tonight’s Media Buyer Dinner in NYC by @northbeam - the chef showed us how to make the dinner he served to us immediately after

Regardless of your political beliefs, this has been one of the greatest meme days I've experienced since the Knicks

The MEMES