付费广告未死：以受众为中心的新打法

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“Paid fundamentals across targeting & messaging still work...but the 20% of teams that can execute and test faster, at higher volume and higher quality, with AI are crushing the other 80%.”

Max Hogan, Co-Founder of Closing Media

There’s always been a division in marketing: You either love “paid” or you wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole.

But lately, even paid lovers can’t pretend it’s working like it used to. Search traffic is going down, LinkedIn is very saturated, and other paid channels are hard to crack.

For the record, I fall into the “I love it” camp—I started my career in it. IMO, running ads has the excitement of something like day trading, but with creative assets and company money.

So I was paying close attention when I did a MKT1 Unboxing with Keith Putnam-Delaney, Co-Founder of Primer, a couple weeks ago. Primer’s whole product is centered on the idea that with better audience data and targeting, you can scale paid efficiently across B2B and even channels considered B2C historically.

I left the conversation realizing I had to write an entire newsletter on what’s possible with paid. So to figure out what else is working now, I called in some other experts too: Max Hogan, Co-Founder of Closing Media, Lizzy Marano, Director of Growth Marketing at Justworks, and Kamil Rextin of 42 Agency.

Here’s where I landed: Paid isn’t dead. The method just needs an upgrade, and it needs to be audience-first (and of course AI-powered).

To make paid successful today, you need the same audience-driven foundation you need for all of marketing (I’ve been preaching this foundation over the last year and a half). This doesn’t mean simply defining your ICP in a Notion doc and calling it a day. It means prioritizing your TAM into tiers, enriching accounts and contacts, and loading those audiences into every channel you run. Then taking those learnings and feeding those insights back into your CRM at the account and contact level, to inform all areas of marketing, not just paid.

Here’s what makes this approach different from how most paid teams operate:

• Audience is at the center: Most paid efforts start with “pick a channel.” This one starts with “build audiences” by enriching account and contact data in your CRM. (This means don’t leave ad data just sitting in ad platforms.)
• Organic + paid channels work together: Most teams run paid and organic in silos and miss this entirely. In an audience-first approach, you track channel engagement at the account and contact level, so paid and organic add to the same story.

“Yes, LinkedIn is saturated. Yes, search traffic is down. Yes, AEO and eventually GEO will rival SEO. But also, yes...paid still works. The future of <any channel> is dependent on whether your marketing fundamentals and data foundation are good.”

Kari Hanson on LinkedIn

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In this newsletter:

Whether you love this stuff like me or have historically stayed away from it, this newsletter covers the new table stakes in paid, what the best teams are doing beyond that, and where things are heading. I hope it hypes everyone up about the possibilities.

Here’s who I chatted with:

Since I’m not in the weeds day to day on paid anymore. I wanted three perspectives: someone running ads at scale in-house, someone running ads for many clients at an agency, and someone building the new tech.

• Keith Putnam-Delaney, Co-Founder & CEO of Primer: He gave me a full demo of the Primer product and how to bring your audiences to historically B2C channels during our Unboxing (full video here) and at our Gen Marketer Summit in December.
• Max Hogan, Co-Founder of Closing Media: You may remember him from our Gen Marketer Summit in December and as my longtime go-to expert on all things LinkedIn ads. We jumped on a call to discuss what’s working now across his B2B clients.
• Lizzy Marano, Director of Growth Marketing at Justworks: Justworks brings in a high volume of inbound as they target SMBs and Lizzy walked me through how she runs performance marketing at scale. She formerly did performance marketing at Chewy, an e-commerce platform for pet products. B2C is usually way ahead of B2B on ads, so I thought she’d add great perspective.
• Kamil Rextin, Founder at 42 Agency: I also did a quick check with Kamil since he’s using AI workflows at 42 in a big way, internally and for clients (read more about his agents in this newsletter & in this LinkedIn post).
• I also posted on LinkedIn about this topic and I’ll be adding quotes from your comments throughout this post too! Thanks.

And here’s what this newsletter will cover:

• Part 1: BYOA: How to bring your audience data to every channel
• Part 2: Build a paid flywheel: How and why to stop running ad channels as one-offs
• Part 3: Creative is not the bottleneck: Use AI & steal B2C creative playbooks
• Final thoughts on the future of paid: ChatGPT ads and ads for agents (I’m tabling these to the end on purpose!)

Bonus for paid subscribers: We added a new “/paid-checklist” skill to the MKT1 MCP. Install our MCP and run this skill to get personalized suggestions on what to do next with paid.

A quick break to unbox Primer

Here’s the full chat and demo with Keith Putnam-Delaney, Co-Founder & CEO of Primer, which helps B2B marketers reach the right customers on more ad channels than just LinkedIn, and figure out whether those ads actually drive pipeline.

Keith walks me through:

• How to build one ICP audience and run it everywhere: Keith pulls from Primer’s 292M-person database, layers in his CRM data to exclude existing customers and competitors, and syncs the same audience across Meta, Google, LinkedIn, and Reddit.
• Why LinkedIn audiences cost twice what they should: LinkedIn shows ads to “related” job titles and this hurts your conversion.
• How Primer’s AI catches the dumb setup mistakes that waste ad spend: Keith walks through features that flag things like bad audience expansion settings or misallocated budget.

If you want a deeper dive on topics in this newsletter, watch the video, then try Primer. Bonus: Get 10% off an annual Primer subscription with code MKT110. New customers only.

And now, on to the newsletter…

To build out your own checklist, use our /paid-checklist in our MCP Server for paid subscribers.

Part 1: BYOA: Bring your audience data to every channel