How to Weaponize your Product Catalog for Q4

All right, Creative Con. It's time to talk about something that doesn't get nearly enough time in the spotlight in the creative conversation. Cataloges. Here's a not so creative truth.

Nearly 70% of all e-commerce spend runs for catalog ads. And if you're not treating your catalog like creative, you're leaving some serious money on the table. That's why our next speaker is here. He's the founder of Marpipe, a pioneer in creative test and dynamic ad solutions and one of the driving forces helping brands rethink their approach to catalog strategy.

Now, before I bring him up, I want to take a second to shout out Marpite for being one of our amazing Creative Con sponsors. Their support is what help makes this event possible. So, please show them some love in the chat. Now, it's time to show you why catalog is your creative and how to unlock the hidden lever behind the majority of e-commerce ad spend.

So, without further ado, let's welcome to the Creative Con stage, Dan Pantello. All right. So, uh it is Creative Con and uh Chase, thank you so much for putting this on. Um this talk is from Marpipe and it's going to be about how to weaponize your product catalog for Q4.

And oh wait, hold on. Do I see some friends over there? Is that is that Nick Chararma? Is that is that Dylan Ander?

Oh my god, we have Dylan, Andrew, and Nick Sharma here for the Creative Con Marpipe talk about how to weaponize your product catalog for Q4. Oh my god, what's going on here? Wow. All right, friends.

Welcome to the Marpipe chat. We are going to have a really good time here. We're going to talk about how to weaponize your product catalog for Q4. Um, all right.

So, how about this? Listen. So, it's time to launch ads for your business, right? Let's assume that you're about to launch some ads.

Nick, you ever launch ads before? >> All the time. >> Yeah. Okay.

And uh when you're typically launching ads, right, there are videos you could launch, right? There are static images you could launch, but what is that third category that no one ever really talks about? What do you know what it is? >> The DPAs.

>> Product cataloges. >> Exactly. and and and when and when people run product cataloges, they don't really know too much about it. They don't know what's going on.

They don't know like how all of the details work around product cataloges. And so, um here's the thing. Dynamic product ads, also known as catalog ads, are the most popular digital ad format in e-commerce. 40% of Meadow's global revenue, did you know that 40% of Meta's global revenue comes from catalog ads?

quite a bit >> and and in the e-commerce category, 70% of ad spend goes to catalog ads. Did you know that, Dylan? >> What type of companies are typically spending? >> Well, that's a good question.

Okay, so here's the thing. It's a lot of different types of companies and you've seen these ads before, right? They're they're not goodlooking, right? They're just like product ads.

They're just like boring. >> Pretty boring, right? Just pictures of product images, right? Like this is not good ad creative.

You would never approve this. You would never run this. Like you would you ever run an ad like this? >> No.

>> Okay, good. I mean, neither. Right. Here's the thing.

If they look so bad, then why are they so popular? >> They get the carpool lane. >> Boom. Exactly.

If um All right. So, look, the industry is changing quickly. Successful brands launch tons of SKs all the time. We know that a lot of big brands launch a lot of SKs.

If you look at the Gap, right? Like, I'm going to run through a few examples, right, real quick here. GAP launches 12,000 SKs every year. Zara launches 36,000 SKs every year.

Okay. Fashion Nova Marpipe client, by the way, launches 125,000 SKs. >> That's nuts. >> Every year.

>> What's this big one right here? >> Sheen. Boom. Breaking it.

1.3 million SKs every year. 1.3 million SKs every year. Okay. So, so here's the thing.

When it comes to an image or a video ad, how many SKs can you fit in there? How many SKs can you fit in an image or a video ad? >> Well, I mean, typically if you're designing it, you have to design one by one, right? >> Right.

So, like, so, so let's say like you're H&M and you have a video, right? Like, how many SKs can you fit in there? Two, three, maybe five if you're lucky. >> Max.

>> Max. Okay, here's that's the thing. But what do you do if you have 1.3 million SKs? How can you possibly advertise all those SKs with regular image and video ads?

See, catalog ads are the alternative, right? With catalog ads, you can automatically advertise every single skew to people who are looking for those specific products. So, in one ad campaign, you can launch one ad campaign that just has like, you know, the kids shoes will be shown to like the mother who's looking for shoes for her toddler and the, you know, women's leather jacket will be shown to like the college girl who's like looking for that, right? So, so it's one it it it literally looks the catalog ad campaigns scan your entire product catalog and personalize the delivery of those product ads to the right person at the right time.

So, here's the thing. They look really bad though, right? And that's what Marpipe solves. So, so all you need to do is upload your product feed and you can think of us as like Canva or like Figma for product ads, right?

Um, a lot of the biggest brands in the world already use us to power their catalog ads because it's it's no longer appropriate to just have raw catalog ads. Right. >> Just plain white. >> Exactly.

Exactly. So, so, so here's the thing. We're looking at $2.5 million per day in ad spend on Meta is going behind Marpipe Enrich cataloges, right, from brands like this. And um and we actually have five new ad formats.

Do you realize every time that number gets bigger, it becomes more and more fake sounding? >> Really? >> Yeah. >> As an accidental byproduct.

That sounds fake. Two and a half million dollars a day of >> That's what it is. >> It's crazy. It is true.

And it is what it is, but it sounds fake, but it's true. >> My pipe is getting so large it's starting to sound like a buzz word. All right. Well, look, I mean, okay.

So, we're just pulling the numbers from Meta. We're we're just reporting what Meta gives us, right? >> The numbers. We We love data.

>> The The numbers are the numbers, right? Um, so listen, um, we're going to look at a few formats that are only possible through catalog ads, right? So, so here's the thing, like regular image and video ads, you can design them, you know, you can upload them, but like here are formats that have creative attributes in them that pull from your product catalog. Okay, format number one is dynamic discounting, right?

See, in this example, you have a you have the original price 265 slashth through new price showcased right there. You can have that template applied to every single skew in your product catalog to to visualize the percent off that you're getting, right? Format number two, live review counter. You see it says 83 reviews right here.

So, the second there is an 84th fivestar review, that updates in real time, right? So, there's like, you know, this is like a a dynamic field that pulls from your product catalog. That's pretty wild. So, if you think about it, like so, you know, add to landing page continuity is obviously uber important, but to be able to get the exact number that you have right there all the way down to the page that they're literally continuing their experience, I've never seen anything that's just has better continuity from the ad to what they're about to buy.

That is flawless. >> Right. That that the ad and you're the conversion rate optimization expert here, Dylan. The ad has the exact amount of five star reviews in it in real time that the landing page has.

Exactly. >> And it's believability. It's like a increases trust all the way to the ad because the role of the ad is just to get a qualified person to actually come and click >> right >> and go shop and they have confirmation bias to be correct. So this is just mind-blowing.

>> Let's keep moving here. Format number three, live inventory countdown. Marip can watch your inven can watch your inventory like a hawk and and and and essentially when you have like 17 left in stock, three left in stock, your dynamic ads can say that. >> Wow.

And then they'll automatically stop. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. And and once you run out of stock, they are no longer shown.

And Marab handles all of that. >> Marp handles all of that. >> Dan, I've been friends with you for a while. This is legitimate.

I didn't know that. >> This is >> amazing. Amazing. Okay, let's keep rolling here.

>> Pretty bonkers. >> All right, sales countdowns. Okay, so imagine set it and forget it style. Okay, so let's say you're running like a Black Friday Cyber Monday sale and you know it's like uh you know buy one get one only for the next three days, right?

You can have a a countdown timer in your dynamic ads that visualizes like only two days left, only one day left, only you don't have to keep uploading and relearning. >> Just one time, just set it and forget it. Exactly. Yeah.

And then and then it says like 13 hours left, two hours left. >> You know, the more the more I'm diving into this, the more I realize that the more you have technology on top of catalog ads, the more you can weaponize all the abilities it has. Yeah. Like it has all these things you can do, the countdown, the pull the live inventory, pull the live review, all these things that are dynamic and and easily pullable, >> but you have to be able to do it on top of catalog ads.

You can't just put catalog ads on, right? You have to do it on top and then let it run. >> And and that requires like a certain amount of special attention. Like here's the thing.

A lot of people that are at Creative Con right now listening to this right now, like they are they're experienced in making image ads and video ads. They're not experienced with catalog creative and like these are capabilities that become enabled. >> This too is a template, right? So like once you create this, so like this ring or this uh this bangle, if you create this for a bangle, this template can now be applied to 4,000 other SKs, right?

Exactly like that. >> Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah.

>> And then the kicker. Okay, so this is brand new, right? And this is Latico. This is Ben's brand actually.

Let's go. >> Um, so, so, uh, imagine being able, so product level video, right? So, imagine being able to turn every skew in your product catalog into a unique video. That's what we're doing here.

That's what Markipe enables, right? So, you're allowed to run video catalog ads. Now, this is a very new capability. Meta is promoting it heavily.

And being able to bring basic motion into your catalog ads is just going to be really good for performance, too. >> This is Dan, we've been friends for a while. I said this before. This is all new information.

I am This is mindboggling. >> Wow. Thank you. >> I love that you're learning this about my product in front of all these people right now.

>> You're literally teaching me like you're not teaching them. You're teaching me. >> All right. Now, let's talk about metrics.

Okay. Wait, you skipped over something though, which is the fact that like most people think they don't have enough content to make product level video ads really quickly, but like with Mari and using the tech, you can basically take a PNG and turn it into this. Exactly. Which is video product level video at scale, >> right?

>> You completely glossed over that. Just FYI. >> Sorry. Oops.

You >> like explain how this grabbed all these images and made these videos. This is all done by Marpipe and like automated, right? >> I mean, sometimes Yeah. Sorry.

I'm just so in building the product that sometimes I gloss over these things. Um like what what you're seeing here in format number five is we are taking the product images that you have in your product catalog and turning that into unique videos for every single skew. >> Exactly. Yeah.

>> Because when Facebook announced catalog video ads, everybody was like, I don't have studio shot video ready to go, you know, and people were like, we won't be able to take advantage of this. But when Facebook launches a new format like that, like video product level ads or catalog level ads for video and you don't take advantage of it, that is literally the carpool lane of the highway. Like that's the lane that's open. CPMs are low.

That's what you want to test in. That's what you want to get into, right? >> The only tool that uh that we were able to use to get in at least early on and get on and like turn all PGs and white backgrounds into video feeds is Marpi. >> I appreciate you, man.

Thank you for pointing that out. I was gonna I was literally gliding. >> Mark my presentation, guys. >> I was literally gliding right over that.

>> Trust you. >> All right, let's talk about metrics. Who doesn't like metrics? Okay, so we have over 650 enterprise accounts who use Marpike today and we pull data from all of them, right?

And we look at what is the average performance of image and video ads as a whole from all of our accounts. Now look, case studies, I can you on case studies. I can just cherrypick the good ones, right? So everyone knows case studies are take them with a grain of salt, right?

But this this is pulling from all of our ad from every ad account we have access to. We pull it together. Here we have clickthrough rate and rorowass here on regular image and video ads. Then we have the click-through rate and rorowass of plain catalog ads unedited.

Right? So plain catalog ads typically perform better than image and video ads. But then we have enriched catalog ads which is when you add creative elements to your catalog ads. You're looking at double the rorowaz on average.

>> Wow. of regular image and video ads. Okay, that's wild. So, look, um, you know, I'm I'm tell I'm here I'm here to tell you about all of the ways in which you can become creative with your product catalog.

I think that the future of creative is catalog driven. Listen, you have all these things coming out like Shopify announces their integration with OpenAI, right? That's all catalog driven. Yeah, right.

Um, a lot of people are discovering products. People don't even realize that your tool will actually enable OpenAI's creative to look 10 times better when it's displayed in chat. >> That's exactly right. You can stick out from the competition.

That's right. So, so I think you should take advantage of catalog powered formats that your competitors probably don't know about yet. >> You know, there's there's like there's advertising that we do, right? There's advertising where you're deciding you're going to hire a designer, a video editor, a developer, and you're going to do X, Y, and Z, and everything's sequential.

And then there's advertising that's entirely programmatic and done at lightning speed. And that's where you have APIs and you have data sets of data going in and out and being inserted and imported. And that's what Marpipe allows you to do is sort of play on that programmatic way of advertising, but in a channel that is not typically, you know, uh, in a channel that's like really made for anybody to go on and advertise, but it allows you to be that high performance trader uh, of advertising with creative by using all the inputs and the data in a way that's like systemic versus just adding one thing at a time and it not being repeatable. You know, like anything I make in Marpipe as a creative, I can then apply it to 100,000 SKUs with with the next click.

>> The thing that I'm stuck on is if you think about it like OpenAI, like you have your usual UI. >> Let's say you have three companies that come up. They're working on GEO. They're doing all the AI SEO work.

And three companies come up. Two of them have just plain white backgrounds >> and one of them has a beautifully designed stutter. All three of those you earn that spot. Yours is actually like like it's kind of blowing my mind because >> it's like this is the mini arbitrage within the arbitrage.

All right, guys. This is the arbitrage and that's the arbitrage within the arbitrage. >> This is the underground But you got to get on this to understand the underground >> Spongebob. This is like >> Well, thank you guys for nerding out with us.

Uh, thank you for joining our little session here. Thank you Nick and Dylan for hopping in on this little presentation with me. This was so much more fun when it's done together. >> I didn't realize you could do this on any channel.

Facebook, go Snapchat. Thank you. >> All right, guys. Thank you so much.