Hey, fellow growers. Anyone else fall in love with HBO’s Lanterns over the course of its first season?✋

Watchmen, Peacemaker, now Lanterns - at this point, anytime a DC property is turned into an HBO series it gets automatically added to the watchlist. And, somehow, they all live on the same platform as that brutal Green Lantern movie with Ryan Reynolds. Which to be fair, we didn’t hate quite as much as other people seem to.

Anyway. That’s enough superhero-nerd talk. Let’s be marketing nerds now🤓.

-Peter & Scott

P.S. If you want to further nerd out over “Lanterns,” Adweek recently interviewed HBO VP Alex Diamond, who oversaw the marketing campaign for the green-infused hit superhero show. Fair warning: It’s a subscriber-only piece, and we definitely can’t recommend using a website like archive.ph.

In this week’s newsletter:

• 🌱 The campaign that generated $1.23M+ by refusing to expire
• 🤖 AI-generated vs. human-generated ads: Which performs better?
• 📝 The largest CMO tenure study ever

Did someone forward you this email? Subscribe here for free weekly growth-marketing news, tactics, tips, and tricks - backed by proprietary data we see across thousands of live advertising campaigns while running America’s most-exclusive newsletter network.

DATA INSIGHT

🌱 The campaign that generated $1.23M+ by refusing to expire

Campaign reports train marketers to only measure them while they’re active. That works for an ad that disappears when the spend stops, but it badly undervalues useful content that keeps answering the same buyer question, regardless of the time of year.

Today’s breakdown: One recently completed campaign in our network involved turning a seasonal guide into a sales asset that ended up hanging around longer than Alex Honnold in Free Solo (*spoiler alert:* he’s still alive. And so is the asset for this campaign. Ba-dum-tsh🥁).

In our case, we worked with an online eventwear brand partner to anchor its campaign around an evening-formalwear guide, then kept distributing it through the social, email, and SMS channels of fashion-focused publishers in our network. (ICYMI, at DONUT Press Media we run newsletter-centric multichannel advertising campaigns to take advantage of what we call “the halo effect.”)

• The campaign accumulated 33.1M+ impressions over its 12-month lifespan…
• …which translated into $1.23M+ in sales, a 12.3x direct ROAS all-in for our partner.

The two-step guide to creating your own successful evergreen campaign

Step 1: Build around a specific painpoint, or recurring issue, your ICP has.

• Evening formalwear is a recurring problem, which makes the guide useful every time a new shopper wonders what on earth "garden cocktail for wedding reception" means. If you need some inspiration to start to build yours, search Reddit boards where your ICP lives and examine customer feedback to find common painpoints, dream outcomes, etc.
• If you nail the core asset, this means your brand delivers value immediately, and appears as part of the answer instead of a promotion wedged beside it.
• It also means that every later post, email mention, and returning shopper has a credible destination. Which brings us to…

Step 2: Distribute your campaign on multiple channels. Each one handles a different point of the sale.

• Email = awareness + intelligence building. Newsletter readers tend to be more affluent, and the channel provides higher customer LTV than other channels. Advertising with trusted publishers can help you build awareness and convert new, high-LTV customers, while also providing better data on who to target - and what creative makes their little fingers tick🖱️.
• Social = add’l scale. In our case, Meta whitelisting ads created further discovery and validation outside of our network, eventually generating 13.1M+ new-eyeball impressions. It also allowed us to play around with different ways to use the guide, since it was kept static - we knew it converted visitors in the target ICP at a specific baseline, info gathered during email ads - and the only thing that changed was how we got people to see it. AKA the creative messaging and visuals.
• The money grab 🤑 = Frequency + urgency over time. Stay in front of people consistently and provide value, and, when the time is right, they’ll choose you - that’s effectively the whole promise of content marketing, which this approach fits into. In our case, repeated email placements kept our brand partner visible while shoppers compared options or waited for an actual event (frequency). We coupled that with timely, personalized email/SMS sends with time-sensitive discount codes when our internal data told us that purchase intent was highest (urgency). Rinse and repeat for a prolonged period of time while iterating on traffic-driving creative; we usually opt for 6 or 12 months (over time). Voilà!

💡 DON’T FORGET: Without tracking, we’re nothing - aka Will Smith at the beginning of The Pursuit of Happyness - SO MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THIS IN PLACE B/F YOU LAUNCH. Track revenue by content asset and distribution date so the first spike and the long tail don’t disappear into a monthly mystery bucket. Also keep the core asset stable while testing new hooks around it, b/c constant reinvention makes it impossible to learn which idea did the selling. This takes more coordination than buying one slot and waiting for applause, but a more than 12x ROAS at scale is what can happen when the campaign still has a job long after it’s “active.” And maybe it goes w/o mentioning, but you can run the same traffic → asset playbook - now with all of your hard-gained customer learnings - year after year after year.

NEED TO KNOW

What you may have missed this week

🤷 Us vs. the machine: Do human-generated ads or AI-generated ads perform better? (A)I sure don’t know, but Harvard Business Review has the answer.

📱 New kids on the blok Tok: TikTok debuted a feature that can show your ad to users in 400K other apps. And for it to be on or to be off - that is the question.

🔍 GEO-locating: Vaer AI, an enterprise AI search and visibility platform, just published an analysis of how ChatGPT and Google AI serve shopping answers to their users. One finding: Asking AI for an “independent” store sharply changed both the recommendations and their sources. Read the full analysis here.

THE HELP DESK

Stuff that makes your output better and your job easier

🤖 Boss pushing you to use more AI? This practical guide turns an executive AI mandate into a bounded experiment with a 30-day hours tally, capacity cap, owner, kill date, and shadow comparison. (Ya know. All the stuff they haven’t thought of.)

🤝 What does Sales need from an ABM team each week? Use these six proven alignment plays to get ABM and Sales on the same page re: account lists, action signals, email-ready recommendations, and more.

📝 Zoom zoom: Take a look at what CMO Huddles describes as “the largest CMO tenure study ever.” The headline: companies are churning through marketing leaders at a pace that would make Max Verstappen jealous.

That’s all, folks. Happy growing; see you back here next Wednesday✌️.

-Peter & Scott

P.S. Meta or Google not providing the same bang for your advertising buck? At DONUT Press Media, we have 13.4M+ premium subscribers across dozens of highly engaged niche audiences. 43% have a net worth over $2M. 87% are decision-makers. If you're considering diverting some test spend to newsletters to capture the halo effect, you should definitely check us out.