What Top Marketers Are Doing Differently (and What You Can Steal)
When you drop into a room full of some of the best performance marketers in the world, you’re bound to walk away with a notebook full of ideas and maybe a few things that challenge how you’ve been running your ads.
That’s exactly what happened when Madelene Ragno from MADE Creative joined the Foxwell Founders meetup in Portland, Oregon. The takeaways she shared on the Marketing and Margaritas podcast hit on some of the biggest shifts happening right now in performance marketing from how brands are using creator partnerships to how we should all be thinking about Black Friday, creative testing, and AI.
Here’s what stood out and what you can actually put into play.
1. Partnership Ads Are Eating the Budget
If you’re not running partnership ads, you’re already behind.
Top brands, yes, the ones spending millions every month are allocating up to 50% of their ad budgets to creator or partnership ads. These aren’t just influencer collaborations; sometimes they’re run through creator pages, and sometimes they’re even run from standalone theme pages (think: “Menopause Matters”) designed purely to build trust and drive conversions.
Why it works: People trust people more than brands. When the ad comes from a face or a community, not a logo, engagement and conversion rise fast.
💡 Here’s how to make it work:
Expect to pay creators an additional $400–$500 USD to whitelist from their page.
Focus on easy, mutually beneficial relationships. If the creator’s tough to work with or overpriced, move on.
Remember long term relationships outperform one off posts.
2. Black Friday Doesn’t Need to Be Reinvented
The consensus at the conference? Stop overcomplicating BFCM. What’s working right now is simplification. Don’t turn off your evergreen ads, don’t overthink your offers, and don’t build 20 new campaigns for the sake of novelty.
Instead:
Keep your evergreen winners running. Just layer your Black Friday offer over what’s already performing.
Consolidate. One campaign. One ad set for cold. One small retargeting ad set.
Use lifetime budgets instead of daily budgets for short sale periods. Meta learns faster that way and can spend more efficiently when performance spikes.
In short simplify your strategy and let Meta’s machine learning do what it’s built to do.
3. Creative Diversification Is the New Advantage+
If you take one thing from this episode, make it this: the game now is creative diversification, not constant micro optimization. Stop testing 10 versions of the same product shot with new hooks. Instead, test emotions and personas. Let’s say your brand sells wellness products and your audience is stressed out parents.
Instead of one perfect ad, create 10–15 ads that all look and feel completely different but speak to the same core pain: stress.
Different tones, visuals, storylines, and formats all pointing to the same emotional trigger. That’s the creative refresh Meta rewards right now. And don’t panic when one ad isn’t converting. Meta’s signals are modeled, not exact. Sometimes, the ad that’s not “working” is actually driving top of funnel engagement or helping another ad close.
👉 The takeaway: Trust the algorithm. Launch more creative. Stop turning things off too early.
4. Launch New Ads Every Week (Yes, Every Week)
This one might sting, but it’s true: if you’re not consistently launching new creative, your performance will drop. Every five to seven days, refresh your ad set with 5–10 new creatives that look and feel different. Watch how reach and performance spike every time you launch. That cadence isn’t just for high spenders—it’s becoming table stakes for anyone serious about running Meta ads. If you can’t produce enough content to keep up, it might be time to rethink whether ads are the right play for your brand right now.
5. The Future Is Already Here (and It’s AI-Driven)
AI isn’t just changing how we write captions it’s changing how we create content altogether. At the Foxwell Founders event, marketers were using AI tools to generate realistic videos like a hand reaching for a product that looked completely human. It’s wild.
Even if you’re not ready to go full Spielberg with AI tools, remember: every time you “trust Meta,” you’re already relying on AI. From optimization to delivery, it’s doing the heavy lifting. So the question isn’t if you’ll use AI, it’s how far you’re willing to go with it.
The Big Picture
This episode wasn’t just a download of cool tactics it was a snapshot of where performance marketing is headed.
The throughline across everything shared?
👉 Trust the machine learning.
👉 Simplify your strategy.
👉 Launch more creative than feels comfortable.
👉 And build partnerships that make your brand more human.
That’s how today’s best agencies and brands are staying ahead and why the Foxwell Founders community continues to be a global hub for growth minded marketers.
Take a listen to the full episode of Marketing and Margaritas for more insights and real world examples.