I joined Hallam in 2021 as the Paid Social Lead, and was tasked with developing and expanding the agency’s offering across Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and any other social platform you can think of within our Paid Media team.
Fast forward to today, and we’re a Badged Agency Partner with Meta, a LinkedIn Agency Partner, and more.
As an Agency Partner, we’re invited along to the Meta Agency Summit, where we get a look behind the curtain and see what will impact how we, and you, can get the most out of Meta in the coming months.
The Main Focuses for 2024
Navigating and Unlocking the Agency Landscape
Nick Baughan
Here Nick spoke about the key themes that agencies and businesses need to focus on — not just across Meta, but across all of their advertising and marketing strategies:
- Outcomes over audiences
- Raising the ceiling
- Many voices vs. one voice
Outcomes over audiences means easing off on the control you have and relying on the tools and products that Meta is bringing to market, and their AI, to focus more on outcomes. As marketers, if we’re taking subconscious or preconceived biases to our campaigns, we’re not focusing on the outcomes. With a +32% increase in Return on Investment and a -17% decrease in costs across Advantage Shopping Plus campaigns, there’s data to back up this method working.
Raising the ceiling is pushing agencies to be heralds for an evolving AI journey. Better outcomes require better creatives, and with platforms constantly evolving their ad formats to fit with what audiences are consuming, integrated creative diversification is going to be pivotal.
Many voices vs. one voice take the evolution of business models further and call out the need for brands to have more content than ever before to keep up with consumer demand and consumption. With 303m creators worldwide, this is going to be an area brands can rely on to keep their content fresh with much less expenditure (both time and money). 78% of products feel more familiar when promoted by a creator, and 64% of people consider switching brands when they have seen an influencer do it.
Let’s jump into each of these points in a bit more depth as they were covered at the Summit.
Holiday Success
Insights on Consumer Shopping Behaviour and Holiday Insights
Anni Tankhiwale
Starting with a focus on 2023 takeaways, Anni highlighted that the market began leading with AI, with approximately $200 billion in holiday sales being made through predictive recommendations and experimentations. We also saw the highest-ever share of wallets across eCommerce Holiday purchases.
Looking forward to 2024, and AI is going to be a huge focus in terms of delivering personalised moments. Going beyond standard ads, and offering ‘Just for Me’ moments, with personalisation being a pivotal to ensure the right messages hit the right people.
3 Ways AI will drive maximised performance in the Holiday period:
- Predicting outcomes: using machine learning to drive action
- Personalising ads: giving as much copy and creative options as possible to the campaigns will allow real-time personalisation and variation testing
- Iterating at scale: taking the reliance on finding audiences and targeting out of our hands and focusing on outcomes only, means it’s easier to find the right people, without seeing them as a needle in the haystack
With 52% of holiday shoppers using Meta for active research, and 74% of shoppers buying a product from personalised ads on Meta, it’s a no-brainer that you need to include it in your Q4 planning.
Reels Revolution
How Agencies Can Leverage the Power of Short-Form Video
Bianca Bradford
3.8b people are using a Meta app daily, and 60% of a user’s time on Facebook and Instagram is consuming video content. Add to this that 50% of all content on Instagram is now AI-recommended, and you’ll see how important and curated AI targeting can be alongside bespoke video content.
The benefit of Reels is that most accounts are already set up to take advantage of the placement, and it’s as simple as opting in if you’re using Manual Placements, or providing the right creatives if you’re using Advantage+ Placements.
Reels Best Practices:
- 9:16 video, optimising for full screen visibility
- Build with audio, 75% of Reels are viewed with sound on
- Always build your key messaging into the creative safe zones
Advantage+ shopping campaigns
Unlocking the Power of Automated Shopping Campaigns
Edel Horgan and Kai Herzberger
It’ll come as no surprise to anyone that there’s a significant shift (not just with Meta – but with all ad platforms) on moving away from manual optimisations and segmentation.
Automating campaigns offers things humans just can’t do as quickly; iterate in real-time, endless personalised AI-generated creative variations, maximised conversion chances, and access the highest potential audiences.
Meta are reporting a high adoption rate of Advantage+ Shopping and App campaigns, that are coming with some positive improvements to performance:
- 17% improvement to cost per acquisition
- 32% increase to return on investment
- 25% higher omni-channel incremental-ROAS
It’s hard to give full control over to the robots, we all know that. But Meta suggests that allocating a portion between 30-70% of your Meta ad spend on Advantage+ campaigns, yields the best results.
Dentsu has conducted 19 experiments across different accounts of ASC vs. standard setups, allocating 50% of budget to ASC saw improved performance and cost-per-result decreases of ~9%.
Expanding possibilities
How we innovate at Meta
Narain Jashanmal
With AI featuring so heavily in the Agency Summit, it’s no surprise that we were given a quick history of Meta’s SAM (Segment Anything Model) which is what allows its generative AI model to learn and identify everything in images.
Increased investment from Meta in improved GPUs, the launch of Llama 3, and the introduction of meta.ai (which is probably not available in your region yet) coincide with their integration of image generation models in-app.
All of this is going to be introduced to Meta’s ad product innovation roadmap, in an attempt to use the huge power of AI behind Meta’s offering to find and meet more customers, and support in growing businesses.
Generative AI for creative optimisations and launch ads based purely on AI prompts is also seemingly going to be a large focus for the future.
So, AI?
With such a large focus on AI from Meta, it’s pretty clear that they are being bullish around the technology and are extremely confident in their growing automated product base for marketers.
With this comes a more black-box approach to the data and insights we’re able to take from our campaigns, so hopefully the announcement of third-party tracking and attribution is going to go some way to alleviate that isolation Meta seems to be walking towards.
Get in touch with our award-winning Paid Media team
If you want to talk through your wider B2B strategy, have any questions on anything that we’ve spoken about, or need support on delivering your paid marketing, get in touch with Hallam today.
