Zapier’s Head of Paid Ads on Storytelling, AI-Targeted Ads, and Why He’s All-In on Influencer Marketing

Happy fall, MiM-ers! Grab your pumpkin-spiced latte, settle in with Noah Kahan’s Stick Season, and get ready to hear from a paid marketer who’s all-in on influencers, storytelling, and AI-targeted ads.

(I’m sorry I can’t offer up a more recent fall-inspired album. To be fair, I’m still obsessed with my “Summer 2019” mix.)

Keep reading to learn why Zapier’s head of paid ads thinks the golden age of paid ads is over.

1. Fully embrace the influencer buzz.

James de Feu says the golden age of paid advertising is over. And he’s okay with it.

He’s also the manager of paid ads at Zapier.

(I’m currently imagining Mad Men’s Don Draper rolling over in his TV grave.)

De Feu is so confident about influencer marketing that he negotiated to bring it under his paid ads team. He succeeded because, moving forward, “we see that as our brand motion.”

In fact, when I asked how he’d spend a hypothetical $1k, de Feu tells me he’d put a hefty 40% into influencers.

But don’t delete your Google Ads account just yet. De Feu says he’d still give 50% of that hypothetical budget to paid ads. (The other 10% would go to SEO, if you got stuck trying to add this up to 100.)

As he acknowledges, “Paid ads will always be on, and we’ll still spend a ton of money there. But paid ads live and die in that spending month. It’s not getting us the reach it once did.”

That’s why de Feu isn’t putting all his eggs in one basket. Paid is still a good egg (err-basket?), but he’s excited to seek out influencers who thrive on the same platforms where Zapier’s customers hang out.

“I smirked when you mentioned influencers, because that’s the name of the game — even for those of us in the B2B space,” he tells me. “It’s no longer just about glossy teenage products anymore.”

2. Storytelling is the bread and butter of marketing.

“In the world of paid ads, we get fixated on one single, siloed experience, and we just keep trying to optimize it until it’s perfect,” de Feu says. “But one thing we’ve learned is that storytelling is huge.”

“Storytelling is huge” is exactly the same pitch I gave my parents when I was trying to convince them that majoring in creative writing was a sound financial decision — but de Feu isn’t wrong. If there’s one truth that remains consistent in the world of marketing, it’s that humans have always, and will always, love a good story.

“Stretching something out, building a story, creating use cases, highlighting testimonials — I let go of that over the past couple of years, and I’m just grateful now that we’ve reset ourselves. Storytelling has always been, and will continue to be, our superpower as marketers.”

So if you’re unsure of where to start in the world of paid ads, try this: Talk to your customers, learn their pain points, and then communicate your solutions through a good ole-fashioned tale.

3. Get used to cha-cha-changes.

David Bowie preached it: You’ve got to keep up with all the changes happening in the advertising industry or risk throwing precious cash down the drain. (Those are the lyrics, right?)

For de Feu, that means doing tons of tests to learn how to use AI to personalize Zapier’s ads — not just in creating assets, but in audience targeting, too.

“You have to be really on top of all these recent changes or you’ll end up wasting money,” he says.

An example could be an athletic brand that uses AI to target yoga apparel ads to their vinyasa-loving consumers while ensuring their golf apparel is sent to every guy on Wall Street.

In other words: The future of ads will look a lot more like high-intent, targeted content, and less like the generic, all-purpose ads we’ve come to know and hate.