The VIP Campaign Trap

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

📈 The VIP Campaign Trap

⚡ The real PPC shift nobody is talking about

🏆 Ad of the Day

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Together with Insense

Scale UGC in Q1 Without Scaling Your Workload

Q1 is when teams reset budgets, launch new angles, and need fresh creative fast. The problem is UGC production turns into spreadsheets, follow-ups, and bottlenecks right when you’re trying to move quickly.

Insense keeps your Q1 pipeline moving. Tap into a vetted marketplace of 75,000+ UGC creators and micro-influencers across 35+ countries. Collaborate with multiple creators at once across diverse campaign types. 

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Over 2000+ brands like Beauty Pie, Bones Coffee, Flo Health, and Aceable scale UGC by sending one creator collab to dozens of creators at once, then remixing the raw clips into new ad variants. 

Across the platform: 

• Quip hit an 85% influencer activation rate with product seeding
• Revolut partnered with 140+ creators for 350+ assets
• Matys Health drove 12x reach with TikTok Spark Ads

Book a free discovery call by January 23rd, and get $200 toward your first campaign. 

📈 The VIP Campaign Trap

There’s a type of campaign that almost always “works.”

You send it to your most engaged customers. You add a discount. The numbers jump immediately. Revenue per recipient spikes. Conversion rate looks incredible. Everyone feels relief. And then, quietly, the business stops growing.

This is the VIP trap.

Targeting your best customers doesn’t create demand. It harvests it. That’s fine when it’s intentional. It becomes a problem when it’s used to prove efficiency.

When teams want to show improvement quickly, they often narrow the audience. Fewer sends. Higher intent. Cleaner metrics. The dashboard improves, but the underlying engine doesn’t.

Those customers were already leaning toward buying. The campaign didn’t change their behavior as much as it claimed credit for it.

This is where performance starts lying.

Revenue per email goes up because the denominator shrank, not because the program got better. Discounts accelerate purchases that would have happened anyway, often pulling future orders forward. The short-term lift feels real. The long-term impact shows up later as softer repeat behavior and a thinner pipeline.

The dangerous part is how convincing this looks.

Leadership sees efficiency. Teams feel validated. Cadence slows. Exploration stops.

Meanwhile, the rest of the list gets quieter. Newer customers receive fewer touchpoints. Education drops off. Intent never gets built for the next layer of buyers.

The brand becomes very good at converting people who already love it and very bad at creating new reasons for people to care.

That’s not retention. That’s stagnation with good optics. Healthy email programs separate two jobs clearly.

One job is harvesting demand from high-intent customers. That’s where VIPs belong, and it should be measured honestly as extraction, not growth.

The other job is building demand in everyone else. That means sending messages that don’t convert immediately but make future purchases more likely. Those emails rarely look efficient on their own. They only pay off in aggregate.

When everything is judged by revenue per send, that second job gets cut first.

The fix isn’t sending more discounts or fewer emails. It’s changing the question being asked.

Not “Which campaign performed best?”

But “Which campaigns created buyers who didn’t exist before?”

VIPs are important. They just shouldn’t be used to prove progress.

Because when your best customers are carrying the dashboard, they’re often hiding the fact that nothing new is being built underneath.

⚡ The real PPC shift nobody is talking about

2025 quietly rewired how paid media actually works. Not because of one feature launch, but because control, creativity, and measurement all started behaving differently at the same time. Here’s the cleaner way to look at what matters heading into 2026.

What Works and What Doesn’t:

• Performance improves when advertisers stay hands-on with structure, keywords, and conversion signals, using Performance Max and Demand Gen as force multipliers rather than autopilot systems, and relying on scripts.

• Creative and planning anchored in real people still win, with UGC and influencer-style content outperforming polished AI ads, especially when teams optimize toward business outcomes instead of chasing ROAS in isolation.

 • Fully automated creative assets remain a liability, with Automatically Created Assets introducing brand risk, misaligned messaging, and inefficient budget allocation due to limited approval and control.

• Platform rigidity keeps increasing, as hidden toggles, long learning periods, modeled conversions, and complex interfaces make fast, confident decisions harder, especially for smaller or seasonal campaigns.

PPC success is shifting from execution speed to decision quality. As 2026 approaches, platforms are evolving faster than ever, and the biggest changes likely haven’t even been announced yet. Advertisers who stay flexible, protect signal quality, and pair automation with judgment will win.

Together with The Shift

The AI Newsletter That Solves Problems, Not Creates Them

AI can do a lot, but most newsletters leave you wondering what’s actually worth trying. 

That’s where The Shift comes in. They don’t just tell you “what’s new” in AI. 

Every edition answers one question: What can you do with AI today that saves you time, money, or effort?

You’ll see real-world examples, step-by-step mini-guides, and instantly usable prompts, plus free access to 3,000+ AI tools and top free AI courses so you can apply what you learn right away.

No hype, no wasted time, and no “just in case” news. If it’s in The Shift, it’s because it can make your work better today.

Subscribe to The Shift now - it’s free!

🎥 Ad of the Day

What Works:

1. Product-aware - The buyer already wants a lip product; they’re just deciding which one actually feels worth buying.

2. Everything is shown, nothing hidden - Product shots, real lips, feature callouts, and a human review all stack quickly so the buyer doesn’t need to imagine results.

3. Conversion support - This ad exists to answer last-mile questions like “Will it look good on me?” and “Is this practical for everyday use?”

When buyers are comparison shopping, over-show. Real usage visuals and simple proof beat clever copy every time.

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