What's your plan for "ecomm summer?"

This week’s data covers the 4th of July, which fell on a Saturday this year. Many advertisers cut back their spend on the 4th, which always felt counterintuitive to me. People are on their phones more than usual, sharing videos of fireworks (unfortunately) which means screen time is generally up, you’d think.

The big shifts you see in “All Other Platforms” is advertisers making huge shifts in their ad strategies around Prime Day and 4th of July. Massive increases in spend on Amazon drove down conversion rates, which are jumping back to the norm this week. That category overindexes heavily toward Amazon and CTV.

Elsewhere, you can feel the downward pressure of decreasing purchase intent. People don’t buy DTC on this holiday, they buy illegal fireworks. Therefore, normal drops in purchase metrics and increased CAC through this stretch.

CPMs don’t get cheaper though, because our advertisers know that screentime will be up. Excellent time to get eyeballs leading into my favorite season…

We’re past the 4th of July, Prime Day already happened, the kids are out of school in earnest, and the weather is getting hotter. It’s that time of year again.

These are the dog days of ecommerce.

Welcome to the dog days of ecommerce summer. Good marketers know that right after the last tentpole of H1, usually Prime Day, there’s a seasonal cooling in the ecommerce market right as the weather gets hot. 

Your Meta conversion rates are down. Your new customer traffic is flat. Revenue growth is slowing. What’s going on?

As a culture, American priorities shift during the summer.

Most people aren’t shopping online. They’re buying sunblock, beach chairs, hotels: summer-focused “need-state” products. Unless you’re Vacation (one of my favorite brands of all time) mid-July to late August is a tough time for sales.

Your ads are serving to people sipping Modelos on pontoon boats. It’s a tough time to convert. People aren’t buying your stuff. They’re on vacation.  

And that’s exactly why this is the best time to run creative tests.

Right now, consumers aren’t impulse buying. They’re traveling. They aren’t upgrading their wardrobes, kitchenware, anything like that. They’re getting sunburned, and for the most part, they aren’t shopping online. 

But, on the other hand, social media usage goes up. People are posting their vacations, taking more pics, spending more time on the feed.

But they probably aren’t shopping for products that rely on seasonal spikes or buying giftts, which is most products, to be honest. 

But that’s the point. When purchase intent is low, signal quality goes up. This is the ultimate crucible for your campaigns.

Plus this increased amount of eyeballs means CPMs will be cheaper before they inevitably spike in September.

Any ad that works right now is actually working. This is the time you need to be testing EVERYTHING in preparation for your Q4 rush. 

That thumbstopper that drives clicks in this season? It’s a weapon for Q4. The landing page that converts now? That’s a stud for Q4. The hook that somehow pulls someone’s attention while they’re sitting poolside? That’s your Black Friday cold open.

 So what should you test right now?

As we reckon with advertising in the attention economy, I’ve tried to go back to basics. Staying away from tactics and instead thinking about strategy. 

To that end, I’ve been studying Steve Jobs, one of the greatest marketers of all time.

Here’s what he might say you should do (in my humble opinion):

Don’t get distracted by noise, vanity metrics, pointless apples-to-oranges comparisons. Focus on the core thing that moves your business: profitable new customer acquisition. 

Cut the fluff. Strip your message down to its most potent form. Test the absolute hell out of it. What message relevant to your customer in the year two thousand and twenty six?

What is the #1 thing that drives your new customer acquisition right now, and how can you double it?

You might end up finding scale even in this low-buying-intent season. 

Even if you’re testing 500 AI animated ads, your ads need to communicate value in the first 1.5 seconds. No cleverness. No ambiguity. No paragraph-length overlays. Show me what this does, why I need it, and why now.

I use something called the “sports bar” rule: if somebody is in a bar watching a ball game, are they going to see your ad on the TV, be actually compelled to watch it, and understand your value prop, even without audio? If so, you’ve nailed it. 

Jobs didn’t just market well, he made sure Apple’s products could survive scrutiny. That same scrutiny exists in your comments, your reviews, your unboxings. If you’re testing creative this summer, make sure your product experience backs it up.

To be honest, you can’t do half the stuff in this list if your product is half-baked. If your product is ambiguous, lacks a clear vision, and doesn’t communicate your values, you might need to go back to the drawing board. 

We’ve already established that testing a high volume of different creative types is key to success. But what does that look like?

You need to take leaps and bounds in your experiments. Moving a pixel three centimeters isn’t a creative test - it’s a lazy way to claim you’re testing lots of creative. You don’t need 42 iterations of the same ad. You need dozens of bold, innovative, swinging-for-the-fences ideas.

Keep your experiments as diverse as possible instead of trying to squeeze another hundredth of performance out of your champion ad.  

Say no to low-leverage edits, recycled hooks, and brand-safe templates. Be weird. Be bold. Be memorable.

And don’t sweat your visual brand identity. Brand isn’t your color palette or your font - it’s your values. To reach new audiences, you need to speak like them. That means shifting your visual identity in ad creative to create connection across the algorithm. 

Look at Red Bull: they have their cutesy animations to win the office crowd, and extreme sports sponsorships to win their outdoors folks. And they’re unconcerned with that dissonance. They're concerned with big swings that communicate values, and you should be too. 

Think about where they are right now. Scrolling Instagram on the train. Lying in bed on a hotel Wi-Fi. Standing in line to buy a case of Modelo. If your ad creative doesn't meet them where they are, you’ve already lost.

One of my favorite books is The Context Marketing Revolution by Mathew Sweezy. This one flew under the radar. But so many people think of ad platforms as just money machines instead of ways to reach real humans at scale. This book will remind you that you’re advertising to people, not spreadsheets. 

This summer is not the time to scale. This is the time to learn.

If you don’t know which creative themes are resonating, which hooks pull attention, which offers spark curiosity, you’re going to be flat-footed heading into the fall.

These are the dog days of ecommerce. Get your experimentation plan locked in while your competition’s on the beach.

So book a demo already. 

🧠 Jon Loomer refreshed his Master Brief for July, his full current take on Meta ads. The gist: most targeting inputs are just suggestions now. Use value rules, not restrictions.

📺 Advertising as entertainment - study this to make good ads. We’ve come full circle, and ecomm gurus are discovering what TV and radio advertisers have known for five decades.

🤷 The creator economy is above the law. Many successfully scaling brands you know are likely capitalizing on this unenforced, lagging area of the law.

🧪 9 Operators talks incrementality. Everything you need to know before running your first incrementality test.

📺 Thinking about CTV? We’re here to help. We’re partnering with QRY and MNTN to describe exactly how to scale via connected TV ads. More on this as we get closer to the event.

Love this newsletter? Please forward it to your friends, coworkers, or Mauricio Pochettino. Subscribe here to get this data in your inbox every week.