Creative Is the New Targeting: Why E-commerce Ads Fail Without Better Creative | EP. 226

Creative has become the most important factor in e-commerce advertising.

In this 226th episode of The E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff breaks down one of the biggest shifts happening in e-commerce advertising: creative has replaced targeting as the primary driver of performance on platforms like Meta and TikTok.

This episode is for you if your ecommerce ads used to perform well but now feel unpredictable, expensive, and harder to scale.

What You’ll Learn:

• How your ad creative now determines who the algorithm shows your ads to.
• The biggest mistake brands make when they spend on ads but ignore creative.
• Why authentic UGC ads consistently outperform polished brand ads.
• The hidden reason winning ads suddenly stop performing.
• How to test and reuse creative so your best ads drive results everywhere

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📧 Email: info@bluetuskr.com

Transcript

Andrew Maff: 0:03

You have to invest in really good creative that is very specific to the audience and very specific with the messaging.

Narrator: 0:09

Welcome to the E comm Show podcast. I am your host. Andrew Maff, owner and founder of BlueTusker, from groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies. Get to know the ins and outs of the E-Commerce Industry, from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it!

Andrew Maff: 0:23

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the E commerce show as usual. I'm your host, Andrew Maff, and today run solo again, because I've got a lot of conferences and stuff coming up. So I wasn't able to get a ton of interviews in. So I needed to get some some done, and I had some stuff I wanted to talk about. So today I want to talk about creative and how basically creative is the new targeting right? Advertising has changed so much in the past, like five years. It's it's basically how, what I kind of wanted to what I basically wanted to be more specific about today, Meta, Tiktok, specifically, both of those platforms, mainly, are the ones that are kind of the brunt of this. But the i But the lack of, the lack of investment into creative is weird, like I almost don't even understand it, like the the the poor amount of creative that brands are willing to invest in. It's just, I don't know this is gonna be more of like a giant question for me, and then, of course, as usual, it's probably gonna turn to a venting session. And I know it's cashflow and things like that. I think that brands have to develop a mind shift, because five years ago, maybe even a little bit more, you know, you could pretty much say, like, Hey, I spent this dollar and it went towards this much revenue. Like it was so it was so granular, you could see every little thing. Well, covid hits, and it just changes everything, right? Like we, we were kind of in a heyday, because everyone was crushing it, because everyone was at home and shopping. But the problem was, is that the user became like they evolved. Their online shopping capabilities evolved so fast that we took, like, a good five year jump into the future, and a lot of brands were not ready for it. Basically what it means like so many users became like professional shoppers, like they knew where to get the discounts. They knew if they found you on Tiktok. Let's also look at their Instagram and their Facebook. Let's look at their Amazon. Let's look at their website. Let's make sure this isn't a scam. I think the US is like one of the top countries that's just constantly dealing with scams, and so the users are, like, on the lookout for it, so they do their own due diligence. And so they they're constantly looking around. And so what ends up happening is you can't track everything as well as you used to, because attribution is not what it once was, right? And then you have platforms in marketplaces like Amazon where they don't share any of their data, so you you don't own any of it, so you have no idea how much traffic you may be driving to Amazon from anywhere else, right? So the problem becomes we were so used to spending money on certain things and being able to see exactly what the return is that I feel that brands need a mind change. Need, like, a mind shift, to basically get more comfortable with the fact that that's not going to be the case, and you need to act a little bit more like, you know, businesses back in the day. And I literally, I just talked about this on another episode too, of like, you know, digital marketing is a lot more like traditional marketing now. My favorite example is if you watch Mad Men, like, none of those guys ever turn around and say to the agency, like, Hey, can you tell me the ROI of a billboard? Like, that's not possible. And so it was just, this is our budget for marketing for the year, and please do what you can to get as much eyes and as much sales as possible, right? And that was it. That's that's where digital is going. And so because of that, brands are fighting it, and the ones that are fighting it are going to drive themselves crazy trying to figure out every little dollar return that they think they're going to get, and because of that, it's causing a severe lack in investment into creative and because there's no ROI to it, like not that you can tell, right? So for example, let's say. You invested a ton of money into UGC, so user generated content. You pay a bunch of creators to make you a bunch of content, and you drop, you know, 1000s of dollars one month, you probably get, I would hope, like, hundreds of videos out of it, and you start to put out the the videos, and then, you know, handful of them do well through, let's say social, traditional social, you revamp them and use them as advertising. Then those ads, you know, operate at a semi tolerable return cool. The problem is, is that you will now look at how much did all of those videos cost me. How much money did I spend on the ads? How much time did all this take me? How much did, like, probably some management fee or whatever, take me. And then you look at it, you go, it's just, it's just spending too much. And so then they stop investing so much in creative. It's such a huge mistake. It's ridiculous. First of all, Tiktok and meta, especially over the past, like, I think, like three or four years, I can't remember when it actually happened, but they basically became so algorithm heavy, so algorithm heavy. And these algorithms, especially with AI I'm imagining, have trained themselves to get so good, like, I literally will look at one product on a website, and then every single one of their competitors I will start seeing on Instagram right like, it's just the algorithms have gotten so good at knowing exactly who to get in front of. And really, that means that the targeting side, to a certain extent, is not really that necessary, especially top of funnel, right, like you're retargeting, you kind of want to, you kind of want to develop that funnel strategy where you have certain messaging, if they, like, just visited your website and haven't converted. Then if they got to, like, check out or cart, you know, you might want to show them something else. Some of you know, some brands that they have like a B to B element to them, and maybe it's like a, you know, there's like, filling out a form for something, then maybe you want to show them testimonials while they're still kind of a warm lead or whatever. So, like, there's different situations for middle of funnel, but for top of funnel, you know, the content in itself will become the targeting like if you create a video, let's say I always, I always try to do examples to kind of paint the picture more, and then I just draw a huge blank on how I

Narrator: 7:34

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Andrew Maff: 8:06

Let's do an easy one. Let's say you sell football jerseys, right, NFL jerseys, and you create an ad with Pittsburgh Steelers stuff, and you run that ad promoting that you sell a ton of jerseys, like you sell all the jerseys, right? But your ad only has Pittsburgh Steelers stuff in it. What's going to happen is those algorithms are going to pretty quickly cater to people that are showing more interest, which is going to be mostly people that are Pittsburgh Steelers fans. And so after you've run that ad for a little bit, that's going to only go to Steelers fans, right? So if you make another ad with a slightly different audience, so now all of a sudden, you're throwing in the garbage Cowboys, then all of a sudden you're going to start seeing those, all those ads are gonna go to Cowboys fans. It's similar with other stuff, right? Like, if you have a certain product that you know, there's a certain messaging you need for a male audience, there's certain messages you need for a female audience. Well, if you launch it as a male audience, if you launch it just a complete like, let's say, on Meta as an advantage, plus, you don't really have to do much, it's going to start to cater to a male audience, and that's because the content and the creative is engaging that audience, and so the algorithm is forcing to go that way. So the targeting is not, it's not what it once was. It's not you can still force it. You can, especially if you're still starting off. Sometimes the targeting can work really well. You use, like, interest based audiences, or, you know, lookalikes are kind of hit or miss now. But the the algorithms are so good at just finding the right people that you don't really need to do that as much anymore. What you do need to do is you have to invest in really good creative that is very specific to the audience and very specific with the messaging, because that's going to be what leads the algorithm, right? So we used to think that I could take a piece of creative, any creative. It could be, whatever the hell I want it to be, but if I select a certain audience, a certain gender, certain age group, whatever certain focus, they're going to see that creative. And that's that's the end of it. Now what's happening is, unless your creative is extremely catered to that audience, they're probably not going to see it, even when you force it, sometimes it doesn't do as well as you want it to. So the lack of investment into creative is ridiculous. The problem is as well, is that these the brands that are just crushing it. The ones that are just, like, constantly seeing crazy results in their, you know, their brands always think too that, like, oh, you know, my competitor that I compare myself to is, like, you know, 10 times bigger than us, and I can't, you know, compete with that, and blah, blah, you're 100% right on search engines. Like Amazon, if they've got, you know, 100 times more cash than you have, they're going to outbid you with their eyes closed, and it's going to be real difficult to out to win anything for from a keyword perspective, same thing on Google, on social media, where creative is going to get leveraged the most, it's every man for himself. Every ad tends to cost about the same. From a cost per click perspective, it doesn't matter how much your competitors spending. They might have a higher frequency, but you can still get in front of the right audience. There's an obscene amount of real estate. So that's where it's a little bit more fair game. So that's where it's kind of interesting to make sure that you're investing in really quality creative because these algorithms are going to cater to it. Now here's here's the other thing. So I know I gave the example of, you know, you spend a good chunk on UGC, and then you don't love you, the results are okay, and so you stop it, where a lot of brands make the big mistake is that they invest in this creative and they only use it on social media. It makes no sense to me, like that's that's your biggest mistake if you're going to invest in an asset, use the asset as much as you can. Created UGC stuff can work great in email. It helps with a lot of improved click rates. It can work great with product imagery. It can work great on your website, like, there's literally anywhere that you've developed assets this more like human connection with having like, UGC tied to it can really help the person put themselves in that picture. And it's a little bit more authentic, because it's not like a It's not like a big old professional photo shoot. You know, you get a big professional photo shoot, you have this, like, gorgeous model, and they're like, leaning up against some ridiculous car, and it's like, oh my god, buy our product, right? Like, cool. I'm never going to look like that. I'm never going to have that car. Like, they can't relate. So even if you do, you know a photo shoot where it's like, okay, we know exactly who our audience is, but it's still a professional photo shoot. It still comes off, like fake so everyone likes the more authentic element. That's why you tend to see like videos that are shot on a phone tend to do really well, because it's like if just a buddy of yours just filmed something. So when you see that type of content, it actually works really well across all of your other stuff, too. UGC and product imagery works amazing. You know, if you're on Amazon, you're A+ content on, ideally on your website and your PDPs, you should have similar section. UGC works really well there, too. You look at influencer marketing a little bit differently, right? Micro influencers, I look at them as like a mix of UGC and influencers, right? Because I am getting some content, but I'm also getting a little bit of reach. When you start to get a little bit bigger with them influencers, and you're getting you're mostly leveraging it to get in front of a new audience. Now it's a little bit more useful from a social proof perspective. So you got to think that not only are you getting content out of it, but you're also getting the approval of someone that has influence for a lack of better term, even though they all drive me crazy. So the that's that's kind of where those differentiators come from. And then you have the creative testing, like, volume problem, right? Everyone thinks, I've got to have hundreds of pieces of creative on a monthly basis. Cool. If you've got the budget to test that much, go for it. If not, no, you don't like you can really only test so much at any given time. You've got to put a semi decent budget around AB tests to see like, which creative is working the best. You know, everyone likes to put like, five, $10 behind it a day, and it's like guys like, you're not really it's going to take you weeks to pull in enough data. I like to make sure that if we're making a decision, we're very confident in it. And sometimes that low amount of data is not going to tell you a lot. So the amount of testing becomes a problem too, where brands are either not testing enough and they're like, only launching, like, maybe one or two pieces of creative on a monthly basis, and they test them and then they do something with them, or they're doing way too much and they're making too fast of a decision without enough data. So there has to be kind of that fine line. But once you find okay, this piece of creative worked really well. Then you can, obviously, how do you use it into your existing advertising? But then how do you also leverage it in your other assets, besides just advertising, and then you kind of blanket it as much as you can and rinse and repeat. But you know, UGC isn't necessarily a strategy, as much as there's a tactic and much is like an asset development, then you kind of have the one off ads. Those still work really well. I still really like them, as long as the messaging is specific and you have something that you need to say for a relatively short period of time. So a promotion, you're doing a sale for a week, you want to just custom develop an image and kick that thing out. Go for it. Those stupid ads are running around where it's like an apology from the founder or whatever that is. I hate that, but hey, if you want to try it, go for it. So you know, those things can still work. But the the the ability to get someone into your ecosystem tends to work when you blend in with everything else, and it doesn't come off as an ad, right? No one wants to be sold to. Someone wants to make a decision for themselves, and so the best way to do that is it's kind of like, what's it called? I don't think the words product placement might be product placement. I think it's product I'm drawing a huge blank on it right now. But, you know, like when like, when movies, when they used to, like, slowly sneak in products, and then they'd be like, oh, there's a Coca Cola. Where the the, you know, the labels facing right at me, like it's clearly they paid for that kind of thing, similar, right, where it's like, it just needs to blend in. And then they can show interest, and they can educate themselves, and then they feel like it's their decision to do this, and you're not forcing them to buy it, and now they're shown some interest, and then you can kind of slowly work them into, you know, social proof and, like, all that fun stuff. So that's where a lot of that stuff, I find, becomes kind of the bigger issue. You know, it's really interesting, like, these brands don't the lack of investment in creative is astonishing. The amount of brands that we work with now that, you know, I'm not even happy to say or like, you know, we, we tell them all the time. Like, you'll see creative fatigue. You'll get, you know, ads will work for a little while. And even really good creative, you get some great creative but then, like, you know, seasons change, people's personalities change. You've kind of capped out marketing and capped out your targeting. There is a benefit in some scenarios to keeping certain creative running for a really long time. This is something I've always said, and there's, there's absolutely you can your brand listening right now, go look. I'll bet some of your top performing creative chances are the reason it was a top performer, if it's not newer, like your older top performing stuff, is you left it running for so long that it developed a ton of social proof on it, there's a ton of likes, there's a ton of comments, there's a ton of shares, and people see that, and so when it comes across their feed, they're like, oh, this thing went viral. What am I missing out on? Right? So it kind of almost then becomes like a FOMO aspect. Those can actually work really well. So sometimes, when you find a good piece of creative and you want to put a semi decent budget around it, you almost want to say to yourself, like, I need to let this ride for a while, because it's going to slowly start to improve over time. And so then you run into the issue where brands are like, you know, we've run this one piece of creative and we are getting creative fatigue, but I can't seem to get any new creative to work as well as this one once did. And even though we're trying to create something very similar, we just can't seem to repeat it. It's because you're not waiting long enough. It's because that one's got a ton of social proof on it. You need to find one where maybe, like, the click through rates just as good, maybe the engagement on it is just as good, but then you just got to wait, and you just got to let it run until it gets enough of that social proof on there. So sometimes there is that element that you got to think about. You know, founder led stuff is always kind of interesting. Sometimes that can work really well. I know a lot of brand owners, they don't like to put themselves out there, and that's, you know, that's totally fine. It's kind of to each their own. But that's always something that's kind of interesting to throw in there is something different, because no one wants to buy from a business. They want to buy from a person. So if you can put yourself out there on occasion, it also kind of throws a wrench in it every now and then doing something a little out there is what you can typically see, will all of a sudden do really well. So for example, I know I just complained about it, but like those, you'll get those ads where it's like a ton of text and it's like an apology from the brand. It's like, We're sorry we messed up, kind of thing in big letters. And then, like. Super small copy, and the copy is just like, oh, we messed up and overstocked this stuff, and we decided we're just going to put it on sale. Like, it's ridiculous. It's kind of a bait and switch sort of thing. But you're seeing a bunch of brands do it because someone came up with the idea, thought they would try it, and it did really well. The reason it probably did really well is because it was super different. And it's, it's thinking outside the box. You're, you know, sometimes your standard UGC, your standard ads, you got to do something different. You think of these big brands, they don't do like, like, let's use the American Eagle one as an example. Because I thought this whole thing was hilarious. I won't get into because I know it's kind of a political thing, I guess, but they they do, like, campaigns where it's not a sale. It's not like, you know, when brands say, hey, let's do a campaign, they think like, Oh, what do we want to do? Like, 50% off for the weekend, or something. Like, no, we're talking like, let's create a message. Let's do something that is going to resonate with our audience, good or bad, and let's stick to it and kind of create a shit ton of assets around it and make that kind of our esthetic for the next, like, several months, right? So our season, so they did that thing with Sydney Sweeney around the jeans. She didn't do just like, one photo shoot. They had a ton of, you know, in magazines and billboards and on their website and on their social like, they had a ton of stuff, and it wasn't a sale. It wasn't like, 50% off jeans. Like, no, it was like, we're doing a message, and we're putting it out there, whether people liked it or not, as a different, different podcast, not my, not my area. But that's what I what we try to focus on, too, is like, we don't know what. Like, I hate sales. I think it's a cash flow nightmare. I think it's just a vanity metric a lot of times. But I digress, different podcasts, um, they developing a overall campaign and creating the UGC around that, and creating your other messaging around that, and then using that I know I kind of went off on tangent here, but overall, either way, basically what I'm saying is the biggest thing I across the board also develops not only that message that kind would say take away from this. You have to invest in assets. You have to invest in content and creative. Advertising will of sparks interest and makes ideally spark conversation, but absolutely fail. For you without question. I will not i You couldn't even debate me if you tried. I could tell you right it also keeps everything like cohesive across the board. So now, if you don't get good quality content and creative, your advertising will fail. All of these platforms are extremely your website, your social, your Amazon, your other marketplaces, algorithm heavy now, and with AI, it's only going to get worse. So that means that you've got to create some really good creative that is going to resonate with your audience, so like anywhere else you're marketing like they all have that the algorithms put it in front of them. End of story. As usual, thank you all for joining me. Please do the usual thing, that kind of messaging and esthetic. And so it keeps that rate, review, subscribe, all that fun stuff, whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the ecom show.com cohesion. And so people also then know that they're, you to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining me see you next time. Have a good one! know, working with your brand.

Narrator: 23:30

Thank you for tuning in to the E comm show. Head over to E comm show.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTusker YouTube channel. The E comm show is brought to you by BlueTusker, a full service digital marketing company specifically for E commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com now for more information, make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E comm show!