S. Patrick Hopf

Retargeting is a waste of time in 2025. Remember how we used to set up ad accounts? Separate prospecting and retargeting campaigns, exclusions on website visitors and purchasers etc. All that meticulous organization is worthless now. If you need proof take a look at frequency metrics across your accounts month over month for the past couple years. They've just gone up. The platform is hitting the same people more frequently in shorter periods of time. If you do any level of creative testing you have more than enough retargeting in your ad account. Ads perform poorly ignore exclusions, effectively serving as your retargeting strategy. Spend the time you would've wasted on building complicated account structures on developing ads that actually perform well. The marketers still obsessing over retargeting strategies are the same ones wondering why they can't scale past a certain point. They're optimizing for a platform that doesn't exist anymore.

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16 Comments

If the Out-of-Home industry wants to attract more digital dollars, it’s time for some common-sense standards. Nowhere is this more urgent than in programmatic, where ease, scale, and trust drive success. Screen size matters — but context is just as critical, especially in the open exchange. Take the “Outdoor” category. It should be simple: screens labeled Outdoor should actually be outside. Think Urban Panels, Bus Shelters, and Billboards — typically in the public right of way, perpendicular to traffic, clearly visible to both pedestrians and drivers. But instead of common sense standards, we have confusion. Some OOH media operators classify indoor, store-facing window screens as Urban Panels — even though they’re often parallel to the street, behind glass, and definitively indoors. In direct sales, buyers know exactly what they’re getting. In programmatic, that clarity depends on accurate taxonomy. When inventory is misclassified, buyers are flying blind — and that undermines confidence in the whole system. Grouping together screens just because they’re the same size — while ignoring fundamental differences in context, location, and function — doesn’t help anyone in the long run. Over time, it erodes trust, devalues premium inventory, and slows industry growth. Urban Panels are in demand for a reason: they’re high-impact placements in high-traffic areas. They drive reach and frequency, support key public services (like Wi-Fi or transit info), and often exist under city franchise agreements that generate civic revenue. Window screens, by contrast, have their own value — especially for retail-oriented campaigns. But they belong in the Retail category. They’re not Outdoor, and in many cities, putting them outside wouldn’t even be legal. A smarter, more accurate taxonomy benefits everyone: advertisers gain confidence and transparency, and publishers can better differentiate and monetize their inventory.

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26 Comments

One big observation from 2024: CPMs are rising. Some brands are seeing increases of 100%+ YoY. My prediction for 2025: If you don’t shift your Meta strategy, your acquisition costs will keep climbing, and growth will stall. Direct response creative isn’t everything. Too many DTC brands are obsessed with driving immediate conversions while ignoring TOF creative that builds brand equity and future demand. These brands are burning £££ by targeting the same audiences over and over again and they wonder why costs keep climbing. How to win on Meta in 2025: 1️⃣ Invest in TOF creative: - Stop circling the same buyers. - Start reaching *new audiences* who don’t know you yet. - Tell your story. Build affinity. Drive attention before intent. 2️⃣ Balance brand + direct response: - Brand-building creative fuels future demand. - Direct response creative converts it. 3️⃣ Increase creative + testing volume: - The more inputs you push (creatives, offers, landing pages), the better your chance of finding winners. - Constant testing keeps your campaigns fresh, reduces fatigue, and improves results. 4️⃣ Take big creative swings: - Rising CPMs mean average creative won’t cut it. - Test bold hooks, visuals, and narratives that stop the scroll. Need proof? We grew one brand 2.4K% by focusing on one channel only, Meta. This was done by mastering creative alignment, testing rigorously, and scaling winners with precision. Meta isn’t getting cheaper, it’s getting smarter. Brands that focus on long-term growth over short-term wins will dominate. 2025 is the year to look beyond the bottom of the funnel.

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✔️ LeadScale’s Gen5 Software and XBM™ Framework Transform Marketing Operations ✔️ Marketing Operations professionals face a daily struggle with fragmented, siloed data spread across dozens of platforms—resulting in inefficiencies, unclear account stories, and slow meeting velocity. LeadScale’s Gen5 software with our under-lying XBM™ (Anything-Based Marketing) framework, is designed to solve these challenges by unifying technology and workflow integrations into a single, adaptive platform. 📌 How XBM™ powers Gen5 to support MOPS: 💥 Continuous, Unified Data Journeys XBM™, at the heart of Gen5, treats data as a continuous journey—constantly flowing, adapting, and updating as new signals arrive. Gen5 integrates data from every source (Marketo, Salesforce, product analytics, and more), providing a real-time, 360-degree view of each account’s engagement and status. 💥 Standardized Account Status and Pattern Recognition Gen5 leverages standardized account status (unknown, known, engaged, qualified, etc.), enabling Marketing Operations teams to index, track, and analyze accounts consistently. This makes it easy to recognize engagement patterns and progression, improving targeting and forecasting. 💥 Real-Time Data Validation and Governance The Gen5 platform validates, enriches, and routes all incoming data instantly, reducing errors and eliminating redundant or conflicting records. Advanced de-duplication and standardized tagging ensure your team always works with clean, actionable data. 💥 Centralized Asset Management and Workflow Automation Gen5 consolidates all campaign assets and data into a single platform, streamlining operations and reducing reliance on multiple third-party tools. Automated workflows free your team from manual processes, so you can focus on strategy and execution. 💥 Accelerated Meeting Velocity and Revenue Growth With unified, high-quality data and clear account statuses, Marketing Operations can quickly identify which accounts are ready for outreach, which need nurturing, and which require re-engagement—leading to faster pipeline movement and more productive meetings. 📌 Why Gen5 + XBM™ Is a Game Changer for MOPS LeadScale’s Gen5 software makes XBM™’s adaptive, circular data journeys a reality—delivering a self-service, enterprise-grade platform that unifies technology and workflows for Marketing Operations professionals. No more patchwork of tools or fragmented insights, just a single, scalable solution designed to drive clarity, control, and compliance at every stage of the funnel. Ready to see the whole picture and unlock the true potential of your data? Gen5 with XBM™ is built for Marketing Operations. #MarketingOps #MarTech #WorkflowAutomation #DataIntegration #LeadScale #Gen5 #XBM™

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It's 2025. If you're still doing SEO like it's 2024, you're already invisible. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot are creating a parallel search universe. They care about one thing: whether AI engines understand and trust your content enough to recommend you. AI search is eating traditional SEO, Google's AI Overviews already draw 1.5 billion users monthly - proof that answer-style results now rival classic blue links for reach (Reuters, 2025). OpenAI crossed 400 million weekly active users for ChatGPT, up from 300 million just two months prior. One of our clients jumped from 0% to 11% AI visibility in their category within 30 days by restructuring content for AI comprehension. Here’s how to take action and get noticed: 1. Write for answers, not keywords Traditional SEO: "Best CRM software 2025" scattered throughout your page. AEO: Clear statements like "Salesforce reduces sales cycle time by 23% for B2B companies with 50-200 employees." AI engines need definitive answers, not keyword soup. 2. Structure for extraction No more fluff. AI engines parse bullet points, numbered lists, and clear headers. Put your most authoritative claims up front. Companies embedding gen-AI into seller workflows saw conversion rates rise 40% and lead-execution speed improve 30% within months (McKinsey, 2025). 3. Monitor seven engines, not one ChatGPT (400M weekly users), Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, plus Copilot and emerging platforms. Each values different signals. Track citation patterns across all seven daily. 4. Build topical authority clusters Google rewards domain authority. AI rewards topical depth. Instead of 100 blog posts on everything, create 10 comprehensive guides that answer every question about your specific solution. AI engines pull from sources that demonstrate complete expertise, not scattered keywords. 5. Enterprises are already moving McKinsey's March 2025 Global AI Survey finds 71% of enterprises now use generative-AI in at least one business function - marketing and sales leading adoption. You're creating comprehensive content for them to find once instead of constantly tweaking. 6. 2026 is the deadline Gartner projects 30% of all searches will happen inside AI chat interfaces by 2026. Google's AI Overviews serve 1.5 billion monthly users, but only 1% click through. The audience has already moved. TAKEAWAY: At Metajive, we just launched AEO services because the search playbook is unrecognizable. Stop optimizing for keywords. Start optimizing for answers. Stop writing for crawlers. Start writing for comprehension. Stop tracking rankings. Start tracking citations. In 12 months, there will be two types of companies: 1. Those visible to AI engines. 2. And those wondering where their customers went. Time to choose.

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