Jonathan Becker

We realized that highly produced ads from brand teams would always underperform next to user generated assets. The unpolished iPhone, mobile phone creative, suddenly we realized massively outperformed these other channels because there was an authenticity to it.

Creative is still one of these things that for now is not auto-generated in the world of AI and all the changes that we're seeing. One of the major pitfalls that we see is that certain brands just dump one homogenous message into all of their targeting. You see the same ad over and over again. It creates banner blindness and it's a total lack of efficiency.

We can have ChatGPT come up with all kinds of variants of copy that we would not have necessarily thought of. On our creative group, we can come up with mockups in literally 1% of the time that it took. You still have to understand what questions to ask of the AI and be capable of iterating.

The advice is that there's no single source of truth. Anyone who claims that they are a single source of truth, whether it's an individual, a model that they've created, or a tool that they've created, is not being accurate. The approach that works to attribution is that it's an ongoing investigation and it never stops.

If other things work, it is highly likely that paid acquisition will work. The issue for most companies is in this incorrect assumption that the data that is provided through paid channels allows you to have full end-to-end understanding of attribution. Which is wrong, it's never been that way.

We have more people now than we've ever had, but the nature of the work that they do is more strategic. It's more about modeling, validation, asking the right questions, being focused around creative levers. And less so the trench work of implementation and bid modifiers at the keyword level on Google search.