Change Will Always Be Your Biggest Problem
The biggest challenge in Meta advertising isn't any single feature or update, it's the relentless pace of change that makes best practices obsolete within months. Jon explains why he stopped creating training courses after producing two that became immediately irrelevant, how he built an ad briefs library that stays current by pulling from his most recent content, and why solving the shelf-life problem led him to rethink how he delivers value to his community entirely.
This is the biggest challenge faced by Meta advertisers.
Look, Meta advertising is no picnic these days. It’s mostly chaos. But if there’s one factor that’s the constant theme of that chaos, it’s the relentless pace of change.
If you’ve been doing this for any amount of time, I’m sure I don’t have to work too hard to convince you of that.
Some of us look back at the good old days when things were seemingly easy, or at least we remember them that way. But truly, a decade ago was cheap and advertisers had far more control.
We were still part of that relentless spin cycle, but those who dedicated themselves to the craft benefited. And in some cases, looking back, it was almost too easy.
The main pivot point when change stopped feeling helpful was iOS 14. But man, that’s five years ago now.
It’s been a constant series of launches since then related to automation and AI, all leading to less and less control.
As someone who educates people on how advertising works, this is both good and bad.
It’s good because uncertainty and confusion mean people will need my help. You’re less likely to care about what I have to say if you are already an expert with nothing to learn.
It’s bad because it’s close to impossible to direct people to a central source of truth related to how things work today.
I initially gave up on trying a few years ago.
There was a time when I’d produce a new training course five or six times per year. The course might initially sell well, but it had zero shelf life. That was a huge problem.
Then I got to the point of creating a couple courses per year. But that’s around the time when I hit my breaking point. I produced two courses that immediately became irrelevant or mostly outdated. One for a feature that disappeared and one for a feature that completely changed.
That meant a whole lot of work for nothing, and I learned my lesson.
So my initial response was to focus my revenue opportunities purely on real-time experiences.
I still had my Power Hitters Club - Elite community, which stressed real-time answers and support. I conducted a webinar every week, and no one expects a webinar covering a week in 2023 to be fully relevant a year later.
In response to iOS 14, we started conducting strategy sessions every Tuesday to meet, share what we were seeing, and solve problems. I’d eventually add JonBot, which is an AI-powered chatbot trained on my content that can help brainstorm and talk through problems.
But one of the benefits of Elite membership was access to training courses, and that disappeared.
The real-time support was great, and some people take advantage of it more than others, but that’s not always the best resource.
Sometimes you just want to know what the current best practices are for targeting or campaign construction or ad creation. You can search my site for content, and some will be relevant and some won’t be. And you can sift through all of my webinar replays, but that might take a long time and not give you the answer you want.
So I had a couple of problems I wanted to solve to provide value for my community.
The first is that I wanted a reference that was current and updated to reflect best practices now. But the second was that the only way to do this, historically, would require a whole lot of work.
I could create these references today, but it would need to change a month and two months from now. And this is where I decided to leverage AI to help.
I’m not going to go into all of the details of what I did, but I created something that went through several iterations.
I created it using Claude Code, and it allowed me to develop a dashboard that would generate Ad Briefs on specific topics. It pulled my content from feeds, which included my blog posts, podcast episodes, videos, and free mini-courses.
But it prioritized the most recent content, and it would stop using it as a source once it was six months old. I could remove sources that became outdated before then or add sources that are evergreen beyond six months.
This is what would become my Ad Briefs Library.
As of today, there are 24 Ad Briefs on some of the most common advertising topics. Each brief summarizes best practices, followed by a bullet list of key takeaways, and a list of links the brief is based on to read more.
It doesn’t try to hide that it was written by AI as I intentionally have it write in the third person, covering “what Jon believes.”
There is still a manual process to this to come up with topics and approve and finalize the content of each ad brief.
And now that I have the foundation of these 24 briefs, I have a quick process to update them all every month. It’s not quite as streamlined as I want it to be eventually, but it’s becoming less and less work with each passing month.
In the past, a new member would go to my membership website and be immediately overwhelmed. They’d see training course after training course and not know where to start.
And truthfully, none of that stuff was worth looking at because it was all out of date. But now, all of that old stuff is gone.
When they log in for the first time, they see two sets of content: The four most recent weekly webinar replays and the full Ad Briefs Library.
So now they have a resource to quickly access answers to these common topics and problems. And they know the advice will be current.
My goal with the Ad Briefs Library was to solve a very challenging problem faced by advertisers.
Change is constant, and you’d be forgiven if you’re unsure how you should approach things now or what a certain feature does.
After refining the Ad Briefs Library for four months, I have now made it available as a standalone subscription.
Not everyone benefits from a real-time community. If you want access to the library, go to jonloomer.com/briefs to subscribe.
It’s a monthly subscription because the content of the library will be updated every month to reflect current best practices. As new briefs are needed, they’ll be added. If it’s no longer relevant, it’ll be removed.
It’s the solution to one of our biggest challenges.
And as a thank you for being a Pubcast listener, use promo code PUB30 to get 30% off.
That’s jonloomer.com/briefs.
