Episode · 2026-03-18
Meta Outage, Major Spend
Meta Outage, Major Spend | The World's First AI CMO? | Brett Fish x Aman Advani
Rundown
Chris and Colin open by roasting Meta for a major outage that torched ad budgets overnight, then talk with Ministry of Supply CEO Aman Advani about why profitability now trumps scale in DTC and how workwear norms have loosened. Tag Hero's Brett Fish closes the show with a deep dive on Meta tracking fixes (CAPI, EMQ, account categorization), and the hosts react to a new $99/month 'AI CMO' tool.
Takes from this episode
The Meta outage caused significant wasted ad spend and advertisers should push reps for refunds or credits.
It caused tremendous overspending, and nobody's happy about what their budget is looking like now. Call your rep, prepare your refund paperwork.
Profitability, not scale, is now the deciding factor for DTC brand survival now that cheap ad arbitrage is gone.
gone are the days where scale will work it all out because that is proven to be false so many times... not every great product wins, but only great products win
Workwear norms have shifted from rigid prescriptive dress rules to a looser standard focused simply on looking sharp and clean.
it's it's we think it's a lot more prescriptive... a lot more descriptive, a lot less prescriptive... look sharp and and and clean
Brands must send conversion events via both pixel and server-side CAPI, since pixel-only tracking loses significant conversion data.
making sure you're sending all of your events via both pixel and conversion API... what you would lose with like pixel drop
Attempts to disguise a health-and-wellness ad account under a different category are futile because Meta's automated review scans both the data sent and the website's content.
as soon as you start sending data to Meta, it's going to know what it is and categorize you. Unfortunately... that's not something you can avoid
The hosts are cautiously optimistic about a new 'AI CMO' tool that runs specialized marketing agents across channels for $99/month versus a $160k hire, but want to see its capability set expand beyond the initial channels.
Normally, you'd need a marketing hire, SEO agency, content writer, social media manager, etc... going to cost you 160k per year. CMO does it for $99 a month... I hope there's, you know, maybe some more capabilities outside of that, but starting very good.