Don't Call it A Comeback

Let's try this again Joseph Yau-Schofield May 10, 2024 It’s a sunny Friday in London so lets kick things off. Subscribed Mini Monthly Misogi I recently heard about Misogi twice in a 7 day period, once at lunch with Michael Rogerson-Smith and once on the MFM pod. I was sold. Especially as I had a trip to Japan coming up. Traditionally Misogi is a Shinto purification ritual conducted in the natural and historic setting of Shirayama-Hime Shrine, near Kanazawa. But Jesse Itzler describes a misogi as: “The notion around the misogi is, you do something so hard 1 time a year, that has an impact on the other 364 days of the year.” In the My First Million Pod the reference how Marcus Elliot and NBA player Kyle Corver have been responsible for popularising the concept - including an effort of diving down into the ocean and moving a rock for 3miles! Elliot describes it as… “Take on challenges that radically expands your sense of what’s possible. There are just two rules: you have a fifty-per-cent chance of success at best, and it doesn’t kill you… Does it make your jaw drop? That’s a good litmus test for whether something can be a misogi or not.” With my teams we would often set goals for the month, which invariably had some sort of exercise flavour. For example my May goal is to be able to pistol squat and to spice things up Lewis on the team is trying to do the same thing! But mine had slipped into ‘Run 250km for the month’ or ‘go to the gym x times’ which seemed a little dull. So I thought can we combine the two of these things but lower the barrier and ‘jaw dropness’ of the efforts but also increase the frequency so as to provide a sense of progress. I developed the MMM ‘Monthly Mini Misogi’. Sidenote: At high school my wrestling name was Marvellous Mike Magic, so the MMM moniker is one I seemingly have an affinity for. April: Physical 100 Treadmill Challenge Physical: 100 is a popular South Korean show on Netflix which has a variety of contestants competing in a unique blend of unusual challenges and demanding physical tests. The contestants are all at the peak of physical fitness and the show starts off with them admiring each others plaster busts as they enter the arena. It begins with 100 participants of diverse backgrounds and fitness levels, gradually narrowing them down to a single "ultimate physique" through a series of quests. In the first challenege of the 2nd series the contestants we faced with a room filled with 100 curved treadmills, the kind where you power the belt yourself. The athletes were tasked with running as far as they could during three timed intervals of 10, 7 and 5 minutes. As I watched it I was wondering ‘how tough is that’. So this felt like a good tester for my first MMM. May: Run a Solo Ultramarathon With May bank holiday coming up and London promised a heatwave, my wife San announced that she was heading for a girls weekend in the Lakes and would be taking our daughter with her. Wow. A full long weekend all to myself. So of course the natural decision was that I should attempt to run 50km I have run marathons before and run a reasonable amount but this still felt like it would meet the criteria and after 46km I definitely felt there was a good chance I wouldn’t finish. I managed to shuffle the last few km’s home. And spent the rest of the day prone on the sofa watching the Dune movies. Subscribed June: TBC If anyone has any suggestions for what to do in June I’m all ears. Leave a comment Recently I’ve been really focussed on growing campaigns in Meta. It’s been refreshing to get back into the weeds of a platform, understand things from first principles, build creatives, think about testing frameworks. The list goes on. I’d also like to thank everyone who has helped me with some of my thinking here. Exploring Meta's New AI creative Features in Ads Manager: Good for SMB’s but what about everyone else? Meta recently unveiled new AI features in its Ads Manager, sparking interest and debate among marketers and business owners alike. For smaller, more agile brands with limited creative resources I can see how these tools could be a bit of a game changer. They offer a way to simply build out multiple creative iterations with pretty low overhead or the need for extensive in-house capabilities. I'm planning to test these features out myself. However, I'm skeptical about their usefulness for many advertisers, where we already have existing creative prodiction processes or are using AI-generated content already. Will these tools provide a significant advantage over what we currently use, or will they just be another set of features added to FAM which nobody wanted? Challenges ahead for AI creative tools With Meta's vast computational resources and Zuck’s stated commitement to invest more into it’s AI capabilities. In the same vein as Tiktok with Capcut, you would imagine it's only a matter of time before Meta is able to offer a better UI than the existing AI creative tools. This should be a wake-up call for those folks who have built businesses layered on top of other Gen AI models because I can’t see how many of these continue to be of service. I imagine the move will be to niche down further, whilst Meta takes a more generalist approach can those businesses tailor their product offering more to certain sectors or elements within the creative process? A Hott take I saw that Barry Hott expressed his thoughts about Meta's track record with ad creative tools: "I just haven't seen Meta make great ad creative tools so far," he noted. Meta has yet to prove that it can deliver effective and innovative ad solutions that stand out or are particularly usesful. For those familiar with the Facebook Ads Manager you will also know there are some super weird UI elements and the product roadmap seems, meh. What do I think? Today I couldn’t see there being a whole lot of value in the product but I think at the moment this feature set is useful to and aimed at the wrong audience. The more usage these tools can get and the more ads which run off the back of them, the more data Meta will generate to improve it’s outputs. But there is very little incentive to change your workflow or use anything that these throw out. Clearly the ability to quickly generate high-quality, targeted ads would be great for SMB’s but how does Meta close the gap here. And Barry crucially agreed! It looks like Google is getting in on the act too as my colleague Alden sent round this screenshot of a feature in Google Ads for Pmax. Them’s just my thoughts but would be great to hear how your organisation is thinking of using these tools or not…