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Talking Shop With Mike Ryan, The PMax Whisperer
00:41:04
Mike Ryan of Smarter Ecommerce helps advertisers get the most out of their Google Performance Max campaigns. Understanding what’s going on inside this walled garden black box product is now the most pressing concern for many retailers and ecommerce...
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- [00:13]
Mike Ryan
Welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast.
- [00:15]
James Hersher
Devoted to examining the issues and trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you. Hello and welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the Ad Exchanger podcast where the editorial team catches up with interesting people from the world of media and marketing. This is James Hersher filling in this week for our intrepid editor, Managing Editor Allison Schiff. And this week I am excited to have on Mike Ryan, Head of E Commerce Insights at Smarter E Commerce, someone whose work I follow. Good to have you on the pod, Mike.
- [01:06]
Mike Ryan
Good to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
- [01:09]
James Hersher
Cool. So let's start with just sort of some of the basics. Maybe people don't know Smarter E Commerce and Head of E Commerce Insights too. Like what exactly does that mean?
- [01:23]
Mike Ryan
Yeah, it's probably not your run of the mill job title I guess, but let me just first introduce you to Smarter Ecommerce. Yeah, so we work in performance advertising and we have a particular focus on performance max for Google. But in general we're interested in all kinds of performance marketing technology. And as said in the name Smarter E Commerce, we work with E commerce, both multi brand retailers and mono brands all over the world to help them with that stuff with our software that we build and services that we provide. And Head of E Commerce Insights is an interesting job title. It's kind of a custom role that was, that was built and I do a variety of activity. You know I do market facing activity like sharing insights, getting on podcasts like this one. I also do a lot of client facing work with custom data projects. I used to be in product management so I also work with our, with our products and solution teams a lot as well. So it's really just kind of a custom role so that I can have a foot in these different areas and help out wherever I can.
- [02:37]
James Hersher
One thing I've been curious about, Smarter E Commerce goes by like, I see it abbreviated to smec. S M E C. Does it go by smec? Is that how people would know the company?
- [02:48]
Mike Ryan
Yeah, we're also known as SMEC and this is, I don't know, it's like it's not really an acronym. It's not really a portmanteau. It's kind of like a portmanteau acronym. Like it takes a. And I think this, you know, it's a. We're an Austrian company and I think you'll see this sometimes done with, with some German brands and stuff. Give us some credit. We've been in, we've been in business for 17 years. There was a couple of founders just in a spare bedroom 17 years ago starting this thing up. So you know, it's that, that type of thing. But I have to. Yeah, exactly.
- [03:24]
James Hersher
How'd you end up in, in Austria? Was it, was it the company? Like what? Yeah, how'd you end up there?
- [03:33]
Mike Ryan
I, I didn't come here because of the company. I came here because of a woman, because of love. So though, yeah, I mean I met an Austrian when she was working in the US for a while and yeah, we, we lived apart for like a year but then we had to make a decision. So I've been in Austria for yeah like seven to eight years now. It's been a while. And I mean I, I did choose, I had options for which company to choose. And what I liked about Smarter E Commerce is that it felt very much like an American company compared to some of the, some of the other businesses in the area. Just felt much more familiar to me and the subject matter was really interesting. So.
- [04:18]
James Hersher
Gotcha. So you've been there for pretty much all of like GDPR essentially.
- [04:23]
Mike Ryan
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
- [04:25]
James Hersher
An interesting time to move to Europe in the category.
- [04:31]
Mike Ryan
Yeah, there's never a dull moment in Europe and sadly mostly as involving regulations.
- [04:39]
James Hersher
And so the coming. So you said Smarter E Commerce focusing in particular on performance max. So you know, the company, the company predates performance max by quite a bit. So is that, you know, has that, has that just sort of like been where like the client interest in demand is like how do you know, how do you sort of end up being like particularly focused on performance max?
- [05:05]
Mike Ryan
Yeah, I mean that's a great question. So the company started out building text ad automation. That's really where they had their start. And then we started to grow a lot faster when we got into bid automation for Google Shopping and that was, you know, Google Smart bidding didn't even exist yet. So that was very kind of, yeah, groundbreaking work back then. And this got us very involved in Google Shopping for the next several years. As smart bidding evolved and the whole platform evolved, you know, we've just had to evolve with it. We were, and I personally, we were not fans of smart shopping when that came around. It's just a totally different kind of beast than these standard shopping campaigns. But what we found is that despite our recommendations and us trying to have the best interest of advertisers in mind and so on, it just saw a massive adoption. The numbers look great in platform. We can talk about short termism in the industry, but it's a massive adoption. It was A very successful product. And when it started to become, it got migrated into pmax. I mean, I guess it's kind of like a very pragmatic approach, like real politic. You don't try to enforce your dogma or something like that. We saw what happened last time people adopted this technology before, they're going to adopt this technology again. So what can we do to kind of help people enjoy responsibly and not, not try to fight against it?
- [06:52]
James Hersher
Enjoy responsibly. I like that sort of framing it as like, like booze or something like that. Like yeah, something you're, you're gonna enjoy but maybe isn't good for you. Is that as opposed to like taking your medicine like that? Maybe that's how Google would frame it?
- [07:10]
Mike Ryan
Yeah, I mean, again, I don't want to be dogmatic about it or anything like that. And I. It's just there are kind of when you think about drinking alcohol and it leaves you with a hangover or eating sugary foods or whatever the case might be and you want to enjoy these things in moderation or enjoy responsibly. I think it's kind of an apt metaphor because the thing about performance max is that it can be sort of too much of a good thing. It's sort of implicit in the name. Like, yeah, Google built a campaign type that will max performance, but this is the in platform reported and attributed performance. And if you really want to maximize performance, it's just typically going to steer your marketing into, let's say less incremental pockets of demand. Like it's going to just sort of follow warmer traffic. Like we see that pmax goes heavily into branded traffic. So people who are already aware of your brand, this is not necessarily as incremental. It often leans heavily into bestsellers where there's a lot of demand and you know, but those products, they don't necessarily need that advertising pressure as much as a product that is behind sales plan, for example. There's also a lot of just straight up remarketing mixed into pmax. And you can't even see that it's in there by default. It's baked in. It's not something that is segmentable or reportable. So yeah, and that's the way that I kind of mean that. There's just a way in which it's kind of like be careful what you wish for. Advertisers want to max performance. Google listened and delivered a tool that does that. But like truly incremental marketing isn't necessarily going to look that good. In platform, you know, actually doing that hard work of generating new customers is not necessarily going to scale well, it's not necessarily going to be cost efficient. And so I think that's one of the big trade offs with a technology like that.
- [09:21]
James Hersher
Before getting any more into Performance Max, I'm curious if you know, clearly like Google is big news, is the DOJ stuff, is that top of mind? Like is that like right on the radar on the other side of the pond? Like I feel like you know, if there was some sort of court thing going on in Austria, like maybe we'd, we'd grab it, but it wouldn't be like news here in the States probably.
- [09:47]
Mike Ryan
Well, you know, funny enough actually Austria for better or worse has been, has, has been a big mover and shaker with some tech related rulings. You might have heard of these cases like Schrems 1 and Schrems 2 which are related to like Google Analytics and the legality of that. And that came from an Austrian named Max Schrems who is very aggressive towards these platforms and files, files suit aggressively and follows up on them. So oddly enough you will sometimes read about Austrian rulings in, in the international press, even though we're a little mountain country. But yeah, of course doj, we're all watching that quite a bit. It's, I think it's very interesting to see how there's sort of like this transatlantic ping pong going on where like GDPR happened and then you see that kind of game picked up a bit with what's it called? Ccpa, the California equivalent of that. And like there's just this. Yeah. On both sides of the pond we see people are really tightening down on big tech from a lawmaking standpoint, from a regulatory standpoint. So I'm curious to see, I mean we years ago had a partial breakup of Google with this CSS verdict, if you remember about that. Basically it was ruled that Google Shopping is Google's own comparison shopping platform or comparison shopping site and that Google was kind of self dealing or self favoring their own comparison shopping engine compared to other local competitors. And so Google Shopping Europe is like this split off piece of like Google Shopping is not part of Google in Europe they had to split off a little bit.
- [11:45]
James Hersher
Yeah, I do remember the comparison shopping suit. Yeah. Is there like a breakup? Is there a remedy here that you would like to see? Performance Max interestingly does sort of seem to get called out by regulators as well.
- [12:03]
Mike Ryan
Yeah, Performance Max was called out by name and I don't know, I'm very I, I'm not a, always a huge fan of you know, heavy handed regulation. I sometimes wish that the markets would self regulate a bit more. But you know I understand the basic complaint that when you're a monopoly that kind of self regulation is, is not going to occur. But I, I certainly would like to see some of these remedies like about default search changing. I think that some of these things related to the ad tech could come around to bite us in the end. I think it's hard to predict how those things might play out. Like for example Google is being asked to share a lot of their ranking signals and open up their algorithms and all kinds of stuff like that. Or they might be asked, it's only in draft right now but they might be asked to do this and Google's saying well this would violate privacy. On the other hand it's always there's kind of this tension between anti competition and privacy often and sometimes these privacy laws end up supporting the garden walls getting higher. But if you take, just to get specific about it you can look at something like search term data which Google limits that on privacy grounds and you know if they would be forced to share that there would be a dilemma like how can they share something that's going to violate people's privacy. And, and then a ruling might say then if you're not able to share this then better not collect it and this would be bad for advertisers in the end. It wouldn't, it wouldn't favor advertisers in the end because this would degrade platform capability. So it's, I think this stuff, there's a lot of knock on effects or secondary effects that are difficult to predict and I, I'm very impressed with, I think the, the doj has a much clearer understanding of the landscape compared to say like in 2007 when they, when the FTC for example approved the double click merger. I think they didn't have an understanding of implications and I think they've improved but I still, I'm worried about heavy handing regulation coming in here and having unforeseen consequences.
- [14:33]
James Hersher
Yeah, yeah, it's going to be wild watching that one play out. Although I imagine it'll be years. This ball will be getting kicked around on Google shopping too. I've always sort of felt like Google sort of like missed the shopping opportunity. Like they never really got into, they kind of like dipped a toe in and then they had a retail program that like Walmart and some big retailers joined but then like sort of pretty quickly got out of. And it seems, yeah, like I don't know if it's because Google's just never really wanted to touch like customer service and fulfillment and all those things, but it does sort of feel like, like, like a missed opportunity. Like oh, like where was Google on all this? You know, on the sort of shopping opportunity.
- [15:23]
Mike Ryan
Yeah, I think it's a, it's a fair criticism and one that they're aware of. They just at time of recording, just last week they introduced new AI overhaul of their shopping tab for their shopping property. And the, the thing about that, I think it's quite interesting but if you, if you look really close at what they've shared about it so far, I don't know if it's really going to be needle moving. I don't know if you're fundamentally going to change people's behaviors. Like ultimately it's basically still acting as an affiliate. It's, I mean I think where it has advantages right now compared to let's say Amazon, I think the product filtering looks super promising. I think that the kind of premise of it actually being a price comparison tool is attractive. It's a little bit more transparent about that than Amazon is. And yeah, it's also there's just one bar of ads at the top. That's it. There's a single row of ads at the top. You scroll down and then you're really in the experience of shopping. And I mean Amazon, they literally. Who was that who coined the word intification about. Specifically about Amazon search engine result page. Like it's so overloaded with ads that it's sometimes barely usable. I think Amazon hasn't taken their own medicine about putting the customer first above all. So, but I, so I think that Google, they've improved it here but somehow no one, it's just hard to make people care about it. It's hard to make people like take it kind of out of the friend zone and actually view this as a shopping destination. And I don't think that's going to change.
- [17:19]
James Hersher
Yeah, no, it just, I mean it does seem like they just can't create that behavior. It seems like they just don't have that, that habit. What about some of the others? Like, you know, obviously that's something that like Facebook and TikTok, all these platforms create like they're, you know, they've strongly incentivized it and, and they, they want that. But I think it's like is that being forced like especially you know, particularly like among your clientele, like are will like Facebook maybe Potentially the other one, Snapchat, TikTok, like, are those, will those be important parts of like smarter E commerce? Because those, you know, platforms are going to be like shopping ad platforms.
- [18:03]
Mike Ryan
You know, I think that like Facebook's marketplace has, has grown. I, I don't know. I'm, I'm never fully convinced of the integration of shopping into these platforms, but it's something to watch. I mean, yeah, you just. There was a interview a couple episodes ago with chief revenue officer at Pinterest and it's quite interesting to look at like Pinterest people. The user self report that a lot of them are there specifically in some kind of a shopping capacity. But yeah, even though it's quite big, it's somehow it's still relatively fragmented or relatively small, kind of underdog compared to these other platforms. And I think that is one of the challenges is like fragmentation, being able to justify the effort and see the ROI on a fragmented landscape. And you see a similar thing with retail media, which is even further fragmented, probably even more so here in Europe.
- [19:12]
James Hersher
Yeah, I do think that especially like online there is this kind of scale gap where you know, you think of like Pinterest is like huge, like hundreds of millions of people, like big social network. But like actually it just doesn't have enough. Like it can't get itself off the ground. And they've signed these recent deals with Amazon and Google, which investors love, but those, you know, and Amazon and Google love like those. To me, those feel like extremely advantageous deals to Amazon and Google, which get, you know, great better like targeting and analytics when they're getting people from Pinterest back to Amazon or like back to Google back to somewhere else to shop. And Pinterest is not getting like a cut of that. Like they're getting a demand partner. And in theory, like maybe that, you know, drives up CPMs over time and it's just nice to have a demand source. But that still is just like one, you know, it's just like an ad client of theirs. It's not like Google or Amazon where it's like as they get better at Pinterest at converting Pinterest customers or like figuring out what it's good for, all the value of the performance and the set, like the purchases accrue to Google to Amazon. Yeah, I really feel like that's like Pinterest, like Pinterest and Reddit. Some of these are, you know, and even I think like in media, New York Times and buzzfeed, that everyone be like, oh, like they're Huge. And then it's like actually like buy digital ST standards. Like they seem like they're huge but they're actually kind of like piddling. They're just like little pieces that really just have to be put into like, you know, sewn into a quilt.
- [20:51]
Mike Ryan
Yeah, yeah. I mean it's crazy. Like Pinterest, I don't know, their market cap is probably more than like $20 billion or something and I don't know what their revenue is. Maybe a billion, I don't know. But they're, they're somehow, yeah, like I said, they're somehow in an underdog position compared to these others. It's, it's fascinating. And Pinterest to what, to what you said. I mean they're using. Sorry to bring up PMAX again but on Google side they are basically bootstrapping their rest of world segment with pmax. And rather than building the demand on their own, they're just tapping into that existing advertiser demand and matching it to, you know, their user base. And I don't know how that looks on a round trip basis about who's getting what data. But the thing, the crazy thing is they announced at an event one or two weeks ago, I think just recently they announced an event that they're going to expand that to 30 more markets. I've picked up about 10 markets or so that I, I'm not saying that's comprehensive but it's, it seems like they're significantly scaling it up and I don't know if that's really healthy considering that it seems to just deepen the dependence on Google. They become just like a publisher rather than their own bonafide ad network, which is ultimately what they want to do.
- [22:09]
James Hersher
And I wanted to get back to the sort of initification of online shopping you brought. Like yeah, I think that was probably coined for just like the experience of browsing on Amazon. But you know there is like broadly this kind of Temu effect, like Temu and Shine. Like there's just a lot more very cheap apparel, just very cheaply made like plastic merchandise with a lot of like paid media. And that just sort of seems to be like winning on a lot of these marketplaces. It's you know, it's like a problem for Etsy now that like these are their big advertisers and like this like Teemu shit is like sneaking into Etsy orders and you know, people probably be like oh like what is this? Like I thought this was gonna be Etsy. It's like Teemu stuff. Yeah. And yeah, Amazon, like seems to be going like, okay, like rather than like, I don't, I don't see anyone kind of like taking the high road, say or like other strategy. Like it just does, it does seem like there is, like everyone is like, okay, this is what people want. Like let's in Shitify.
- [23:17]
Mike Ryan
Yeah, I know. I mean literally no one is taking the high road because you know, consumers express an interest in sustainability, you know, in an eco sense and also in these other topics that come up, like human rights. But then there's kind of no, there's no rock bottom. They'll just, they'll buy that TEMU stuff. And Amazon, like in my opinion, they just, they, they blinked. They just absolutely. It was like a staring contest between TEMU and Amazon and Amazon blinked and they're rolling out their own kind of comparable program right now. And that concerns me because Timu, it's not given that TIMU is going to actually not implode at one point. I, I don't know. But I still don't rule it out of, out of possibility. Especially because they're facing tough actions both on both sides of the Atlantic. They're facing very tough actions.
- [24:16]
James Hersher
Someone's losing a lot of money there.
- [24:18]
Mike Ryan
Like someone is, I mean their stock took a major haircut recently, which to me was not surprising. It then rebounded. But there was this whole rally, stimulus driven rally on the Chinese stock market. So I don't think it was based on their fundamentals. But, but you know, my, my point being is what I find, what I find really concerning is like TEU might go away one day, but Amazon's not going away and Amazon is adopting this model and so they're now kind of like granting it that longer term staying power and that legitimacy. And I don't know if that's a healthy thing. There's also a fascinating line of thinking I would credit this to, to Joe from Marketplace. Polls, check, check them out. It's great resource for everything. Amazon and Marketplace.
- [25:06]
James Hersher
Yeah, I don't know if I had a kazoo.
- [25:08]
Mike Ryan
That's why I'm going to call him Joe. I'm not going to mess up. He has a Lithuanian last name if I'm not mistaken. I don't want to butcher it, but yeah, so, but he, you know, he's, he, he credits Amazon with having trained us to accept this low standard of quality. You know, when you think of these kind of nonsense brand names that, that come out of these Chinese sellers where it's like a few random letters, all capital letters, Like a Q Q TN or something. What. That's really what these brands look like. It's almost like an anti brand. It's almost an insult to what a, a real brand's term or brand like trademark would be. And they've just, we've gradually gotten accustomed to that and accepted that and moved price forward and forward as, as the main decision criteria. So it's just, Yeah, I mean it's, it's not on accident that we ended up here, but it's, to me it's a bit of a concerning place where we are.
- [26:11]
James Hersher
I saw something too. It was someone sort of tracking, I think like Amazon search term traffic like sort of year over year. And one of the categories where Amazon is way, way up is apparel. Like in some places it's sort of flat or down and apparel. And you know, I think that's probably because they starting this year changed their like affiliate commission structure for cheap apparel. Like, you know, and it's just, it was like funny. It's like, oh man, like the knobs that Amazon has, like, they could be like, okay, like a little more like affiliate commission on apparel. And then like, boom, like apparel that's under $30 shoots through the roof on Amazon. Like if you just, you know, it's like if you, if you, if they just like show a bone like to anyone, it's, it's amazing. Like, especially when you think about like Google being like totally unable to make any like shopping behavior happening and Amazon just has like a million levers they can crank that just changes so much shopping behavior.
- [27:11]
Mike Ryan
Yeah, and that's, that's something like there's been this, you know, TikTok and Amazon, they compete on some terms and they've extended some olive branches here and there. They've partnered a bit. But I think ultimately TikTok has been very good for Amazon. I think that, you know, around prime day, for example, any kind of major sales event and just in general, I think that there's a lot of sales volume flowing to Amazon through TikTok. And yeah, it's just, it's just another, it's just another way this stuff all connects back.
- [27:46]
James Hersher
Yeah, that's how I feel about Google and Amazon. I both, I think both like secretly love TikTok. Like it's, those are sort of, you know, people think of like, oh, like TikTok as a kind of like part of this like very big like threat to Google, like another search engine. It's like, I think Google like pretty much loves TikTok and I think Amazon kind of loves TikTok too. Like, especially compared to like the other like, you know, dealing with like meta or something. It's actually probably better for them.
- [28:12]
Mike Ryan
Yeah, I would tend to agree with that.
- [28:16]
James Hersher
So, so what's you mentioned in an aside before we did this call the, the Khrushchev thaw in Performance Max and I wanted to bring that up before we close. Didn't want to put performance max behind us entirely. But yeah, like, what's going on there? Is this a fundamental change in sort of like attitude that Google has or is it, you know, are these like more just like, are they small concessions and we're just not used to concessions?
- [28:49]
Mike Ryan
Yeah, I mean I think if you'd rewind the clock back to around like 2020. There was probably a low point from my perspective in kind of the relations between advertisers and the product team at Google where it seemed like they were just sweeping away features and just. Yeah, raising the garden walls as we've said before, with little regard to user feedback. And maybe because of these monopoly claims like advertisers just kept spending anyway and that's ultimately what matters. But more recently, yeah, I called the Khrushchev thought, which is, I mean, in case I, I don't know, maybe there's some Gen Z people who's like, Khrushchev. What? Right. But like that's a reference to this rather, rather moderate leader of the Soviet Union who, who allowed a lot of, a lot more concessions and, and compromise and, and relations between like the US and, and the Soviet Union thawed a bit. And right now I see kind of a thaw going on. In really last 18 months or so, Google has started releasing, you know, an amount of transparency that wasn't there before and giving back some controls that were taken away. So for example, like smart shopping campaigns, arguably the predecessor to Performance Max, it didn't have Search term reporting at all. And Google brought back Search Term reporting and, but it's, you know, it's always on their terms. Like they don't let you see cost data for search terms, so it's always on their terms. But they also, they've brought back recently negative keywords at the campaign level. And this is a really kind of important tactical lever and quality control so that people feel like they're not just buying spam traffic or bad traffic from Google. They've also released like placement reporting for YouTube and search partner Network, sometimes with external impetus. Like I think probably analytics reporting was behind the Search Partner Network disclosures. But. And it just goes on and on they're changing the way that PMAX interacts with other campaign types like shopping. And so it's all, it's a bit in the weeds. I don't want to get into that too much. But just the point is that they are making a lot of favorable concessions. And I can't say exactly why they do this. I don't know if it's because adoption of PMAX is stalling out within a certain segment and they need to kind of stimulate that by giving future concessions. They could be de risking a bit or they might think, hey, these are changes we're going to have to make anyway. Let's just get in front of it. Anything is possible. I don't know, I sort of feel.
- [31:41]
James Hersher
Like they staked out like their early position on pmax. Like I kind of think that this was all part of a, you know, a years long, you know, hold the ground and then you beat a very like a steady retreat, you know, where they just stake out this position with PMAX that was like, like you don't, you don't see what like, like it's like what level of transparency. You know, now they're in a position where they can kind of walk back a lot of these things to like what feels like, okay, like this just should have been where it should like, should have been in the first place. Like this is like going from like wrong to right in some places. But it's, but now it's like you get to do it as this like series of of concessions and it's like a compromise instead of just sort of like planting the flag there to start.
- [32:31]
Mike Ryan
Yeah, it, it could, you know, another thing is that they could be. Because yeah, I'd have to look at some current set of numbers, but I don't know, I would say probably it depends on market segment and stuff, but probably like 15, 20% of of costs on like shopping, like campaigns are still in standard shopping campaigns and not pmax. And if they kind of take away the complaints towards pmax, it really removes justifications for still using these traditional campaigns. And it might make it easier to kind of take that away because you know, you might say it's only 15% of cost or something, but this is on the scale of billions of dollars. So it's pretty significant amount of money actually. And they have to be very careful about that.
- [33:22]
James Hersher
Yeah, and I think the scale of it too, like with, with Advantage plus, which is like Facebook's kind of P Max version, you know, they really like deliberately slow rolled adoption for a Long time. Yeah. And I think that that was partially like, you know, sometimes it like, everyone, like, wanted it and like, getting, Getting approved, like, getting into Advantage plus was this kind of like, people were like, waiting to, like, get their ticket called. And I think that they had a lot of, like, tinkering because it was like, you know, if all the apparel companies are on, like, Advantage plus, like, that makes it difficult like that, you know, that that makes performance really hard. Whereas if they have, like, a handful of like their, you know, pilot partner apparel companies using it, it's like, okay, that's great. Like, everyone. There's still, like, great demand for everyone. I don't know if like, Google even has to, like, balance those kinds of concerns or like, ever did, like, I don't know if they did ever have that sort of like, slow roll effect where it's like, oh, like some jewelry companies, but not other. Like, oh, like, no, more like CPG companies for now. Like, we're just. We just sort of are overloaded on that.
- [34:30]
Mike Ryan
I mean, I, I think that it gets concealed in, like, their, in their, like their pilots and their betas and stuff like that. They've got many different flavors of beta and sometimes, you know, they'll give you a list of, for example, who's eligible and it's based on their needs for that beta or their requirements. So I think that, I think that does happen, but it's a bit concealed. But I mean, I'm glad to talk about another campaign type besides PMAX as well, because I like, I generally, I think if people are wondering, should I care about pmax or why does this matter to me? I also think there's kind of an abstract concept of like a PMAX or I sometimes call this PMAXification, where at this point every platform has their PMAX and this is just the direction of travel for performance marketing at least. But you also see, you know, like, even LinkedIn has their own PMAX and Reddit is trying to build a P Max. Just like I mentioned Pinterest. Yeah, I was really glad Allison asked about the name of their. Of their P Max equivalent, Performance plus, because the naming conventions on these campaigns are all very samey. But she was very polite about. She was very respectful.
- [35:55]
James Hersher
Yeah, all the Maxes. I think Critio has Commerce Max. Yeah, Performance. Microsoft just went Performance Max, which I thought was just like a perfect troll move and great. Just SEO. I think Amazon and Pinterest might be Performance Plus.
- [36:12]
Mike Ryan
They both have Performance Plus.
- [36:13]
James Hersher
Yeah, yeah. Not a lot of creativity in the. But it is and that idea too of like, oh, this is our performance Max. I do think that it kind of like I, you know, if I were Google I'd be very frustrated. But I do think it is like everyone is just sort of means like oh, this is our like platform led, like algorithmic, like sort of black boxy thing. But like actually what's special about Performance Max is this like canvas of Google properties that they have to work across. And I felt that way with. I was at Unboxed in Austin with, for Amazon's event recently and they were talking about Performance plus and they're like here's where Performance plus goes. And it was like Kindle, Twitch, Fire, tv Prime Video, like Amazon, it's like, okay, like here's finally like a new, here's actually like a performance Max worthy thing. Like even Facebook, like even Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. That's like Meta's performance plus, those are all like, they're just kind of like they're similar like apps like their mobile ads. Very similar. Like it's pretty intuitive. Anyone who's like on Facebook is probably like an Instagram advertiser already. You know, it's, it's nothing like having this like, just whole like omnichannel like across someone's life way of reaching them. So many different formats.
- [37:34]
Mike Ryan
Yeah, yeah. I mean and that's, that's just kind of the idea is that you've got this single buying point to all of your owned and operated inventory and so it really becomes an age of, you know, having owned and operated assets is just this major moat. And I mean I think it's, it's clear anyway, but it's just becoming more so. And yeah, actually you're now you're making me bullish on Amazon's Performance Plus. That's you really, you just sold me on it.
- [38:00]
James Hersher
So yeah, we'll see, we'll see. See Smarter E Commerce at the next unboxed.
- [38:05]
Mike Ryan
Exactly.
- [38:06]
James Hersher
Maybe, maybe here's a question to end it on. Who do you see this come January say where do you think is going to have a great Christmas season? Maybe it's pmax, maybe it's Amazon or hopefully it's not Temu. But is there anyone who, whether it's TikTok, Snap, Pinterest, who you think in a few months we say oh wow, they had a Great killer, killer Q4.
- [38:35]
Mike Ryan
Well I mean since you said Teemu, I mean I think they will have a good Q4. They've been kind of steadily ramping their ads on Meta for the past weeks. They're actually a little bit less prevalent on Google these days. But I think they're getting back into, into kind of like top form and saturation for, for Q4 on meta and I think it could be, I think they're going to have some hard quarters ahead due to some of these interventions. So I think it's, it's going to be, yeah, let's see, it might be peak Timu, who knows. But yeah, in general though, I don't think, I don't think that the pecking orders is set to change in the intervening time. So I think it's going to be, you know, Amazon already had their prime event for like that where they try to concentrate some of that early seasonal demand, steal it away from Black Friday and I think it was pretty successful for them and they'll do well on Black Friday and Cyber Monday and all that as well. But it's, you know, the, the big are still big, I think. Let's see if, if this kind of bootstrapping tactic that Pinterest is following is going to start showing results in the next quarter or two. But snap is to me is still a bit floundering, but I'm not super deep into that. I feel like tick tock is just kind of, I don't know, it's like, what is that? Playing the violin while the Titanic is sinking. They're going, they're plowing full steam ahead and they seem to have like a lot of momentum and power. But let's not forget that they're in real trouble with lawmakers. It's just, it's unpredictable what will really happen here. But yeah, my near term prediction is nothing, nothing too dramatic will change. It's just going to keep going the way it is due to momentum.
- [40:28]
James Hersher
Well, we'll check back in 2025. Mike, thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it.
- [40:35]
Mike Ryan
Thanks so much for having me.
- [40:44]
James Hersher
Sa.