Black Friday is won in August
Nobody wants to hear about Black Friday in August, but the creative you scale in November has to be proven somewhere, and if you wait until October to start testing you'll be paying peak-season CPMs to learn things you could have learned this month for a fraction of the price.
The ground under paid social shifted this year too, because Meta's Andromeda update means the algorithm now reads your creative to decide who sees your ad, so the lookalike audiences you built your account on matter less than the angles you feed it. Your targeting is only as good as your creative library now, and most brands are running on three tired ads.
The fix isn't more budget, it's a routine: angles written down before you brief anything, one fresh creative tested every week, and a hard rule about killing slow ads. Everything below feeds that routine.
3 From our blog worth reading this month
1. The best content right now doesn't feel like content.
Audiences are tired of polish, and our social team is watching three formats outperform because of it: memes that build in-jokes with your community, raw behind-the-scenes clips, and comment roundups that put your customers' own words on the feed. Every one of them is cheap to make, which is exactly what a weekly testing pipeline needs, low-cost angles you can post, read, and either scale or kill without ceremony. Start with the comment roundup, your audience already wrote it for you. Read the full piece →
2. Up to 95% of purchase decisions happen subconsciously. Test your ads that way.
A Boomer trusts polish and longevity, Gen X wants it straight, Millennials buy the story, and Gen Z won't touch anything that looks like an ad. That's not trivia, it's a ready-made set of testing angles, the same product framed five ways for five different buyers. Tropicana ignored the feeling its packaging carried and watched roughly $30 million in sales disappear in two months, so before you brief your next campaign, run it through the six questions in this checklist. Read the full piece →
3. Don't pay to top a search you don't understand.
TikTok is now selling Search Hubs, paid placements that put your brand page at the top of search results, and the pitch is tempting, but paying to sit above searches you haven't mapped is just renting attention at a higher price. Map what your customers actually search, prove which terms drive buying behaviour organically, then put money behind only the winners. Test first, pay second, the same rule as everywhere else in your account. Read the full piece →
2 Industry hits we're watching
1. Food & Bev: Big Food just moved in on TikTok Shop.
PepsiCo, Mars, and Hershey are now selling through TikTok Shop, and food category sales on the platform have more than doubled year over year. TikTok's own head of food says it plainly: products that stop the scroll are what work. Budgets that size won't out-create you, but they will out-spend you, so your edge is speed, a testing routine that finds your scroll-stopper in weeks while the big players are still in brand review.
2. Lifestyle & Wellness: Creative is now the targeting.
Meta's Andromeda update changed what the platform rewards, because the algorithm now reads your creative to decide who sees it, which is why lookalike audiences keep losing ground to broad targeting backed by strong creative. One analysis of the update found brands testing 20 or more new ads a month seeing 65% higher ROAS than brands testing fewer than ten. If your account is still nursing three polished ads and a lookalike, your ceiling isn't your budget, it's your creative volume.
The seasonal one: August is your testing window
Back-to-school is live right now, parents are budgeting nearly 12% more per child this year, and if your product touches that moment at all, you have a few weeks of live purchase intent to test against.
What makes August different from November is that attention is still cheap. The test that costs you a few hundred dollars to read this month will cost multiples of that once Q4 CPMs kick in, and at that point a test isn't a test anymore, it's a gamble with your biggest revenue window. Use this traffic to prove your angles, your hooks, and your offers while mistakes are still affordable.
This issue also closes out our Social Is Already a Revenue Channel theme, so here's the thought we want to leave you with: your social was never underperforming, it was disconnected. Connect your paid to your organic, test creative weekly, track the full journey instead of the last click, and give every post somewhere to send people, and the revenue you've been looking for shows up in the channel you already have. In September we're turning to a new theme, Community Is the New Funnel, built on one idea: followers belong to the algorithm, a community belongs to you. The first piece is live now, and it's the best preview of where we're headed.
"Organic is your test ground for paid, so take your top three posts from July and push them into ads this month."
- Natasha Chilcott
