Performance marketing without permission – Marketing Tech News

When I say “best practice”, I mean the playbooks gifted to us from years of iteration. First from Meta and Google, reinforced by respected voices within the industry, and infrequently baked into our own processes.

It’s not bad advice. For many brands, implementing the “gold standard” does deliver a brief-term lift. But here’s the issue: With AI and automation accelerating, it’s easier than ever to tick the very best-practice boxes, meaning that it’s harder than ever to realize an actual competitive advantage by doing just that.

Also, let’s not ignore who really advantages. The more advertisers use the identical techniques, the more competitive those approaches change into. Costs spiral as CPMs and CPCs climb. If everyone in your category is feeding the machine the identical kind of knowledge and chasing the identical audience signals, the auction gets crowded. You’re paying more for the privilege of being the identical. That’s the hidden cost of best practice. It delivers reliable results, but ultimately results in diminishing returns.

The brands that break away don’t just optimise, they explore, and the three areas where it pays off most are:

• Creative → Forget perfection. Focus on velocity and variety. Winners don’t polish a single “hero” ad—they test wildly different concepts until something cuts through.
• Signal → Stop explicitly trusting attribution. It only shows correlation, not causation. Run incrementality tests to isolate the true revenue impact of every campaign.
• Activation → Don’t just plug and play. Broad automation works, nevertheless it’s not the entire story. Look for first-mover windows, dig under the hood with conversion data, and use parameters in unconventional ways.

This is where the  the true edge comes from. Not reckless bets, but deliberate exploration layered on top of a solid base of best practice.

The Edge Gap is the widening space between iteration and exploration. Four out of 5 advertisers will see a lift by following the gold standard. But just one in five will break through because they’re willing to explore where others stop.

That’s the center of ‘‘Performance Marketing without Permission’’. Expect unfiltered examples from global brands, insider tactics you won’t find in the assistance docs, and a jolt of inspiration to take home.

The query is: Are you brave enough to be the one in five?

Why is it that each yr, a small group of brands continue to grow through paid media promoting, while the bulk hit a plateau?

We’ve helped a whole bunch of brands to outperform of their market, and there’s a repeatable behaviour behind the brands that succeed.

And it runs counter to the recommendation we’ve all grown used to hearing.

When I say “best practice”, I’m talking in regards to the playbooks gifted to us from years of iteration. First from Meta and Google, reinforced by respected voices within the industry, and infrequently baked into our own processes over time.

It’s not bad advice. For many brands, ensuring best practice is in place really does deliver a brief-term lift. From experience, I’d estimate that 4 in five advertisers will see some level of performance gain by implementing the “gold standard” advisable by Meta or Google.

But with AI and automation accelerating, with products like Advantage+ and Performance Max doing more of the heavy lifting, it’s easier than ever to tick the very best-practice boxes. This means it’s harder than ever to realize an actual competitive advantage by doing just that.

So following the playbook doesn’t put you ahead; it just moves you into the center of the pack. To outperform the market, you’ve to compete in a different way.

While best practice might be your enemy, it is nearly actually the ad giants’ friend.

Why? Because advertisers mimicking the identical strategy is nice for the platforms’ goals. The more advertisers use the identical techniques, the more competitive those approaches change into. In turn, this drives up CPMs, CPCs, and ultimately your cost of sale.

If every advertiser in your category is feeding the machine the identical kind of knowledge, running the identical strategy, with the identical campaign structures, and chasing the identical audience signals… the auction becomes crowded. You’re paying more for the premium of targeting the identical users.

That’s the hidden cost of best practice. It delivers reliable results, but ultimately results in diminishing returns.

Don’t get me improper, I understand why CMOs lean on best practices. It reassures boards, ticks governance boxes, and keeps things defensible.

But protected and same have change into too closely linked, and for a performance marketing team, sameness is the riskiest place to be.

This is what I call the Edge Gap.

On one side, there are brands stuck in iteration mode. Tweaking, optimising, doing simply enough to indicate efficiency gains. They tackle the newest platform updates and follow the rulebook to the letter. But now, they need to work harder and harder to take care of performance.

On the opposite side, there are brands in exploration mode. Producing ideas that break with the playbook, testing ways of working that feel unfamiliar, and pushing platforms in directions they weren’t really designed for.

The Edge Gap is the widening space between the 2. And the one solution to close it’s experimentation.

If experimentation is how you shut the Edge Gap, there are three primary areas to focus your testing:

Creative → Forget perfection. Focus on velocity and variety. The biggest winners don’t polish a single “hero” ad; they test wildly different concepts until something cuts through. You may imagine you’re testing your creative, but unless you’ve multiple, very different concepts in play, you’re being too protected.

Signal → Stop explicitly trusting attribution. It only shows correlation, not causation. Instead, develop your individual understanding of performance by consistently running incrementality tests, not only switching things on and off at a channel level, but isolating the true, incremental revenue impact of every campaign. Experimentation is the one solution to determine cause.

Activation → Don’t just plug and play. Yes, broad automation works, nevertheless it’s not the entire story. Look for first-mover windows, dig under the hood with things like conversion APIs, and don’t be afraid to make use of parameters in unconventional ways. Many market-leading brands at the moment are experimenting with synthetic data to optimise bidding, removing outliers to rein in bid aggression.

This is where real edge comes from. Not reckless bets, but deliberate exploration layered on top of a solid base of best practice.

So how do you place this into practice without losing control? Just a few shifts to begin with:

1. Split your budget. Ring-fence 5–10% of spend for exploration. That might mean latest channels, latest campaign types, latest formats, latest concepts or latest targeting. The point is: Make experimentation a habit, not a raffle.
2. Set creative velocity targets. Don’t wait for one perfect ad. Ship latest assets frequently, across not less than three distinct ideas, not only color or CTA swaps of the identical ad. Treat creative like a portfolio of bets.
3. Discover true causality. Commit to 1 meaningful incrementality test per quarter. Pre-register your hypothesis and hold the road until results are significant. No more “switch it off and see what happens” shortcuts, design experiments that let you know what really drives revenue.
4. Interrogate your signals. Don’t just feed the platforms the info they ask for. Understand how the info is used, and where you would possibly bend it. That might mean cleansing or enriching audience data, using synthetic events to steer bidding behaviour, or enhancing product data in ways your competitors haven’t considered.
5. Exploit the grey. For every platform, discover not less than two under-used parameters or features and test them. Go beyond the assistance docs. Break things. Use the tools in ways they weren’t designed for use. That’s often where the largest edge is hiding.

None of this implies abandoning best practice. It means constructing on it with purpose, and proving the worth of exploration through structured learning.

If your marketing playbook looks an identical to your competitors’, don’t be surprised when your results do too.

Best practice makes you average by design.

Four out of 5 advertisers will see a lift from following the gold standard. But just one in five will break through because they’re willing to explore where others stop.

Exploration is the one path left to differentiation. The brands daring enough to experiment today will set the benchmarks everyone else tries to follow tomorrow.

The query is: Are you brave enough to be the one in five?