Meta Targeting, Subscription LTV, & Traits of a Great Media Buyer

Richard Gaffin (0:00)

Welcome to the DTC Hotline. This is your direct connection to hot takes, cold truths and real e-comm advice from two of the best in the business. Call or text 866-DTC-2263.

Get your burning e-comm questions answered. That's 866-382-2263. Leave us a voicemail or just send us a text asking what is ever is on your mind DTC-wise. Both of our operators are standing by. And speaking of which, let's introduce them right now. We got coming to you live from CTC Studios for the first time here. From the Coast of Mesa, California, we got Tony Chop, The Chopper, who's our VP of paid media here at Common Thread. Tony, what's going on today?

Tony Chopp (0:36)

Hello, Richard. Thanks for having me back.

Richard Gaffin (0:39)

Oh, yeah.

Tony Chopp (0:39)

I haven't said too many hot takes. I haven't said the hot take that's gotten me kicked off yet.

Richard Gaffin (0:43)

Yeah, that's right. We haven't booted you yet. But you're on notice. We'll see what happens this week. Next time we got CTC's VP of E-commerce Strategy here, Mr. Luke The Weatherman Austin. Luke, tell us what's going on today.

Luke Austin (0:56)

Tony and I just look forward to this every week. This is a highlight of our week. We have conversations throughout the day in the office about what we're seeing across our data set of brands, our customers, and being able to try to package those up and share them with the world in some way that hopefully, a nugget here or there is useful is just a highlight. So we're excited.

Richard Gaffin (1:19)

That's right. And we all get to wear our vacation shirts, of course, which means the closest thing to a break that we get. Let's jump into it. Just a couple of notes about how this works. It's fairly straightforward. We get questions from listeners. We get questions from members of our admission community here, a commentary collective. We bring it to these two guys. They answer them for you, bringing, of course, their hottest takes and laying down the coldest treats, which is, I think, how we're framing it right now. So let's jump to the first one here. This is a question that we get from smaller brands from time to time. And maybe you even get from larger brands too, I don't know, which is, should we be, this is how this specific thing was phrased. Should we be moving away from ASC based on the way that Meta overspends on the wrong age bracket? Now, to give you more context here, the issue moving away from ASC at this point, I don't know if that's really a thing, but the issue here is that Meta's algorithm, kind of our general philosophy here is you let the algorithm do the work. You set it up properly on the front end with your cost controls, blah, blah, blah. The algorithm will get you the result that you want to get, and it can't really make mistakes. So in this particular situation, what it seems like what was happening is that Meta was driving a bunch of traffic, but it was driving people from quote unquote the wrong age bracket. And then this also connects to similar questions around Meta appears to be everything set up right, but appears to be overspending on an ad that's not really performing. So maybe the hot take framing of this question is what do you do when Meta gets it wrong? So who wants to jump in?

Tony Chopp (2:48)

That happens all the time.

Richard Gaffin (2:50)

Well, that is a hot take time.

Tony Chopp (2:53)

Yeah. I mean, the first thing when you're talking about that age stuff, like, you know, we had bid multipliers, which is a feature that they released about a year ago that lets us put pressure upwards or downwards on audiences or gender or age ranges. You know, so I'm not opposed to that stuff. I think that the thing, okay, hot take, the sort of like dogmatic, like all or nothing sort of thing, it's just not real. It's not real. Like, meta works 100% of the time. Like set your cost cap and never touch it. Like, no, of course not. You know, so the idea of like, okay, I understand something about my audience or I'm trying to push into a certain audience or certain age range.

And I, and I, and I want to let meta optimize, use the algorithm to optimize, but I want to put some pressure. I want to put a thumb on the scale, throw in some bid modifiers for sure. Plus, plus up the age range that you think is right. Plus, you know, minus down the age range that you don't want. I guess like prepared to have all of your preconceived notions challenged about what is the right or wrong audience for your product.