Good morning.
Happy Tuesday, you corporate weapon you.
A few big ones in here today:
📦 U.S. and China reveal $30B tariff lists
The U.S. and China have released reciprocal lists covering about $30 billion in goods from each country for potential tariff cuts.
The U.S. list includes toys, tableware, holiday decorations, and other consumer products. China’s longer list includes personal care and hair products, medical devices, and more.
For brands importing from China or selling into it, check whether your products appear on the lists.
The U.S. describes these lists as recommendations. Effective dates and final rates have not been announced, so check the details before changing your cost forecasts.
🔧 Your Q4 plan probably has a few “we’ll figure it out” sections
Maybe Meta is doing too much of the heavy lifting. Maybe you’ve been meaning to get serious about Amazon, retention, or CRO. Maybe the creative pipeline already feels tight.
That’s the kind of stuff Pilothouse can help with.
The teams work across media, creative, email, CRO, Amazon, and data, so they can look at the full plan and see where your next round of growth could come from.
With BFCM coming up, this is a good time to get another experienced set of eyes on what you’re working with.
Already feeling 100% confident in the plan? Great. The Pilothouse team is still happy to give it a second set of eyes. Book a call with the Pilothouse partnerships team.
🤖 Meta’s Muse is growing fast. One Marketplace sale shows the risk
Sensor Tower estimates Meta’s Muse app has reached more than 3.4 million downloads as of last Thursday. Users can request early access by asking Muse to add them to the list.
That growth comes with a cautionary example. A Threads user said Muse accepted a low offer on his Facebook Marketplace listing, shared his address, and arranged a pickup without his consent. A buyer then arrived at his building.
For brands, the issue is bigger than one bad transaction. Agentic shopping needs clear approval points around price changes, customer information, and fulfillment actions. As more AI assistants move from recommending products to taking action, the guardrails around what they can do matter just as much as the convenience.
🎯 Google adds IP matching to Customer Match
Google Ads has two new ways to match first-party customer data.
It now supports a customer’s IP address and the time of their interaction as optional fields in Customer Match uploads. The timestamp gives Google context for matching an IP address to the person who used it at that time.
If your team uses Customer Match, ask whether your current data collection and consent cover this use before testing it. Google says IP matching is unavailable for users in the EEA, UK, and Switzerland, and instructs advertisers to exclude those users’ IP addresses from uploads.
đź›’ Two Black Friday ad formats you can run
@benradack shares he plans to keep his Black Friday creatives simple.
Two formats that work well are offer statics that put the deal and product front and center, plus proven ads updated with a sale banner and new primary text.
He plans to run both in one campaign budget optimization (CBO) campaign with separate ad sets for existing and new customers. The existing-customer ad set gets a maximum spend limit, while the new-customer ad set excludes past buyers.
Identify your winning creative now, then build the sale versions around the offer you’ll actually run.
‼️ 30x ROAS from whitelisting
Yeah, seriously.
A minisocial client used creator content for Partnership Ads and pulled a 30x return. Taylor, their Digital Advertising Manager, called it one of their strongest paid media initiatives.
Whitelisting, Spark Ads, and Partnership Ads could be your highest-ROI channel for Q4, and you can scale them fast with minisocial.
The pitch is pretty simple. minisocial hand-picks the creators, handles the content, and gives you all the licensing and ad permissions to run it through your paid social accounts.
No long-term commitment either. You pay per project.
BERO, Imperfect Foods, Tushy, and Our Place already love them. And DTC readers get 15% off their first project for the next month.
Submit your brief, approve the creators, get the content, then put the winners behind spend. Try minisocial.
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đź’ˇ Three tips for scaling Q4 creative
Meta’s Andromeda system changed an early step in how ads are selected. Before an ad reaches the final ranking stage, Meta narrows millions of possible ads to a smaller set that might be relevant to each person. Andromeda helps it sort through a growing volume of creative and find more relevant candidates.
For Q4, the practical question is which creative gives that system something useful to work with.
Pilothouse recommends starting with what your account has already shown you: last year’s seasonal winners, this year’s strongest evergreen ads, and the promotional creative that consistently converts.
Here are three ways to turn those learnings into your BFCM lineup.
1. Dupe Your Top Ads
You have a year of evidence about the products, hooks, and formats your customers respond to. Pull your best-performing BFCM creative from last year alongside this year’s top evergreen and promotional ads.
Look for concepts you can update with a current offer, deadline, or BFCM callout.
That might mean adding a sale overlay to strong customer-generated content, refreshing a winning product ad with the new offer, or shooting a seasonal version of a familiar concept. Keep the part that made the original work, then test whether the BFCM treatment helps.
Anyday keeps a bold sale callout across both creatives while changing the product scene and seasonal message.
2. Make the Offer Easy to Understand
Q4 feeds are crowded, and shoppers should be able to grasp the promotion quickly. Put the offer where it can be read at a glance, then make the product and any conditions clear.
The two examples below take different visual approaches, but each gives the promotion a prominent place.
Check your own creative. Can someone tell what the offer is without reading a paragraph of copy?
3. Let Evergreen Creative Compete
A BFCM label does not automatically make an ad your best performer.
Pilothouse saw this with one client: evergreen ads received 80% of spend at a ROAS above 2, while BFCM-specific ads received 20% at a 1.5 ROAS.
Keep evergreen creative in the mix and judge your own ads by their results. Compare performance over a meaningful window, including spend, ROAS, and conversion volume.
If evergreen ads continue to deliver stronger results, let them keep earning budget while you test new BFCM concepts.
🎧 Why Pilothouse is testing more partnership ads
Partnership ads are taking a bigger share of some Pilothouse accounts heading into Q4.
On AKNF, Jacob from the Pilothouse team breaks down why brands are putting more resources behind the format and how to start testing it without building a huge creator program from scratch.
Pilothouse typically sees lower CPMs from partnership ads, with partnership video ads often delivering some of the strongest CPMs across an account.
Creators also give customers another way to encounter the brand. If someone has already seen your own creative repeatedly, the same message delivered through a creator can introduce a new face, framing, and perspective into their feed.
So how do you actually build a partnership ad program?
Start focused. Jacob says you do not need dozens of creators right away, and bigger influencers are not necessarily required. Pilothouse frequently works with micro-creators, testing different people and messaging before developing deeper relationships with the strongest performers.
The creative matters too. Jacob shares several formats currently working across accounts, how far ahead brands should brief creators for Q4, and why overly specific promotional language can create problems once a sale ends.
He also gets into the practical numbers:
▶️ Watch here | 🎧 Listen on Spotify
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