DTC1183: Google AI Ads, Meta Prospecting & Holiday Shopping

Good morning.

“We already told the client it would go viral.” Cool. Cool cool cool. 👍

Here’s what you’ll find in today’s newsletter:

• Google’s personal AI ads, Poppi’s shrinking earnout, and holiday shopping trends
• How a $4M brand shifted Meta spend to new customers and grew sales 28%
• Your next prospecting ad could be in your camera roll
• And more.

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🔎 Google is putting ads in personal AI search

Google has started testing ads in AI Mode for users who connect their apps through Personal Intelligence. Until now, that experience was ad-free.

The ads can draw on summaries and inferences from someone’s connected apps, so Google knows a lot more than what they typed. Google says advertisers can’t see any of it, and ads won’t pull directly from Gmail or Photos. No new targeting controls yet, and no word on a wider rollout. For now it’s one to watch in your reporting.

🥤 Poppi’s $300M earnout is now worth $12M (on paper)

PepsiCo has cut its estimate for Poppi’s earnout to $12 million. At the end of 2025, it was $278 million.

That’s an accounting number, and the milestones run through Q3 2027, so it could still move. But M&A lawyer Kevin Henderson raises the uncomfortable part. After the sale, the buyer sets the budgets, pricing, and priorities that can affect whether the founders ever hit those targets.

Ridge CEO Sean Frank put it more bluntly: don’t count on the “second bite.”

Selling someday? Get the metrics, operating protections, and audit rights in writing.

📊 ChatGPT Ads makes tracking problems easier to spot

ChatGPT Ads rebuilt its Conversions page so event volumes, trends, and measurement warnings all sit in one view, with links straight to Diagnostics. Active advertisers are getting weekly recap emails too. If you’ve been running campaigns there without looking closely at the data, this is a good week to start.

🛍️ A $1 trillion holiday, and it’s already started

NRF expects US holiday sales to grow 4.2% to $1.013 trillion across November and December. It also warns that inflation will squeeze some households much harder than others.

Deloitte surveyed 4,000 US shoppers, and 22% say they’re starting earlier this year. Online should take 55% of holiday retail budgets. The most interesting group is what Deloitte calls “value seekers.” They’re 38% of shoppers, they plan to spend 12% more than everyone else, and they’ll use every promo and reward they can find to do it.

So if October sales are already picking up, you may not want to save every good offer for Black Friday.

🇬🇧 UK sellers: TikTok may have signed you up for ads

Eligible TikTok Shop UK sellers have been automatically enrolled in GMV Max Net Sales Boost, which runs ads on your products outside your existing campaigns and puts the sales back into more ads.

The first 30 days carry no additional cost. Settings are locked during that time, standard fees kick in afterward, and opting out mid-promo can take seven working days. Worth finding your enrollment date today.

🚀 This brand was spending 30% of its Meta budget on people who’d already bought

It’s an easy leak to miss in a Meta account. Retargeting and existing-customer spend tend to report great ROAS, because those people were likely to buy anyway. So the budget can keep drifting their way while new customer growth gets harder to see.

That’s where this $4M DTC apparel brand was when Pilothouse started working on the account. More than 30% of Meta spend was reaching existing customers.

Today that share is under 5%. From June 1 to September 21, total sales across the US and Canada grew 28% compared with the same period last year.

One detail worth noticing in that dashboard: the returning customer rate went down. That lines up with the acquisition story: new customers made up a larger share of the mix.

Here’s how the team got there.

1️⃣ Most of the budget went to prospecting

Pilothouse moved the bulk of Meta spend into dedicated prospecting campaigns, kept testing creative, and pushed budget toward the angles and SKUs that were winning with cold audiences. The new-customer rate in Shopify climbed alongside it.

2️⃣ Existing customers got shut out properly

One exclusion list rarely catches everyone. The team stacked several:

• The Meta and Klaviyo integration
• Shopify Audiences
• A pixel-based purchaser audience
• An uploaded customer list

It also updated audience segments in Meta’s advertising settings, so Meta knew who counted as an existing customer. Frequency dropped 19.66%, while the share of spend reaching existing customers fell below 5%.

3️⃣ Small holidays got real creative

Fourth of July, Canada Day, and Labor Day each got their own sale creative, built to move offers and clear seasonal inventory. Over Fourth of July weekend, Pilothouse doubled Meta spend and ROAS still rose 119.48% YoY.

Those events also worked as rehearsals. The team is now using what won in summer to build BFCM creative.

4️⃣ Monthly drops kept the account fresh

New monthly products gave the team something new to say between sales. On drop weekends, spend rose 84% on average and purchases rose 149%.

Try this on your account

Find out how much of your Meta spend is reaching existing customers. If you’ve set up audience segments in Meta’s advertising settings, you can break down campaign results by new versus existing customers in Ads Manager. If a meaningful share of your prospecting budget is still reaching people already in your Shopify customer list, start with exclusions before you touch creative.

Then look at your sale calendar between now and BFCM. Any smaller moment, a product drop or a regional holiday, is a chance to test offers and creative before the expensive week arrives.

Want a second set of eyes on where your account could scale this Q4? Connect with Pilothouse.

Prospecting budget sorted. ✅ Prospecting creative is the next problem, and the answer might be in your camera roll. 👇

🎧 Your growth story can be a prospecting ad

On the latest episode of AKNF, Liam, co-founder of Marlbank, shares a creative framework for brands with great products that struggle to communicate why they’re meaningfully different from competitors.

Turn the growth of the brand itself into the ad.

Start with the early days. Think kitchen table, garage, first prototype, farmers market, first order, or first customer.

Then find the milestones that show progress. Your first hire, a bigger facility, a retail launch, units sold, or another moment that signals people are responding to what you built.

One supplement brand Liam worked with found success with the hook “from small town to every Whole Foods in Canada.” Another version could simply show a founder fulfilling orders at home before cutting to the operation today.

The product features haven’t disappeared. The story gives a cold audience another reason to believe them.

And you don’t need massive numbers to use the framework. Liam says it can start with something as small as your first sale and evolve as the business grows.

Try it yourself. Open your camera roll and find five moments that show where the brand started and where it is now.

Your next prospecting concept might already be in there.

▶️ Watch here | 🎧 Listen on Spotify

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