Good morning, Eric here. Happy start of Prime Day. If youâre feeling fatigue, it could be because we just passed the summer solstice and every day from here on out gets a little bit shorterâŚif youâre more concerned about ad fatigue, then read on because weâve got the method for diagnosing plus the fix below.
âđ Prime Day starts today. Even if you don't sell on Amazon, pay attention.
Consumer spending is under pressure, and Yahoo Finance reported that many shoppers are using Prime Day to stock up on purchases they've been putting off, not discover new ones.
The most important number won't be total sales. It'll be what people bought.
If essentials dominate baskets this week, that's one of the clearest signals yet that shoppers are still prioritizing necessities over discretionary spending heading into Q3.
And if you're not on Amazon? @IstvanicMarin says on X to run a themed offer anyway. People are in buying mode this week whether they check out on Amazon or not.
đŹ YouTube is stamping your AI videos whether you label them or not
Neil Patel (@neilpatel) shared that YouTube turned on automatic AI-content detection. The label sits right under the video, visible to everyone, and you don't get to opt out.
The part worth paying attention to: Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT pull from YouTube, and once content gets tagged human or synthetic, that tag influences which videos get cited and surfaced by AI tools.
If you've been leaning hard on AI-generated video to fill the content calendar, check your watch time and recommendation reach over the next few weeks. That's where you'll see it first.
đŞ If you own an Agency, are you in this room yet?
Hey, quick thing you might not know about me. On top of DTC, I started another company called Agency, a vetted peer network specifically for established agency founders.
I built it with Jeff Shannon, who runs Pilothouse, one of the top performance ecommerce agencies at around 180 people. Between us, weâve talked to hundreds of agency founders, and they all say the same thing eventually. They feel alone in it. We wanted to solve that.
Thatâs why Agency exists. A vetted room of founders at your level, real intros, real deals, real numbers.
Check it out here, would love to know what you think.
đ Google's making two changes to your ad account this summer. Both have deadlines.
First one: if you're running Target CPA or Target ROAS campaigns that are currently beating their targets, check them before July 6. On August 17, Google forces budget-constrained campaigns to actually hit the targets you set. A campaign running a $5 CPA against a $10 target gets pushed toward $10 automatically. The Bid Target Adjustment Tool launches July 6 - use it to find affected campaigns and fix the targets before Google does it for you.
Second one: on August 18, Google auto-enables conversion-based customer lists if you're running Enhanced Conversions and Customer Match. New audiences show up in your account built from your existing conversion data. You decide whether to use them. If you don't want Google processing your conversion data for this, opt out in account settings before August 18.
Two dates. July 6 and August 18.
đ¤ AI can make everyone a fast-average marketer (that's not a compliment)
@rokhladnik put it well this past weekend: if your strategy is weak, AI doesn't fix it. It just speeds it up. You don't get better marketing. You get more bad marketing, faster.
Matt Bertulli co-signed with the other side of the same coin. Marketing is easy to start and easy to become average at. The mastery part takes years.
The replies in the linked thread are worth skimming too. @ecomrobbie flagged another layer of the problem - AI is really good at confirming whatever you already believed, even when you explicitly ask it not to. Very easy to use it to deceive yourself.
đ° Someone just paid a billion dollars for nose strips
Breathe Right just sold for $1.045 billion. The things football players wear on their nose bridge. Drew Fallon, on his excellent substack, broke down why and it's worth taking a few mins to read.
The brand was growing 2-3% a year. Almost 50% EBITDA margins, cash flows so predictable the buyer funded the entire acquisition with debt and can pay it down in two years. The buyer's whole model is finding #1 or #2 brands in small, boring categories that P&G would never bother with, running them lean, and harvesting the cash.
Nobody's going to be talking about this deal because it's not a flashy VC-backed exit. That's exactly why you should read it. The boring, cookie-cutter transactions are where you actually learn how M&A works, and understanding this one will make you sharper than whoever skipped it because nose strips weren't exciting enough.
đ˘ Hormuz is closed again, I think? I donât even know anymore.
Alright everyone, get out your yo-yoâs. Iran reclosed the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, days after everyone took the US-Iran memorandum of understanding as the all-clear. So much for that.
Passage is allowed only with "compliant transit requests" filed 48 hours ahead, and fees are waived for the next 60 days. Israel and Lebanon were trading strikes overnight, which means there's no reopening you can actually plan around.
Hard to know whatâs going to happen, but it looks like DTC logistics arenât going to get simpler any time soon.
đŚ #unboxing has 150 billion views on TikTok. This UGC content is one of the highest-performing formats on social, but most brands can't produce it at scale. Now, that bottleneck has a solution.
đ Kittl's unboxing templates use state-of-the-art AI models to turn every product image and packaging you want to test on socials into realistic, UGC-style content in minutes. The kind that looks like a real customer filmed it.
Ready to post, ready to test, across every drop. đââď¸
UGC converts 161% better than branded content, and now you can have it for every product.
Start free and use code KITTLDTC for 25% off any subscription.
*Â sponsored
Winners turn into losers fast once an audience has seen the same ad too many times, so you want the next batch queued before performance dips.
Here's how the Pilothouse team catches it in Ads Manager, plus three refreshes you can make in minutes.
Three signs you're fatigued
Three refreshes you can run today
None of these need a shoot. They're same-day edits that keep fresh static and video moving into the account before the fatigue costs you.
If youâre in need of fresh creative ideas, make sure to check back in to tomorrowâs email - weâre sharing 4 static styles you can steal.
Braydon from Pilothouse runs a single "council" prompt, gets back eight finished landing pages, and has the AI rank them before he's opened one. He came on the pod with the actual tools, prompts, and workflows behind Pilothouse's creative output, plus how to stretch your token quota past the errors.
Also inside: Higgsfield AI for consolidating your video and image gen, an ElevenLabs founder-avatar workflow, why he makes creative that looks obviously AI, and how Meta's Andromeda rewards ads that improve the scroll.
âśď¸ Watch here | đ§ Listen on Spotify
âđ˛ 71% of impulse purchases happen on mobile. Is your strategy taking advantage of it? Find data-backed insights & benchmarks in Tapcartâs 2026 Mobile Trends Report. Grab your free copy. *
*Â sponsored
Did you find this valuable? Support us by checking out our businesses:
Please note that items in this newsletter marked with * contain sponsored content.
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
