| ISSUE №202 · CREATIVE | AGENCY OPS |
SPONSORED BY
WTF Happened To Targeting?
Agencies used to make their clients buckets of money by finding the right audiences. Media buyers built lookalikes, stacked interests, babysat exclusion lists and launched campaigns that print.
Meta took most of that away (and I know, that Zucks). The “algorithm” looks at 3 bazillion data points and finds a potential buyer. All that data is invisible to you, so ad creative is your only weapon. Every new ad is basically an audience thirst trap or the thing that gives buyers the ick.
And the algo is thirsty for creative. It always wants more. You know that most of your clients aren't short on media budget - when performance increases, it seems like they can always find some spare change in the couch cushion for more media. But ask them for new creative assets and suddenly they’ve got no time, & no money. They might even start hinting that you ought to pick up the creative slack.
So how do you fix that? You start thinking about bringing in a new creative strategist, a new designer or maybe a new video editor.
Then you realize that all that extra overhead adds cost & complexity to your workflow. And without more creative budget from the client, you end up with razor-thin margins, extra work, and an algo that is still suffering from the worst case of cottonmouth you’ve ever seen.
You might have a flash of brilliance & start thinking about UGC & creator content. Someone else makes the content, you run the ads, your client generates more revenue and everybody wins, right?
Absolutely. Guaranteed win. Sure. Well, um, maybe.
What’s The Risk With Creators, Tim? Seems Like A Slam Dunk
OK, the idea is right…people trust people more than stuff that looks like marketing. A real person talking about the product or service in a real way beats the “creative director approved, 100% brand guideline compliant” creative often enough that every serious brand and agency ought to have it in their arsenal.
But creator content running through a brand account takes away some of the authenticity. PLUS, it's running through the brand's Instagram or Facebook page, so you miss out on the audience that knows and trusts the creator. That’s why Meta Partnership Ads was created. The ad runs from the creator's handle with the creator's name on it, but the targeting & budget are handled by the brand or their agency (btw, that oughta be you).
Superfiliate did a survey of DTC brands (combined $300M+ a year on ad spend). Those brands reported a 19% drop in CPA, 53% higher CTR & 71% higher brand lift via Meta Partnership Ads.
Here’s the big thing (and your opportunity), 83% of those brands said that they would spend more if finding and managing creators got easier. The big friction points were finding creators, getting republishing permissions, paying people.
Almost every agency I know that's running creator content through Meta has done it the hard way, negotiating creator deals one at a time, chasing permissions and tracking payouts in a spreadsheet. It's a giant freaking mess every time.
Superfiliate knows firsthand that this is the friction point (they worked directly with the Partnership Ads team at Meta to build this out). But Partnership Ads aren’t something that just anybody can run - it takes a lot of insight, experience and skill to make them work. That’s why Superfiliate asked me to talk to you about it…because y’all tick off these boxes hard: “a lot of insight, experience and skill.”
Check Out These Crazy Stats From Superfiliate
Your agency can deliver better-performing creative, generate recurring revenue, and scale without adding headcount. That sounds pretty f’ng good to me. Where was Superfiliate when I was running an agency?!?!
That's exactly the opportunity Superfiliate is bringing performance agencies.
An agency I know pretty well brought Superfiliate in & started to cook. The agency developed 20 creator partnerships, and launched 400+ Meta Partnership Ads for their home decor client.
Without spending a single penny on designers or contractors or media buyers, this agency launched 20 new creatives a week FOR 5 MONTHS STRAIGHT. That’s more fresh creative than the agency & brand could pump out COMBINED. The Superfiliate results were SIMPLY FANTASTIC:
32% ROAS INCREASE
(wow - more revenue, same cost)17% CPA DECREASE
(that goes right to the bottom line)25% CTR JUMP
(more clicks means more opportunity)
How do you think the client felt about these results?
The Big Shift - Stop Buying UGC & Start Building a Creator Engine
It used to be that agencies pay creators upfront for videos. That’s a risk to the agency - those ads might never perform, might never make it into an ad campaign, or honestly, might never be better than those awful Meta AI “improvements” that FB Ad Manager keeps telling you is the key to fame & fortune. You might waste your client’s budget, or worse yet, kill your margin!
Superfiliate changes the equation. Instead of buying creator content on spec & crossing your fingers, your agency can now build a high-output creative engine.
Superfiliate lets you do cool stuff like activate content from existing affiliates/ambassadors, find high-potential organic content via social listening, and recruit new creators for UGC content.
Rather than buying content & playing “creative cost arbitrage” or “I hope this content doesn’t suck,” agencies & their brands can compensate creators based on ad spend, results or even flat fees.
Tyler Barrow, Automation & Ops Lead at Kineon, a Superfiliate customer, explains:
"The biggest thing that Partnership Ads help us with is getting a lot more content. Ads are filling a large gap in regards to creatives."
So, What’s The Real Opportunity for Agencies?
Clients love better ROAS and lower CPAs - and you can deliver that by working with Superfiliate. That all by itself is a powerful churn buster and a reason to put this on your radar. (And you know that keeping a client longer is good for your margin & your team).
But Superfiliate gives you access to a new recurring revenue stream.
Wait, Tim, what did you say?
I said “a new recurring revenue stream” - I know, those are the kind of sexy words that keep you reading Agency Inner Circle. All you need to do is add a Partnership Ads management line item into your new proposals or as an upsell to your existing retainers. You can give clients increased campaign performance, broaden & deepen client reputation and reach via a continuous pipeline of creator content. And, you don’t need to spend even 1 second thinking about creative production costs, adding staff or workflow complexity.
Superfiliate makes it easy for you to deliver a win for your client’s top & bottom line. It’s also a big win for your position as a true client partner and you know how much I blab on and on about the need to stop being a vendor and focus on being a proactive, strategic partner.
And believe it or not, there’s another win that you can deliver to your client that isn’t completely obvious. Because you use Superfiliate to discover & recruit creators, you can test new angles, new audiences & accelerate high-trust reach. Most performance agencies can’t really strengthen their client’s brand all that much. But by managing your client’s Partnership Ads, you can bring completely new audiences, new messaging and add texture and depth to your client’s brand.
Superfiliate also makes your life better by automating creator sourcing, permissions, commissions, and reporting. Their integrations with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude make managing workflows across multiple client accounts seamless.
The takeaway? Better creative performance for your clients, a scalable new service for you, and less operational work for everyone.
Partnership Ads via Superfiliate deserve serious consideration as a strategic growth initiative for your agency.
I’ve spent time with the team at Superfiliate & they’ve put together a terrific approach for readers of this newsletter. Grab 30 minutes with them & they’ll pull together a 100% free assessment that helps you understand how Partnership Ad management can make your clients love you even more & make you way happier when you look at your next P&L.
So What Do I Actually Do With This, Tim?
You get to own the Creative Supply Chain. That's the whole deal. You and your client make creative like you always have. Plus you have access to this on demand torrent of click-worthy content to max performance EVERY SINGLE MONTH.
If you only run paid media, the most obvious measuring stick is ROAS. In today’s environment, that means you are throwing down and working with creative somebody else decided was right. If they weren’t right, and performance sucks, who do you think your client blames? Hint: It’s not their in-house creative team…
If you run the creative supply chain, you control the thing that ACTUALLY creates the return. You also get really hard to fire, because firing you means rebuilding twenty creator relationships, all the permissions and the payout process from zero.
As an agency owner, especially those under $20M in revenue, you care about three things:
Landing new clients.
Keeping clients you already have.
Getting existing clients to spend more.
When you can own the Creative Supply Chain, all three things you care about get easier. You bring a new approach to prospects, make it way harder for clients to kick you to the curb, and the improved performance makes it an easy upsell to the folks who already trust you with their growth.
The Question That You Are All Asking: Can I Make Bank By Owning The Creative Supply Chain?
This is a really quick quiz - give yourself 1 point for each YES.
Does Ad Account Performance Ever Hit A Ceiling Because There’s No New Creative?
Do You Ever Look At The Assets Your Client Delivers & Think, “OMFG, What Are We Gonna Do With This?”
Have You Ever Thought “We Need To Bring This Client To Different Audiences But They Won’t Invest In New Creative Because It Costs Too Much?”
Have You Ever Sourced & Seeded A Creator For Your Client Only To Get Creative That Isn’t Up To Your Standard?
Have You Ever Had To Spend Time To Make A New Dashboard To Track Creator Content Delivery & Performance?
Have You Ever Wondered “I Think The Creator Brief Is Good, But Who Knows If This Content Is Going To Work?”
Have You Ever Wished That You Could Reduce Client Churn Through Better Performance, But You Don’t Have Enough Bodies To Throw At A Client Or A Campaign?
Have You Ever Wished That Your Client Saw You As An Important Performance Partner That Was Crucial To Their Growth Rather Than Just A YAFA? (Yet Another Fucking Agency - Read AIC#112 for the full story.)
Have You Ever Wished You Had A Banger To Add To Your Value Proposition That Makes Prospects Think “Holy Guacamole, Let’s Pick These Guys…They Are Awesome?”
Let’s Add Up Your Score & See If You Can Make Bank By Controlling The Creative Supply Chain:
# OF TIMES YOU SAID YES | CAN YOU MAKE BANK? |
|---|---|
ZERO | NO, YOU CANNOT MAKE BANK (AND I DON’T BELIEVE YOU ANSWERED THE QUESTIONS TRUTHFULLY) |
1-3 | HELL YEAH |
4-6 | OMG, 100% HELL YEAH |
7-9 | WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? BOOK A CALL WITH SUPERFILIATE RIGHT NOW! |
How To Sell & Package This Stuff
I know, it took me long enough to get to the part you care the most about:
EXISTING CLIENTS WITH AFFILIATES AND PARTNERS: Ask your client POC to chat about Partnership Ads and ask them to bring the results from their best 3 creators. Review the results carefully, nod thoughtfully, exhale slowly & say, “I think we can use this to juice your performance fast.” Tell them about Partnership Ads & offer to run a test with existing creators. Charge some minimal amount to manage the proof of concept through Superfiliate. After you get initial results (they are gonna be good), hand your client a list of 10-20 spot on new creators and ask them if they’d be interested in potentially 10 or 20x-ing the proof of concept results. Talk to them about endless creative, endless avenues for audience expansion and endless feedback around brand and value proposition from as many audiences as they have budget to find. Stick a fair price on it and get ready to write up a new SOW.
EXISTING CLIENTS WITHOUT AFFILIATES AND PARTNERS: Ask your client POC to chat about Partnership Ads. Hand your client a list of 10-20 spot on new creators and say “We can use their reach, credibility & charm to build out entirely new audiences and customers.” After your client says, “Hmmm. Tell me more…”, you take their baseline CPA (the one that you 100% recorded during your kickoff call and compare current performance against…) and say, “If history is any indication, we are confident that we can add an additional <MEDIA SPEND THAT SOUNDS REASONABLE> at <BASELINE CPA - 15%>. That ought to generate <MEDIA SPEND/BASELINE CPA - 15%> conversions. At your current <CLIENT AOV> AOV, that looks like <CONVERSIONS * AOV> in new revenue.” The client is going to say, “Wow, really?”. You are going to say “Yeah, and working with these creators is going to alleviate creative bottlenecks, introduce your brand to a fresh set of eyes & build your addressable audience. What I’d like to do is start a test with 3 creators for 90 days. That’s going to cost $X for us to run it - you have to do NOTHING. After we’ve hit <MILESTONE THAT IS INEVITABLE>, we can start expanding our creator universe. We can work out the expansion budgets and our fees as we get closer to the milestone, but this is going to unleash a ton of cost-effective growth for you. We are excited. When do you want to start?”
NEW CLIENT: During the discovery call, get all the information you normally need, and then ask if they are running Partnership Ads. The answer is almost certainly going to be NO. Give them a quick value prop - endless creative, endless audiences, brand enhancement & a 15-18% drop vs their current CPA. After the prospect picks their jaw up off their desk and pops their eyes back into the sockets, say “Yeah, our primary ad management typically has these kinds of results <YOUR CPA IMPROVEMENT>. But we inevitably run into creative bottlenecks and eventually some audience fatigue. We bundle our traditional ad management and Partnership Ad management together to ensure continuous opportunity growth throughout our relationship. And we handle the Partnership Ad management end to end…our clients tell us all the time that Partnership Ads are an unexpected growth engine. Here’s what I’ll do, after we get a chance to check out your ad accounts, I’ll put together a quick forecast of what the business opportunity might look like after 6 months and after 12 months with & without Partnership Ads. Once you see the numbers, it’s kind of a no-brainer to add Partnership Ads to your stack - and we can handle it from end to end - recruitment, creative, campaigns, payments - the whole thing.” Then you do your due diligence, determine your pricing for your primary service and then price Partnership Ad management relative to your projected primary ad management performance. If you normally charge $5K and Partnership Ads look like they will add another 30%, charge $5K for your primary service and $1500 for Partnership Ad management.
Want to see what this looks like on your clients' accounts? Book a call with Superfiliate
This issue of Agency Inner Circle is sponsored by & presented in conjunction with Superfiliate. Any performance numbers are based on Superfiliate data. As they used to say in car ads, “Your mileage may vary.” And, you oughta book a call with the Superfiliate team - I’ve spent a lot of time digging into their service and I can promise you that they are 1. Smart AF 2. Nice, as in Tim Walz Minnesota nice 3. They will bust their butt to help you bring big wins to your clients. They pinky-swore and everything.
