Happy Sunday!

If you’re reading this, I hope you’re having a great weekend and you’re excited to dive into today’s newsletter — a tactical look at partnership ads (formerly known as whitelisted ads). But before we get into that…

I have to tell you about a new book that you need to buy, and it’s written by Dylan Ander, a CRO/website expert and former founder (he sold it) of the largest CRO agency, SplitTesting. I’ve been friends with Dylan for a little bit and I watched him spend countless nights pouring 2,000+ hours into writing the ultimate CRO book. The best part… It's only $20 bucks. Buy it on the book’s website!

Vendor of the Week

Postscript — The leader in eCommerce SMS is hosting a FREE on demand webinar to gather BFCM tricks, hacks and strategies.

BFCM success is decided before the holiday even starts. The bigger your owned list of SMS and email subscribers, the more revenue you’ll drive without breaking the bank on ads. 

The webinar features list-growth experts from top brands (Ridge, Beekman 1802, The Sak, etc.) where you’ll learn how these retailers 3x’d their SMS list in the lead-up to BFCM. At the end, you’ll be able to apply the same tactics yourself. In under an hour, the panel will cover testing and optimizing your popups, crafting creative opt-in offers, gamifying the signup experience, and keeping opt-ins flowing right through the Black Friday rush.

Walk away with 3–5 quick-win ideas to implement immediately. Each speaker will offer their own proven tip (e.g. micro-commitment popups, loyalty program incentives, coordinated SMS+email campaigns) that you can put into practice right after the session.

Watch the “List Size Matters” workshop from Postscript on demand now and lock in your BFCM success on your own schedule.

Limited Supply

This past week on Limited Supply, I went through my landing page process and “Why?” behind setting up a good process. Listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or search “Limited Supply” on YouTube.

There are few things I love more than talking about landing pages (seriously).

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My Rant on Partnerships (formerly known as “Whitelisting”)

You’ve definitely heard the term partnerships ads as it relates to Meta, and if you haven’t, then you definitely know it by its former name, “Whitelisting.” I’ve been running partnerships ads for almost 9 years now.

In 2014, I was working with internet publishers to drive traffic from Facebook and I realized that ads which come from not-a-brand’s FB page had more efficient clicks. Fast-forward a couple of years and I get to Hint Water; over there, one of my immediate key strategies becomes whitelisting in 2017. No one was doing it, but I was doing it, and I had no boundaries — I was down to test anything with any type of content.

One of my earliest product sends to a creator was with Sara Dietschy. I got her address from a mutual friend, knew she loved drinking La Croix, and sent her 108 bottles of water. She loved it so much, she gave us a free commercial in this video (start at 3:55). Then, her then-boyfriend also did the same in this video (start at 4:38). 

You can see on YouTube those “commercials” ARE the most engaging part of the video. So I decided to cut them and run them as ads. We got their Instagram and Facebook pages in our Business Manager, and lit up the ads. The day after I lit up John’s ad, the CMO (who lasted 2 weeks) said, “TAKE THIS DOWN, THIS IS A TERRIBLE LOOK FOR THE BRAND, YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE DOING!”

I said, “It has the lowest CPA and broke us into a new audience that’s scaling fast. We already spent $25k in 24 hours at the lowest CPA. All real customers.” That CMO didn’t last, and our culture (thankfully) stayed focused on efficiency.

At the time, no one was doing whitelisted ad content, and I didn’t end up here by accident. Before I joined Hint, I would work with the biggest internet publishers to drive Facebook traffic. When I got to Hint, I started testing advertorials (sponsored editorial content) with different publishers, and told them I wanted to run the ads using their page (now known as partnership ads). Article like this one would go up, I would add the publisher’s FB page to the business manager and launch 96 ads with a $5,000/day budget to test if it had legs.

From the very early days (I am talking about 2017), these partnerships style ads always out-performed everything else. The CPM was lower (the algorithm and engagement led to this). The CTR was higher (you could run ads with no button CTA, so it looked organic + it’s entertaining). The engagement was high (likes, comments AND shares all at very high numbers). The ROAS was always higher as a result. These partnerships ads were what we called a “Honey Hole” internally. For the next two years, we did everything to expand on these opportunities and by the end of it, I was running partnership ads with everyone from Jay Sean (“Baby are you down, down, down, down, downnnn”) to YouTube vloggers to SoulCycle instructors.

Side note: Until this day, fitness class instructors are still an underleveraged creator type to partner with. They have so much social proof from the company they teach for, and it works. I go to know half the NYC instructors running this strategy with a variety of wellness brands.

What was obvious then, is still obvious and true today — partnerships ads ALWAYS out-perform your evergreen, business as usual ads. If it comes from an individual creator/person, your CTR will be higher. I’ve seen a 2x better CTR when brands leverage a verified creator to drive ad traffic from.

I’ve written extensively before about advertorials, but if you want me to do a more advanced deep-dive into that, let me know. For today’s newsletter, I want to focus on leveraging individual creators. My preferred tool is Superfiliate. They are the only Meta-enabled / “Meta Approved” partnerships management tool. Everything from reaching out, to back & forth messaging, enabling the content for ads, comment moderation and attribution of sales to specific creators all happens inside the platform. They also just did a report on DTC brands and partnership ads here.

If you look at some of the fastest scaling brands, not only do many of them run landing pages (like I talked about in last week’s newsletter), but almost all of them employ a creator marketing strategy, and much of that includes scaling creator content within paid ads. All creator content should be eligible to be run as ads. 

Typically brands do this with a few creators at a time. They find 1-3 they may work with, per month, and pay them for content. Shocker... it always performs well. The beauty of how the creator landscape has evolved today, is you don’t need to just work with the celebrity makeup artist or the celebrity baker anymore. Anyone who can create content, or has built an audience doing it, is a creator. And sometimes your best ads will come from a Creator who may not have a ton of followers, but the content is good.

If you look at Comfrt, Gruns, or IM8’s ad libraries, you’ll notice they run a lot of creator content as partnership ads... why? Because it works. Partnership/whitelisting ads are great because they:

  • Let you tell a longer-form story without it feeling like a sales pitch
  • The format and style of the content feels audientic to the context of the app and the rest of the screen’s environment.
  • Are great for high AOV or expensive-for-the-category brands/products.
  • Allow you to be very demonstrable with the product (great for beauty, home products, etc.)

If you’re unable to get partnership ads working right away, here are some other options:

  • Whitelist your own Instagram account (or your pet’s, if that’s relevant)
  • Create, pay for, or acquire accounts that can be more like publishers, and run ads through that
  • With creators, the smaller/newer they are, the more affordable they will be to work with you

I have yet to find a stat or a business case against adding partnership ads or whitelisting (on ANY platform), as an incremental strategy on whatever else you’re doing. It’s going to only improve efficiency, create perception that multiple people/entities are talking about your product, and allow you to tell your brand/product story through different lenses.

That’s the end of my rant today.

That's all for this week

If after today’s newsletter you still don’t whitelist ads, I don’t know what else to do. Whether you run B2C/DTC or even B2B, it will work and only improve performance for you. No one wants to hear from companies, they want to hear from people. Look what is happening to the rise of independent media and journalism. 


In true Sunday night fashion, I hope you plan to get 9 hours of sleep going into the new week. If you did nothing other than get 8 hours of good sleep, the worst day you’ll have is at 80%. Oh, and don’t forget to snag a copy of Dylan’s new book. He showed me the first print copy a few weeks ago, and I was mindblown at how deep he went with illustrations, frameworks, etc. Stay hydrated. Get a sweat in. Have an amazing upcoming week!