#AnalyzeThatAd: Edition 2
A review of the last week (April 1st-5th) at Pint AI
It's been a hectic one week at Pint AI; we've gotten into the early rhythm of product-building, and as you can imagine, the last week brought a lot of ideas, a lot of discussion, and a clear path ahead.
Before we get more into that, let's take a look at our spotlight for the week.
Spotlight: Getting Jiggy with Advantage+ Campaigns
It's no secret that media buying/performance marketing is becoming more and more algorithmically driven. Google was the first to set things in motion with the launch of the Performance Max campaign type in 2022. which made AI and Machine Learning the driving force of ad distribution for the first time, at scale.
Meta soon followed suit and launched the Advantage+ campaign in late 2022. But despite being, arguably, the most popular ad network around, marketers at D2C brands are still having a tough time making use of this campaign type, especially those at small brands.
So how exactly does this campaign type work?
Whether you're looking to boost your shopping campaigns or enhance app engagement, Advantage+ puts various ad formats (static, video, dynamic, etc.) together into one campaign, for your entire funnel.
Put simply, you upload a bunch of different text and creative variations. Meta's algorithms will create combinations from this, take care of targeting and start delivering the ad.
But how does Meta take care of the targeting?
How does the budgeting work here; is it automated?
What does 'a bunch of creatives' mean? How many should you upload?
Should the creatives be completely different from each other?
Does Meta recommend the best creatives to use from whatever you have uploaded?
Who takes care of the ad spend here?
These are just some of the most commonly heard doubts about the Advantage+ campaign type. And we've broken all of it down.
Updates from Pint AI
Like I mentioned at the start, we've just gotten into the groove of product building now.
We're approaching things a little differently than when we previously built products. Earlier, we never placed enough emphasis on speaking to a large enough number of whoever our users were going to be. We spoke to maybe 10 and then built out products hoping they would sell. It's no surprise that this didn't really work out.
This time, we spent almost 4 months just speaking to potential customers to understand not just their pain points, but the value they needed, not just the value they said they wanted. We spoke to 100+ media buying teams across agencies, E-commerce brands and gaming companies, which gave us not just a sense of clarity, but a renewed sense of confidence in what we're building Pint AI out to be.
The importance of doing this was stressed by the folks at Upekkha — one of India's leading AI and SaaS accelerators, and one of our investors. And boy, has this helped us out.
There are two big parts to having these conversations. The first is to just get in the room with the right people. The second is having the right kind of conversations — those that you can extract actionable insights from. Here are a couple of resources that you can take a look at which helped us as well:
- The Mom Test, by Robert Fitzpatrick
- How To Get A Meeting With Anyone, by Stu Heinecke
If you have any suggested readings for us, do send them across! You can just reply to this email with the same, and I'll add it to my reading list.
As always, if you have any questions or just want to talk, write in at sourya.reddy@pint-ai.com.
Have a great week ahead!
Sourya Reddy
Co-founder, Pint AI