Has Performance Media Plateaued? Why Strategy and Creative Still Win

Heather Riexinger: here today with Bob Birch, our media guru, ninja, whatever we wanna call you. Don’t, don’t, don’t. You’re like, please, please don’t do that.

Bob Burch: No ninjas, no gurus, none of that nonsense.

Heather Riexinger: All right, well, very smart media man. Wanted to chat a little bit today with you about perfectionism and how it’s been performance and there’s some plateaus, people are calling out, AI obviously is ever changing in media. But recently there’s been a lot of chatter around the premise of the performance plateau and there’s articles saying that brands now have access to same tools targeting automation, has creative really become the differentiator again in this world. So I’d love to hear a media perspective on that and how you’re feeling about all of these tools. And obviously we know here automation and AI are only as good as the hands that are working it. But is, you know, is performance media actually plateauing? You know, is it just harder to do that? What’s going on? Tell us a little bit about your thoughts.

Bob Burch: So I think the idea of any media tactic or any strategy plateauing is probably a little overblown because I think in general everything sort of plateaus and every client we work with, every business, depending on where they are at in their marketing strategy is going to hit different points of plateau. Regardless of what they’re dealing with. I think there is certainly something to be said about certain tactics like search and social, which like you said, we are all, in many cases, using a lot of the same tools, using a lot of same automation type things. Certainly they’re building in AI capabilities natively into the platforms now. And I think that’s a really good question. I’m not sure that we’re going to be able to be able to dig natively into the platforms now. So that is less differentiating in terms of what’s happening there. I think where you can continue to differentiate is the strategy that is behind all of that. So yes, there are plateaus, but I think in general, there’s always ways to do things differently with any situation. to be thinking kind of one or two steps ahead in all of the different levers that you can be pulling there. And I know you mentioned creative as one of them. And I think certainly that could be a really big amplifier of performance.

Heather Riexinger: Yeah, so talked a couple weeks ago with Chris Flynn on the podcast. And he mentioned the human touch in all aspects of creative. And we know, you know, Meta is now offering all of these creative amplification tools. How do you feel about those and where they should be incorporated into campaigns?

Bob Burch: Yeah, so I think their goal is by the end of this year, they want to set it up where essentially you just feed in almost raw assets into the platform, let them kind of stitch together different forms of creative. I think the concern for anybody in the marketing space is, I think, a few things. Number one, are we going to deal with even more of a sea of sameness that’s coming out of that? That’s a problem always. I think especially we work in a lot of highly competitive categories, highly regulated categories, where being differentiated is not always easy. And there’s always a really crowded competition anyway. So if you do that and combine it with everybody kind of feeding the same inputs into something, the outputs are going to be very, very similar. And so that’s what I think where a really smart creative mind can amplify that a step further. That’s not to say that you can’t create elements of that with AI and streamline the execution and the operation side of it too. I think it’s a matter of how do we create a really strong creative platform in a system that could then be amplified by the AI pieces of that. So I think that’s a lot of the piece that I know when we’re working directly with our creative team, we can feed them best practices for the platform. They are, in general, designing with the platform in mind first of what the expectations are for that. But I think that’s where that collaboration between our media teams and creative teams can get us better creative. And then I think the other big concern by anybody– and this is with any wealth garden– is you’re optimizing to conversions that are being tracked by their own platform. So they are grading their own homework. And that’s really tough to take. It’s why we want to make sure that we also have access to other more source of truth data sets from our clients directly so we can really see what’s going on, because we know all these platforms are, in many cases, claiming credit for the same conversion.

Heather Riexinger: And with that, we see a lot of the optimization for short-term wins. How do you balance that with the long-term growth that we’re looking for in the long-term wins or back-end metrics like sales that are really what’s important if those tools are optimizing to short-term front-end metrics?

Bob Burch: That is probably one of the most difficult conversations we have with clients, because we are often brought in in situations where we are helping them get the most that they can out of often very bottom funnel tactics. And depending on the client, if you are just playing in the high-intent cat space of paid search, for example, you are going to hit a plateau. You are going to get a point where there’s just diminishing returns in that channel. The question is, different businesses, some businesses never experience that. And they don’t need to think about fishing in a larger pond, even if, again, a very small subset of the population is in market for your product or service at any given time. Sometimes you can be very successful just playing in that area. So I think it really just depends on really the universe size and how much your product would resonate with a broader audience, where you have to start thinking about that. And then there’s different ways that we can start shifting in that general direction. I think we have this conversation every few years about brand versus performance, more demand gen versus demand capture. And there’s often a tendency, particularly when there’s a changeover in leadership on a marketing team within on the client side, to just swing in the absolute opposite direction. And that is rarely the right path.

Heather Riexinger: Everyone wants to make a mark. Exactly. And makes a movement.

Bob Burch: And we’ve had clients where we have had them move out. And we’ve had clients who have moved on to another agency because they want to shift more to a brand-led type campaign. And we’ve seen that work in some cases. And we’ve seen them fall flat on their face in other instances. So it’s a balance. And I think we are always in believers of constant testing. We talk a lot about the 80-20 rule, or sometimes the 70-30 day, but that idea that we should be putting 20% to 30% of your investment towards testing new things. And that we also have to think of it differently of how we’re measuring that. So if we are moving into different types of tactics that aren’t necessarily going to give us that direct attribution, what are all of the different signals that we’re looking at? Are we creating intent? Are we getting them to take that one step towards that area where we’re designed to capture them? So we talk about TV and paid search and the interplay of that a lot because we know they’re best friends. And if you’re running a really strong video campaign, usually you see performance improvements in paid search, both on the non-branded side because it’s going to help you win the click against all the other advertisers. But then, of course, things like branded search, organic search, AI search, all of that is going to be– it’s just going to build that authority. And it’s going to help you. So testing is just often the biggest answer and just baby steps. We’ve got to crawl before we can run.

Heather Riexinger: So with testing in the 2030 rule, how do you balance testing new media tactics and testing new creative? How do you determine which should be done when and how the overlap should happen?

Bob Burch: Yeah, so I would add a third bucket to that. I think the biggest things we think about, number one, are there new audiences that we can be testing? Then we also think about, are there new tactics? And then lastly, what is the creative that we should be doing there? So a lot of times, we can run them in tandem. But if possible, we like to isolate those elements as best as we possibly can. In some cases, you could be doing one thing in one tactic. So we could be doing creative testing in a tried and true tactic while we’re also investing in something else there. We could isolate markets. We can isolate specific areas. So even just making sure that you have some sort of holdout so you’re trying to keep the variables as consistent as you can. Time is always an ever-changing variable. So that’s difficult. Seasonality is going to play a role. It’s all very, very complicated when you do it that way. So if we have, I think, the freedom of a little bit of time and a little lack of urgency, we would do things a little bit more strategically and pick which ones we think are easiest to start first. A lot of times, we start with bringing existing tried and true creative to a new tactic first, and then we would iterate on the creative in there. So if we can isolate those elements, that’s the best approach.

Heather Riexinger: Are there any platforms where creative makes the biggest difference? What are those tactics, and are there places where you’re a lot more critical of the creative and swapping it out and testing new creative more often?

Bob Burch: That was a lot in one sentence. I think the answer to that is everywhere, though. It’s different types of creative, and it’s different best practices. But Jason, our creative director, I know he talks about platform first thinking when he’s coming up with concepts and ideas. But the reality is you should be testing new headlines and descriptions in your search campaigns. Within your social campaigns, you should be testing different video versus static imagery, different copy tags, different variations of all of that whole new concepts. There’s so much that you can do there. On the video side, same thing. There’s often ways that we can get more things. I think the tendency of where creative tends to get tested a little bit more is search and social, just because we do get a little bit more of a immediate feedback loop on the performance of that. It tends to be a little bit of a lower lift, although as we shift to more video-heavy type creative in some of those, maybe not so much. So you do see it happen a little bit more there. But the reality is better creative has the potential to make every single one of those tactics perform better.

Heather Riexinger: Great. I love it. And I think you mentioned this. That’s the importance of those teams working together. And we have both internally, but we’ve also worked externally with different creative– house creative or other creative agencies. And it’s always imperative that those two are talking and– For sure.

Bob Burch: And I think even when we are maybe only tasked with one, I think our position from a Flynn standpoint is if we’re just handling the media and we’re partnering with another agency to do the creative, that doesn’t mean that we’re not involving the really smart people on our creative team and having conversations with them. Because in that case, our job as a media team is to effectively communicate the creative needs over to the client and to the other agency. And so sometimes having those– just that little collaboration between our creative team can help. And if you flip that around, often I’m pulled in on creative-only ones and saying, well, here’s the media plan they gave us. Can you help us understand it? Can you help us understand best practices for the platform? And so we’re continuing to build and feed the best creative assets that we can over to that team.

Heather Riexinger: Great. All right. Well, that was all very interesting. of shifting a little bit– we can’t have a podcast without talking about AI. You already talked about AI, but I’m going to circle back to it again. Talked about this a little bit with Chris Flynn around creative recently. And now that platforms are smarter, they’re faster, how are you incorporating AI into what you do every day? How are you looking at some of those optimizations that the platforms are suggesting and determining what should be done and what shouldn’t in the human touch, taking your 20-plus years of experience into account to make those gut decisions?

Bob Burch: Yeah, I think what’s really interesting is seeing all of the options that are emerging from an egentic standpoint in terms of tools to perform some of those basic day-to-day, blocking and tackling type tasks that just have to be done to make sure that the campaigns are kind of humming along. So things like budget pacing, things like bid optimizations, even rapid creative testing. AI and anything that’s automated is just going to be able to move at a faster pace than we can individually. But in the same sense, too, that gives our team the freedom and the flexibility to do more of that strong strategic thinking. I think clients always push us to be strategic, not tactical. I think that’s more important now than ever before, because the tactical execution is going to start to get, again, taken over more by and informed by AI. And in that case, the strategic thinking is where you’re going to win. I think what I’m most intrigued by is kind of how these types of AI capabilities will become available. Because I think there’s a few past to think about with that. Number one is, do you have sort of like a centralized solution that can look at each of the platforms individually and act as if our media team would? So our media team would be logging into the campaigns and the different platforms on a daily basis. So can you bring more of a centralized solution that would be looking into all of the different platforms that we’re running? Or are you using the things that are getting built into the platform itself? So every tool we use is building in some sort of AI tool as part of it. Resonate is our audience tool. If we need to go in and build an audience, they basically have a Gen AI tool where we can describe the audience, write a really good prompt for it. It will match all of the different attributes and build an audience off of that. So in that case, we’re using the native tool. We talked about what Matt is building, what Google’s building, the DSPs as well. I think the trade desk is talking about kind of what their agentic AI solution has looked like. We use basis. Basis is building up a solution there as well. So everybody is kind of building their own thing. I think that still goes back to the point of like, okay, but who’s grading the work? So I think ideally if we could build something in a more centralized way that would be able to pivot in more of an integrated way across everything that we’re running, that I think is the biggest thing that I’m excited about because I do think, we’re a small and lean team, but we’re a pretty seasoned and experienced team. So for us to be able to automate some of this, we can really kind of punch above what our actual headcount would indicate with that. So that will help us continue to compete and manage high volume and really complex campaigns really efficiently.

Heather Riexinger: Excellent. So you’ve been lucky enough to be doing this a long time pre AI and you were forced to learn with your brain and do all of this manually. How do you train new media professionals to learn everything on their own so that they can make that judgment and not just fall into allowing AI to become a strategist? What techniques do you have?

Bob Burch: Oh, yeah. I mean, that is a really tough question. I don’t know that I have the right answer for that yet because that is, I think, the risk and that’s the concern here, right? Is the, a lot of the things that we talk about that is more of that blocking tech and those more mundane tasks, but really essential detail oriented work that needs to happen, that’s where a lot of learning happens. And so if we are automating more of that, if we’re using AI tools for more of that, it’s the entry level that’s going to suffer. So from that piece, I am, I think we are fortunate that we don’t have a fully remote team, that we have people who are sitting next to each other to have those conversations on it. But to be honest, it’s not something that I’ve been able to find a good solution for yet. And it’s something that, if I were breaking into this industry, it’s a concern. I know we had multiple schools come in last week through the AAF and kind of toured and talked to us and I think they have a big challenge ahead of how to differentiate. It’s a very, very crowded space. Marketing is very volatile, so there’s a lot to consider there and they’re looking for ways to stand out. I think when I came in, we weren’t doing digital at Flynn. I found a way to add value to that. I think there is going to be a generation of people who have grown up with AI tools that are just going, it’s just gonna be so native to everything that they’re doing that that’s gonna be beneficial to them and they’re gonna just understand tips and tricks and how to get the best out of it, maybe a little more so than some of us who are adopting it later in our career. So they’re gonna bring new ideas there too. But a lot of the strategy piece comes from experience. And so it’s going to be harder for them to gain that experience when they’re not hands-on keyboard in all of these platforms.

Heather Riexinger: Yeah, and I know on the account strategy side, I learned so much by staring at the blank piece of paper and having to come in up with it on my own. And I was fortunate enough to be mentored by Robbie here who wouldn’t review anything until I completed it. And that was so valuable to me at the time I hated it, but now I see the value in having to think it through and think of things from scratch. And now I even find myself in AI, I’m like, start this for me and then I don’t have that anymore. So it will be interesting to see how things evolve and where efficiencies are and hopefully where human touch doesn’t diminish.

Bob Burch: Yeah, well, and to your point, I mean, on the writing side, you have to really give it good guidance. If we’re writing slide decks, certainly the idea and the thought has to be there first to inform and say, okay, this is the point I’m looking to get across. What am I not considering? How can I position this in a way that is very client benefit focused? That’s where I use more of those tools is to help me just better. I articulate the thoughts in my mind that I’m trying to get on paper and communicate it effectively. And that was ways before that sometimes I would put, again, very sloppy text on a slide and we’d go to our copywriters and say, hey, help us make this better. So that does allow us to do things a little bit more streamlined there. And then we’re giving a little bit more of a complete version that it’s still worth bringing in that copywriter who can maybe give it a little more–

Heather Riexinger: A little creative layer. A little bit more. Yeah, so now I think it’ll be interesting to see where things evolve. Anything else, any other points you wanted to make today?

Bob Burch: No, no, I mean, everything is AI right now. So we keep talking about this. I look forward to coming back on and maybe talking about it on AI.

Heather Riexinger: Maybe we’ll do a good direct mail campaign we can talk about for half an hour.

Bob Burch: That would be great. I think everybody keeps asking about chat GPT ads. That’s kind of the biggest thing we see. The pilots are running. It’s very limited categories. It’s very limited advertisers. We had an advertiser in the financial service space that was interested. They’re not taking financial service advertisers. So a lot of prohibited categories, very limited management. That’s kind of the biggest thing on people’s mind. It’s like, how do we jump on board with this? Still just very early. And then going back to our first conversation, how can we find that right balanced media mix to balance that short term and long term? That’s going to forever be a problem and more