Facebook Ads: New Tools for Better Tracking, More Creative, and Faster Sales

A

Before we get started, I want to ask you something. Are you tired of feeling like AI is moving faster than you can keep up? Because I know what that feels like and I hear it all the time. Marketers keep telling me they're drowning in all the new tools and updates and features and must try frameworks and, and they got to do all this while they're also doing their job and trying to run their business. And that's why the AI Business Society was created. It's your personal curation team for AI. We tell you what deserves your attention and what you can safely ignore. And inside, you get live trainings from leading AI practitioners and interactive skill building sessions, bite sized learning libraries. When you just have a few minutes and a community of incredible marketers who are just like you. Hundreds of them are on the inside and you can join right now and lock in an incredible special sale we've got going on. Visit socialmediaexaminer.com AI give it a shot. You got a 30 day money back guarantee, so you've got nothing to lose. Go to socialmediaexaminer.com AI and let's now jump back into today's show.

B

Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello.

A

Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want to know how to get more exposure, more leads and more sales. Today, Jerry Potter and I are exploring important updates from Facebook with our special guest, Nick Theriault.

B

Thanks, Mike. It's great to be here. With every passing month, it seems like Meta and Facebook are asking marketers to give up more and more control over their ads from the tracking, the creative, the campaign management, shopping, even reporting. And the upside is, of course, hopefully better results. But it also means that marketers need to know what to trust, what to check, and what they should still control themselves. We're very excited to be joined by Nick. Nick is the founder of an agency specializing in helping e commerce businesses scale with ads. His course, Next Tier Ads teaches marketers how to design ad creatives that scale Facebook ads. And today, Nick, Mike and I are going to explore what these latest updates from Facebook mean for small business marketers and owners like you. Nick. Welcome back to the show.

C

Yo, what's going on, everyone? Super, super excited to be here. Me and Mike have done a few things together and I'M excited to finally hop on the show with you, Jerry, as well. This is going to be a fun one.

B

Yeah, I appreciate it. So I want to start with the Facebook Pixel, which I think has been an emotional roller coaster over the years. When it first came out, I was like, wow, this is amazing. And, wow, it's a piece of junk. And, oh, it doesn't work. And now it's good again. And now privacy has locked everything down, but they're now making the Facebook Pixel smarter. With AI, this AI powered Pixel can automatically connect and send data from your page and your product. Things like product names, product availability. So there's less manual setup work, meaning that business owners and marketers may not need to hire a developer like they once did. And you'll hopefully be able to deliver ads to the right people. So you're a longtime advertiser, Nick, who's seen the good and the bad of the Pixel. I mean, is this a good thing for AI to be getting involved, or is this potentially going to get messy?

C

You know, this is one of the things with, like, AI that I think, like, AI is just perfectly built for. I mean, we've already seen AI now be able to perfectly code a whole website in like, 30 seconds compared to having to hire a developer and having to do all these, like, hoops and stuff you have to jump through for a website to be built out. Now that I can simply press a button or two and then AI automatically plug in the Pixel into everything. Something that's just very black and white. I love that. And I think that's literally what like, AI was initially intended to be built out for. So I'm a huge proponent for that.

B

I know they say that you do have some control. You can shut it off. You can also tell it which categories to grab from your website and which ones not to grab. So is the Pixel something, like, with your clients or the people you teach? I mean, is this something everybody should have on their website, even if they may not run Facebook ads anytime soon?

C

If you don't run Facebook ads, it's not like something that you need to hurry up in like 91 1, your developer and immediately go and, like, set it up. But, you know, if you're someone who's thinking about running Facebook ads, it's good to have it installed now because it'll start training the Pixel of who actually buys from you and who doesn't. So that way, when you do decide to start investing in Facebook ads, you already have access to all of this data and you'll have to spend less money to basically optimize the Facebook, you know, algorithm once you actually start running ads to it.

A

You know Nick, one of the things that I made a strategic decision on years ago was to stop putting the pixel on social mediaexaminer.com except for on our product pages. And the reason why is because I realized that I was effectively giving Facebook access to all the intelligence of every single person that was visiting our website and all the articles that they were reading and they weren't paying me for that information. And I just decided I'm not going to have those pixels on there anymore. And I got rid of all of them. And it didn't seem to do anything negatively obviously because the social platforms have stopped sending traffic to our website ages ago. What's your thoughts about actually being very selective about where you put the pixel? Because the truth of the matter is Meta and other platforms are using that information and selling that information to advertisers and we as media bloggers, whatever, are not getting any know, compensation at all for providing all that data to them. I'm just curious what your take is on that.

C

It really just depends on what type of business you're in at the end of the day. If you're in a business like this where you are a media website, you're technically like your own Facebook. You know, Facebook is a company where we want to entertain and educate people in a day to day basis. And you know, when you have your own custom built website and your own community and stuff, technically like you're in competition with Facebook on a day to day basis of who chooses to spend time on your website versus choosing spend time on Facebook and just scrolling through random blogs, blogs and stuff. Now if you are like a e commerce business or you're actually selling products online that's not information and stuff and not blogs and content and stuff, I think it's highly important. But you know, you do bring up a really good point right there. That's not a way I've thought about before about like media publishing companies. So actually is some interesting perspective, you know, that's it really just comes down to what type of business you are at the end of the day.

A

Yeah, I just thought I'd throw that out there back to you, Jerry. I know you have some more questions.

B

Yeah, well no, I kind of want to pull at this thread a little bit. So I imagine it's more complex to set up that way. But then like you said Mike, what Mike would be doing, Nick, or for other people that wanted to do this would just be putting the pixel on specific product pages and then nowhere else.

A

Yeah, you can do that through Google Tag Manager and other tools like this. You can target exactly where you want it to show up, right, Nick?

C

Correct. Yeah. Like we use a lot of Shopify. That's where a lot of like our clients are on. And Shopify has a like one click integration with Facebook. It's the best thing in the world. And then we have like some clients that have more of like a legion business with custom funnels and stuff. And there's a little bit more complexity to it with like certain like landing pages and funnel types and stuff one time upsells and everything. And that's where like the AI really comes in handy that Facebook will be launching.

A

Well, and just to throw this out there, we already all do this with Google. Okay. And the reason we do this with Google is because everybody has Google Analytics installed on their website. Okay. But the reason why we do it is because Google Analytics gives us a free service that we think is super valuable, right? Which is access to all the insights and the data. Meta doesn't do that. That's part of the reason why almost all of us allow Google Analytics on the platform. But what we don't realize is we're also giving Google all that insight and data so that advertisers can target obviously consumers based on behavior. So it's just like a different lens that a lot of people don't think about.

B

I'm one of those people too that as a marketer I'm like track everything. You know, if I install a new app it's like, yep, that's okay, you can track me. Even though, you know, when Apple did their big privacy crackdown, the language got so I don't remember exactly what it is, but it got so harsh. Like do you want this company to track you in your sleep? You know, and. But I want to see when I'm being retargeted. So. So the hope of all this AI assisting us, Nick, with our advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram and everywhere is that we'll get better results. Right. Like for example, the conversions API for web events. They've reported that brands are seeing a 17.8% lower cost per result. They've just added a one click setup for that. But I'm just kind of curious for you, as somebody who knows the platform inside and out, does this evolution at a less manual control excite you or scare you?

C

So when you talk about like manual control, are you talking about just with the Pixel or are you talking about overall Facebook adoption of AI overall?

B

Because I think there's maybe a point where we just say here's our website, here's who we want to reach, here's our credit card, if you can get me leads for less than $5 or whatever it might be. And then Meta will do all of the work through a AI.

C

Absolutely. And that's kind of where we've been transitioning to over the last couple years. Back in 2018, it was all about who had the most complex ad account set up. Multiple different campaigns going on, cost caps, bid caps, like all kinds of things going on the account. And then over the last, from 2018 to let's say 2020, 2021, this big trend started to be focused on which was adopting creatives and creative volume and creat and all the brands that were testing more creatives were winning. And essentially the ad account structure was significantly less valuable now because it's just like, hey, I can keep it very condensed of one campaign, put a bunch of creatives in it and just keep testing new ads and we'll find winners and we'll scale the business. And that's essentially reduced the need of like a modern day media buyer. We still need media buyers for like technically like uploading ads, like managing budget and stuff. But now it's not to the same level as what it was at. At least people perceived it to be back in 2018, 2019, and there's actually less and less need of like manual part of humans to the point where I, you know, further predict, and I've been saying this since 2022, where it's like, yeah, it will be a situation like Google's performance max where you give your credit card, you give it an objective and then you just feed it a ton of creative and let it do its job of targeting and putting the ads in front of the right people. I do believe that will be come something one day.

B

So if a small business owner or marketer is listening right now and they either haven't done ads in years or maybe they've done some boosting and nothing more, or they've never done ads, you sort of had the experts curse, right? You know everything. But is now the time? Do you feel like a smart marketer could go in and actually get some results on their own?

C

Advertising gets easier and easier every day. It's easier because the barrier of entry gets lower and lower every day. I mean if you look back at like 1960s as an extreme example of the average person trying to push out an advertisement. It would just be significant amounts of money and take, you know, probably even months. Now, like Facebook, anyone can pretty much now go set up a campaign. It's very streamlined, very easy for just about any marketer. Even with like someone that doesn't even really have huge technical skills. Like especially too of like the pixel being AI at one point. Now all of that right there is going to make it easier and easier and further lower the barrier of entry. And especially too with Facebook even giving you like AI image ads. Now you can upload like one image ad and it'll give you a whole bunch of AI versions and stuff. It's making it easier for the average business owner who doesn't have a strong tech skill set or even just a bandwidth to sit down and manage ads all day. It's definitely is making it easier and lower that barrier of entry.

A

And on top of this, Nick, you probably already know this, but Jerry, you might not know this. Claude Cowork, which if you download the cloud app as a browser extension, so you could technically tell Claude to go into your Meta Ads Manager account and basically analyze everything, right, and run reports for you and all that kind of stuff and move it into like some sort of a document that's ready for you in the morning. I mean, it is definitely a threat, is it not, for media buyers, right Nick?

C

Absolutely. And I think that's like the one person that we will further see to like fade out. I think it won't really be more of like a media buyer, but like a marketing manager role that will start to come up. Or whereas this marketing manager will have like maybe an AI for like the Facebook ad side and a few other AIs it talks to for helping out like producing creatives, producing landing pages and you know, actually getting that inside of the ad account because there still needs to be that human touch. I find that AI has been extremely good at picking out the copywriting and creating the creative and stuff, but it's not good on the positioning aspect of how we position and how we want to create some ad angles and ideas around something. It is better on the execution side of like writing copy and in more, you know, straightforward approach on the advertising side.

B

One of the other updates is they're expanding the AI Business assistant, which is I think I would describe as sort of like ChatGPT inside Ads Manager, where it gives recommendations and insights and things like that. But what I often think in my own business and what I sometimes tell my clients if we're working with AI, is it's, you know, the real superpower is knowing when the AI is right and when the AI is wrong or when the AI advice is good and when it's bad. So if somebody's getting in there and they're getting these recommendations put in their face, like what are the types of things that you would generally, I mean, you know, nothing's universal, right. But that you would generally say, okay, it probably got that right. And what types of things would you just go? Always question.

C

So you have to look at it as more. There's textbook, like here's exactly how to do the thing and then there's just the. In my experience this is what I prefer because it actually, actually gives me a different result. I do think majority of the AI advice is correct for the ad account, but probably some of it it would conflict of how I approach things. Not saying that's technically wrong. It's just a different perspective based off my experience. But for the average person hopping the account and taking advice from AI, I think it would help them tremendously. Compared to having to spend thousands of dollars to hop on a consulting calls with someone or even having to pay an agency and stuff, I definitely think it's a huge help there. Now as far as things I would do differently, you have to understand that the AI is trained on meta's rulebook and the AI is pretty much just going to be a clone of a lot of those meta reps that call you. And I know for me over the years I've heard a lot of bad advice from these meta reps. For example, we're optimizing for purchases and we're scaling and growing the E Comm brand. And then all of a sudden they're like, hey, run a link to click campaign to get more cold traffic. And you know, we'll, we'll technically like test a lot of that advice but like we just won't really see the results that they claim you can get from there. Or for example, a recommendation for Meta where it's like, oh hey, you're getting a really good cost per result. Let's just go 10 extra daily budget with tonight and you'll get all these x more recommendations. And it's like that doesn't always work. Anyone who's ran ads before, you know you can't just 10x your budget overnight and it'll hold the same cost per result go well, it's always something way worse.

B

Okay, I love the way that you answered that. And so am I hearing you say though, like at the very end There, basically, if they're suggesting spending more money, be a little more skeptical. But otherwise, you know, use your best judgment.

C

Yeah, use your best judgment. I would say 90 to 95% of the I's advice is going to be way better. You know, like in the beginning stages, like in the beginning stages, you don't know anything about meta, so you don't really have a rule book to compare to. You just have like a bunch of YouTubers or Google blogs to try to find advice on how to run meta ads. I think that person right there is literally going to jump generations in, like years off of the time it takes for them to learn meta ads, and it's going to make the playing field a lot more even in that sense right there.

A

I know that we might be getting into the next story here a little bit, but where I think this is really fascinating is when we layer AI into the discussion here on ads, what AI is really good at. And when I say I don't necessarily mean meta as baked in AI, because as Nick said, their AI is trained on a very specific set of information that is the same kind of information. It sounds like that their call center, agents or whatever are using, which is probably really good for technical support, but not necessarily excellent for ad advice. But when you start layering in different kinds of models on top of it, that you can connect in quote, unquote, I don't even know. Nick, does Facebook have connectors into a lot of the AI models now? So you can connect your Facebook ad account right into ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini. Is that coming, you know, where you can effectively start creating some sort of a agent? And I know we're kind of getting into this, but are you starting to see that that's the direction we're heading into?

C

Absolutely. So you can actually connect? I believe it's Manus, and I just believe that they actually just launched a Claude one not too long ago, maybe two, three weeks ago as well. I just be careful with it. I feel like it's still in the entry level and I've been seeing a lot of people talking about how their ad account got banned right after connecting it to the AI. And personally, I believe that's because they're just like spamming the AI with a ton of requests. And now meta freaks out that a ton of requests are hitting your ad account, and it kind of does it as like a safety protocol. So after seeing that, I immediately disconnected my ad account from Claude and Manus, not saying that I wouldn't connect it again. I would just be very careful as that's something I've been seeing over the last two months from a lot of people.

A

Well, and for what it's worth, and I know we probably should transition to this next story, Jerry, but Manus is currently owned by Meta. They acquired them for like $2.3 billion out of Singapore. There's a big debate about whether they're going to get to keep them. But Manus is powered by Claude underneath the hood. That is the LLM that is effectively powering Manus. So if you want to experiment with Manus, you're probably safer because Meta owns Manus right now. We've done some really great training inside our AI Business Society on manuscript, but it is really interesting to see that we're heading towards a world where effectively you're going to be able to have, for lack of better words, an AI agent that can do a lot of really cool stuff. So, Jerry, I think this is a perfect transition into our next story.

B

Yeah, well, and it's interesting how much Meta is injecting, man. It's almost like they know something we don't, because as far as the headlines go, as of now in summer 2026, it's like, is it going to get pulled away from them? But they're bringing more AI agents and connectors, including Manus, as you mentioned, which can work with Ads Manager. It can turn ad performance data into dashboards, slides, reports, insights. I mean, I remember when I worked at an agency, reporting was the bane of my existence. And so, you know, that type of thing really, really excites me. But even going beyond this, marketers can be able to manage campaigns inside third party AI tools, including creating, editing and analyzing the campaigns. Basically, ads are becoming less about clicking every button yourself and more about telling AI what you want done. And even on the right now they're talking about this just on the Instagram connector side. But Manus can ideate, generate, publish and analyze content across posts, carousels, stories and reels on Instagram, which of course we know will eventually make its way to Facebook as well. So Meta is moving marketers away from manual control toward this guided control. So, I mean, Nick, what parts of Facebook, you know, with this, like which, which of those phases here, from ideation to, you know, generation and all of that, I mean, at what point, what are you looking forward to getting your hands off of and what are you going to hold onto as tight as you can?

C

So this is where, like, for me, I still am a huge believer of the human aspect of research. And just the high level of ideation and that's still where the high level that, you know, why do we target this avatar or this customer versus this customer? Or through research, we found this whole new world of people that our product can massively help. And you know, we just didn't know that before. So it's like those things right there, I still haven't found AI to be really good at. Like, if you ask it for some baseline, hey, give me a few different types of people we can target, they'll just kind of give you a bunch of generalized people. But actually, you know, seeing that and seeing people saying, hey, I need this product and seeing people that, you know, there's this opportunity out there in this market through research and stuff, like, that's something when you see with your own eyes, you have a lot more conviction. And you can also have a better gauge of actually how to open up that conversation inside of the creatives. Now, as far as like the manual world of like sitting down and writing some copy and stuff, that's something that I did hold on for a while and we actually kind of phased that out now. And a lot of it is just, just AI writing the copy. And now I find that it's more people doing what's called just copy chief in where in 90% of it we'll get the AI to write. And then from there, the last 10%, we're just tweaking to improve things a little bit. And that'll be some scenarios where we're just better off writing it ourselves because we just know exactly what we want to say in the copy itself. But yeah, and then another thing that we've been loving is Higgs Field. We've been creating a lot of various AI, UGC, AI, you know, just graphic ads, ChatGPT right now, like they just updated their image processor now to where you can create some really cool static ads. For one of our clients. We really just created some sales ads for Memorial Day that just happened and it was just like literally plugging in our website and saying, hey, we want a set of static ads highlighting this offer that we're running. And here's just like maybe an example here and it pushes out like five or 10 of them. We could just upload right to meta right there. That time it takes from idea to output has been sharpened down drastically thanks to AI. And that's, that's where it allows us to be infinitely more creative that we just haven't had the opportunity to do years ago.

A

Yeah, for folks that don't know what Higgs Field is. It is effectively an aggregation tool that brings together a whole bunch of different things on the back end and allows you to do really awesome creative stuff, which I've not messed with. But chat GPT image 2.0 is right now kind of the leader with image creation. It was Nano Banana from Gemini and now it's chatgpt. But the thing that I wanted to mention that people may not understand about Manus is it's very easy to use and it's very easy to create workflows. And Cowork is also very good at this by Claude, where you can create a series of actions and give it permissions to do kinds of things. And this is where once people wrap their brains around it, whether it's Manus or Higsfield or Claude, cowork the idea that you can have it. Go look at something. Maybe you're really good with creative, but you really aren't very analytical. This is where I think you could have something. Go look at your ads account and help you understand what is working, what's not working, maybe some recommendations on iterations of things you might want to do. Because, Nick, isn't it true that the latest algorithm from Meta is all about having lots of creative? Right. Isn't that kind of the key to success right now?

C

Absolutely, and I think that's been the key success over the last couple years. It's because it puts your prospect, it puts your customer first. And you know, whereas before it's like, hey, let's, let's look at a bunch of ad account structures, your, your, your prospects don't see that. They see what you put in front of them. They're creative. And the people that knew this the best were actually affiliate marketers on blog websites, you know, 20 years ago. And it's just now that more and more people on Meta are falling, catching on and realizing it. And now that Meta's even pushing that too. It has been, you know, the main driver for a lot of wins that we've seen over the last couple years.

B

So if marketers start moving more of this process to Meta and AI connected to Meta, you know, including the ideation, you know, the creative, the, the testing, all of the copy, all of those things, the tracking especially, do you think that the data is going to become more accurate or should we be more skeptical if we're getting everything from one store, for lack of a better phrase?

C

I think I would just be like double checking, right? Like, you know, there's been times where we take AI at face value that everything it's doing is right. I, I think there still needs to be some little bit of like a quality check here and there just to double check, you know, the math. We've seen AI before be bad at math and I, I think there just needs to be that, that little bit of every now and then. Hey, let's keep making sure this is, is correct.

A

Hey, before we get back to the show, I want to talk to you about something I've been thinking a lot about lately. You already use AI. And if you're like me, every single day you're using it and you're not someone who needs needs to be convinced that it matters. But here's what I've learned from working with hundreds of marketers inside our AI Business society over the last two years. The problem is almost never AI. It's trying to do it all on your own. You're testing tools that you're likely not using again. You're rewriting prompts because they don't sound right. You're probably watching tutorials that give you lots of ideas, but you have no idea what to do with it. And you're working harder with AI, not smarter. And that's exactly why I built the AI business society. Every live training is led by an expert practitioner who uses AI in their marketing all the time. And I'm personally there on every single one of these training sessions to make sure that nothing gets too crazy or abstract. You leave with something you can implement that very day. Plus you're surrounded by a community of marketers who are just like you and they're all there to support each other and you get to be part of this awesome community. The investment is $497 for the full year. And if within the first 30 days you decide it's not for you and you join, then just ask for a refund. We're not going to ask any questions, but at least you gave it a shot. Head over to SocialMediaExaminer.com AI that's SocialMediaExaminer.com AI and now let's get back to the show. By the way, for what it's worth, Cherry Google is very bad with math. Gemini, believe it or not, but Claude is exceptionally good at it. So this is one of those very simple things where I gave it a spreadsheet and I asked it to analyze the data and it was completely wrong. And I gave the exact same thing to Claude and it was completely right. That's why what Nick is saying is really important. Like you got to make sure whatever you're using really is good at doing math, because math is kind of an important part when you're spending money. Don't you agree, Nick? I mean like understanding, understanding the analytics and interpreting them and making sure that you can like, like there is a math equation here, right? Like if we spend more money here, what's the likely thing going to happen or blah, blah, blah, whatever. I just find that some models are really good at it and some aren't.

C

Absolutely. And like, at a face value aspect, for most advertisers, it's, hey, I spend this much and there's so much money in my bank account, that's pretty easy. But once you start getting into, hey, we're going to spend a million dollars this month and we're doing it at a 0.8 return on ad spend because we're acquiring new customers with a 12 month payback window on LTV. Like your math has to be dialed in because if even just by a couple dollars can bankrupt a company.

B

It's funny to hear you say that Claude is the best at math too, because Claude is sort of known as being the best writer.

A

Well, it's good at coding too, which is probably why it's good at math. You know, because they're, they're structured language. You know, math and coding are not too super far from each other.

B

Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. So Nick, you mentioned earlier, you know that the idea of media buyer may eventually go away, but we're going to need some sort of manager. So if we go forward two years, like, what's the skill that the person who is running ads in some way is going to need to have? Is it about buttons to click or what to ask the AI or how to judge the AI's recommendations? I mean, because it's moving fast, obviously. So two years might as well be 10 years at that point. But what do you think that future role is for a marketer?

C

Absolutely. So obviously the idea and the skillset of being able to create offers that scale is gonna be huge. Obviously. Like Alex Hormozi's 100 million dollar offers is where I like to turn a lot of people to. That's inherently important because at a basic level, what does humans still do? At the end of the day, they're product owners. They still own a product that they have to sell and put in front of people. And if you're, oh, hey, all of the skill set of advertising and media buying is taken away from me, what am I left with? You're left with your product. Product, that's a big one. And then the other part is at a high level being able to understand the different ways to communicate that value about your product and the different ways to be able to grab people's attention and then have AI to be able to go execute on that for you. That's the second most important skill set right there. And then obviously, you know, I think AI itself and then the ability to be able to talk effectively to AI is always going to be important. One of my favorite thing about AIs is that the people that do the best work with AI, they just treat AI like a normal conversation. You know, turn their mic on, their clawed on and just talk to AI exactly what they want, exactly why they dislike about this output and just real time with the microphone. I've seen some of the best results using AI just talking to it like it's an actual person versus, you know, some complex prompt there that's, oh wait, I spent two days on it. It still doesn't even work.

B

Work. Yeah, no, for sure. So, so for the person who is at an agency, I'm picturing like their clients are like, oh, I just heard, you know, Manus or AI or whatever, like does everything now. Like how would you recommend people talk to their clients about this if they are, you know, managing their ads and their campaigns, like just so that they under the client doesn't feel like, oh, you're not doing anything anymore.

C

So I feel like at least for us, one of the biggest things that we've noticed is that we've shifted from like what I would say 100% media buying back in 2020 to now we're doing like 80, like 80% of our clientele. Like we're just doing like more creative side. We're still doing like the media buying stuff, but people are coming to us with the intention of, hey, we need someone that's really good on the creative side that can think about how to position creatives and get people's attention. We need those people to run our ads. But as far as like the standard typical media buying. Yeah, that right there, I mean that's, that's the part where I would be struggling with the most. And as far as like Manus from the AI perspective or the client perspective, I would say like all of our clients, they work with this because hey, I have peace of mind now. I have someone to still own the performance for that particular channel. I still have someone I can talk to when things are going bad. Whether y' all use Manus or not, that's up to y'.

A

All.

C

But this is the result that I'm expected to get. And whether you use AI or not to get that result, that's up to you.

A

Well, and I have a couple thoughts on this that are going to be helpful for anybody who is looking to differentiate. You all. Remember when Chatgpt Dall E3, the images came out and everybody started using them and they all kind of looked the same, right? They had a very specific look. And then they upgraded them and then they had a very specific look. They all had that orange hue to the background and everybody was creating themselves inside of packaging and, you know, all this kind of stuff. Well, it turns out that the best people for creating AI images and AI ads are actually photographers and professional video creators, because they know how to direct the AI to come up with something new and original. Because if you don't direct the AI to come up with something new and original, and writers, also existing copywriters, are exceptionally good at getting original content out of these models because they know how to write and they know how to direct the model. So out of the box, all these models are going to have a very universal look and it's going to be recognizable by clients. And eventually people are going to say, well, why are you doing this when I can tell you just coded this up in Claude, you know what I mean? Or why are you doing this when I can tell you just use ChatGPT images 2.0 because they have a signature look. So where creatives. Creatives are always going to have a job is either to direct AI to create incredibly original creative content or to direct humans to do that. Because there will always be a need to direct whatever it is. Whether you're working with a human or you're working with AI, they need to be directed. That's the only way to get really high quality content. So as long as there is a director, a creative director, if you will, I feel like there's always going to be an edge. What do you think about that, Nick?

C

I love that. And that's one of my favorite things I heard recently, is that AI amplifies you. If you're already someone full of originally good ideas, it's just going to allow you to execute on those faster and get more of those out. Whereas if you're already someone with bad ideas, like maybe AI make them slightly better, but you'll still produce just more bad stuff. And that's been the biggest thing that I've debated over the last year. Or two about creative. You know, meta keeps hammering creative, creative, creative. And there's people that are purely pushing the idea. You need to test 100, 200 creatives a week and they do all this work and they're not getting any success from it. And you know, they feel like they were lied to at some point, but in reality is that they just keep producing the same thing that looks.

A

Yeah.

C

And it's, it's like if we, when we tweak their process and maybe we test less but with more intention about being different and creating something new that people want to see, all of a sudden they see significantly better performance out their account because they're actually testing something new and original. And that's what makes the most like all. You look at all the viral, organic social media videos and content and stuff, it's all things that are new. It's original, it's, it's different. And a lot of these AI people are pushing volume and stuff. It's just the same thing, but at a mass scale.

B

If you are listening and you are a creative, write down the story that Mike shared about photographers and go back and listen to it again if you need to, because that's the perfect anecdote for anyone that's questioning you in that way. So absolutely love that. So we've talked about the beginning and the end of the sales process, right? Ads, the ideation at the beginning, reporting all the way at the end, and the tracking. But. But Facebook and Meta are even trying to get into the middle here by adding more shopping tools to its ad system. One of the things they're testing right now is one click checkout, which means somebody could click buy now and assuming their payment information, all that's already saved, the purchase is done just like that. So making it easier for people to go from seeing a product to buying it. This is something that is working really well on platforms like TikTok right now. They're also testing AI shopping features after someone clicks an ad where it can show product details or reviews, pricing recommendations, all kinds of other things that either come from other information on meta platforms or from your website. So when you hear that, Nick, when you hear one click checkout, like, is, is that all great news? Because obviously we know removing friction is good or are there things we should be concerned about as marketers with that?

C

I mean, on one side you look at like Amazon and you know, one click checkout is sometimes like for the what I would say person that's always shopping on Amazon is actually like super helpful thing. But When I think about Facebook in the one click checkout, I think about how what, three, four years ago they introduced the Facebook shops feature and we've just never really saw any success with that over the last two years where it was a little bit more pushed a little bit more dominantly. I've seen one brand that did some sales from it, but I've never really seen a brand really take off off pushing it. And my belief around that is that one, some products require a little bit longer for sale cycle and being able to send people to a, you know, multi step landing page with a little bit longer of like product education and stuff. Those tend to work a little bit better. Now if we're doing like one click, one click checkouts on Facebook and it's for a very simple product, like a white T shirt, black T shirt, maybe some cooking utensils and stuff, that right there, I could see it working really well. So very basic load ticket items that are almost like things you use every day. And it's just like I ran out of it. Let's quickly buy some. Sure. But things that are a little bit more of a serious purchase and you know, they need to go online, they want to maybe Google your name, they want to see and like look at Reddit and stuff. You know, people are ultimately like to look at, you know, hey, it's not that I don't trust this company is what's all the worst things that will happen to me if I buy this product? Is there a refund guarantee? What are other customers that potentially may have gotten and wrongly done and how was that handled and being able to see all of those things and it's kind of part of that sales process. So now we're taking a habit that we already do to buy something and removing it and just straight to a buy now button on Facebook. It kind of throws off that nature a bit. And as the last caveat to that is that every time on Shopify specifically or for all of our E Comm clients, when we test like if you go to a Shopify product page and you love this product and you're about to hit that add to cart button and instead of saying it add add to cart, it says buy now, we always see a lower conversion rate when we change the add to cart button to buy now, there's something psychological about hitting that add to cart button that gives me like this little bit of like a, a two or three second. Let me think about it first before I hit that checkout button because it's, it's a natural part of like our process and a habit that we've done before. So it feels familiar to us, it feels safe to us compared to just hitting that buy button now right away and like immediately the money's going.

B

It's so funny because you started off comparing this to Amazon and I'm a longtime Amazon customer. I have never clicked Buy now because I want that extra page. I want to check the shipping, I want to check the payment, I want to, you know, all of that. And obviously I trust Amazon. It's not like a new buyer, like you said, where it's like I got to go to Reddit and see if they actually honor their refunds or whatever it might be. But that takes us to the other part of this where, you know, these post click features they're talking about, where once somebody clicks an ad, AI can populate other information for them. And as we were planning the show, I was thinking like, you know, best case scenario, you see an actual review from somebody that you know and trust. Amazing. Worst case scenario, it brings up a price that you. A discount you don't offer or some crazy high price or a review from somebody you don't trust or something like that. But based on what you said earlier, do you feel like AI would be pretty good at surfacing the right things? Because this is not just testing a button color on a page. This is somebody thinking about buying in that moment and it could cost the sale every time.

C

I mean, I think it's huge. One of the biggest things, like once you get deeper into the sales process and if you look at like the modern day product page for Shopify, it's like, it's full of like objections and stuff that maybe come up in the sales process. Questions they have in the sales process. You know, it's littered with social proof and YouTube case and demos and all of those things. And to have literally AI right there already give you a buyer profile and this is just me kind of like thinking about like if AI was plugged into my phone and watched my purchasing decisions, it'll know if you're someone who just like literally buy now, I can care less about the price immediately go to it. Or if you're someone who maybe takes a little longer and maybe you're someone who you know, has a little bit more hesitation and objection somehow can track that and it may actually pop those things up right away. If you're a little bit more of a, what I would say, you know, conscious skeptical consumer versus a consumer that's just like hey, throw it in front of me. I'll buy it and you know, I'll figure out the rest. And we've already seen that before, like in Instagram reels, for example. I remember just scrolling through Instagram reels in our organic perspective and I might see a reel that I'm like, I don't know if I want to watch this, but I'll see that like one of my friends follows that profile. And just that little thing right there, I'm like, oh, maybe I should actually check out this if so and so likes this real because I know always like talking to that person. So this actually might be something cool for me to check out.

B

So as this rolls out, you know you said Facebook shopping sort of was an online joke four years ago. Never really caught on. But as this rolls out, they're obviously investing more and more in this. Are you going to think about moving your clients into that world or are you going to keep them on Shopify or their own website, these other platforms?

C

So this is one of those things where I always like to follow an 8020 principle, where 80% of my time, energy and investments is always going to be on things that's working right now and actively making my business and my clients money right now. And 20% of the time, energy and investments needs to be in exploring new actions. And the reason why is because obviously you want to double down on what's working. That's what's actually helping you keep up the momentum right now. But then you still need to have some time, energy and money set aside to explore these new things. Because some of these things might actually take off and crush and some of these things might just be purely just hype for a little bit and fade off. And that's something right there where like you can't just be fully set on. I'm always going to do Shopify because the reality is there will be a day where eventually we fully do adopt that it's just going to take an extended period of time. And we don't know when that time will be before everyone switches over completely. But it would just be like when Internet shopping first started. It took a while for it to really catch traction. 20 years later, all sudden, 2020 after, you know, things going on in 2020, all of a sudden, you know, Internet shopping blows up and it's, it's like a huge staple now of how we do, you know, consuming as a person on a day to day basis. So I do see it being the go to one day and you should definitely Be trying it on the side, but it shouldn't be your main thing if your main thing is another place platform that's unrelated to that.

B

Okay, one of the things I'm taking away from you today is at this point we need a lot of ad creative, right, for the AI to go out and test and all these things. And the other thing that Facebook is talking about rolling out here is more AI tools to create stuff, including what they're calling UGC style, video generation, AI voiceovers, translation, all these things where you could actually make a video of somebody saying, saying, hey, I got this product and here it is and it's great. Where it almost looks like it's from an actual consumer when it's actually AI. So is that something that, you know, for somebody that's limited on budget, is that something that you would recommend trying to just see if it worked, or do you have ethical issues there we need to run from as fast as possible?

C

That's actually a really great question and I'm actually really glad you brought that up because something I actually saw today was that New York just became the first state, today's June 4, June 9, 2026. They're going to be launching a law in the state of New York to where if you run ads on any platform, Facebook, YouTube, Google, even commercials, if you run ads in the state of New York, you have to actually just have a disclaimer on that video that there's an AI person in that, whether they're giving a testimonial or whether they're just simply being an actor in it, that's not even saying they used your product instead of stuff, that's actually something that just popped up. And I think that if more states start to adopt that as well, I think this could actually be not a huge like, oh, AI is done. But I definitely think there is a lot of people right now that are fully relying on AI utc and there's a very fine line and ethics for it. For one, if you use an AI UGC person, you can't claim that, like for a weight loss supplement, for example. This is where the people are getting the most trouble right now. If this AI UGC person claims that they took this product for 30 days and here's their before and after, which is clearly AI and they lost 30 pounds, which is completely fake because it's an AI story that's completely unethical and that can actually get you sued. And there's been a couple of people now that lawyers have gone after them and sued them. For a lot of money.

B

Money.

C

Because of that. Now you can use AI More from a perspective of like, hey, let me talk to you about this product. Let me tell you about the ingredients in the product. Let me tell you about the benefits of this product. But not from a perspective of. Correct. Yeah, more of a. More of a spokesperson perspective. Like a great example is like a Mucinex commercials back in the day, those types of things right there.

A

It's funny because Jerry and I were talking about this with Kenya Kelly on this very show recently, and I think the idea that you're going to have to disclose, like on commercials, they'll say like professional actor, you know, instead of real customer or whatever, we might have to disclose AI actor or something along those lines to cover our bases down the road. That's really where we're heading, don't you think, Nick?

C

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think I. I'm a huge fan of it because, yes, we love AI and we use AI a lot for a lot of content creation and stuff. But I do think that it's. It's going to get way more dangerous in a couple years. And you really, like, we're already at a point now where we can create some videos and it's like, hey, is this AI or not?

A

Yeah, you can't tell.

C

I'm like, I know, like I'm getting old, but I'm like, oh, yeah. Not like my grandma's age yet that where like, she can't tell at all the difference. But at the end of the day, it's like there will be a very harmful ability of it to spread a lot of misinformation due to that. You know, if there's nothing to kind of counter that, it could be a lot of dangers involved there. And that's, you know, kind of my negative towards AI a little bit.

B

Well, especially in the health space like you mentioned, Nick, this has been a really interesting and helpful conversation. Thank you for joining us today. If people want to explore working with you, where is the best place to send them?

C

My YouTube. Nick Terrio and. Yeah, either YouTube or Instagram.

B

Both.

C

Nick Terrio. I'm pretty active on Instagram. If you shoot me a message. Happy to answer any questions.

A

Thank you, Nick, first of all for coming on the show. Jerry, thanks for co hosting with with me today, folks. If you missed anything, we took all the notes for you at social media examiner.com724. If you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a listener for a little while we would love a review. Do check out our other show, the AI Explored Podcast. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. We'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. Catch you next time.

B

The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Media Social Social Media Examiner.

A

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