Eight or so years ago, when Brent Jarvis joined US Wellness Meats, a beef company that operates the Grassland Beef direct-to-consumer business, the brand made a commitment to expand its reach by advertising in new channels.
But it remained a small team of three without the requisite resources to produce creative and crunch data to make many new channels work. So in 2018, Grassland Beef began working with Albert AI, a social and search ad optimization company, to put the brand in new feeds and expand its customer reach.
Nowadays, the big platforms have their AI-based services, Jarvis said. Google has Performance Max (PMax) and Meta has Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC). The point of those products is for the platform to put advertisers in more media channels and to enable more creative production and testing. But Grassland has stuck with Albert AI.
Putting an independent vendor like Albert AI in charge of those search and social campaigns means the brand retains visibility and control over its marketing, he said.
The creative visibility problem
One important visibility factor for Grassland Beef is the creative itself.
“We can actually see the results from the campaign and the artwork we use, to know which are converting and which aren’t,” Jarvis said.
By contrast, PMax and Meta ASC campaigns do not report campaign creative info. For instance, a candy brand’s Valentine’s Day YouTube campaign might use different creative targeted to men or women. YouTube is a walled garden, so the brand doesn’t know which individuals clicked or converted on those ads. With PMax, the platform does the decision-making and creative optimization, and the advertiser doesn’t see which ad creatives performed best – or were used at all. But a brand managing its own YouTube campaign like Grassland does with Albert AI would see which creative worked in particular.
Having the creative visibility is important, too, he said, because what works in the current campaign is often the impetus for the next campaign.
For instance, Jarvis said that since joining Shopify in 2023, Grassland Beef has seen promising results from what Shopify calls its “Collective.” That’s a retail marketing product that allows Shopify merchants to sell on each other’s storefronts. Success with certain campaigns and creative strategies has led to interesting partnerships, he said, to sell things like spices and ready-to-cook meals with other merchants.
The disappearing keyword
Another visibility factor comes down to search keywords.
Refining and managing search keywords is a challenge for US Wellness Meats, Jarvis said. “The use of terminology and language [by ad platforms] has stretched beyond reason.”
Grassland Beef touts its own unique set of standards for raising cattle. Its farms use no pesticides and herbicides, and the cows eat only grass on pastures.
But every big meat company with vast factory output can claim “free-range” and “grass-fed” beef, if they were at one time fed grass on open ranges, before being confined and fed grain or other additives, according to Jarvis.
Grassland Beef advertisers its cows as “grass-fed, grass-finished,” and raised on “regenerative farms.”
But general consumers don’t always understand those fine distinctions, which means education is a major priority for the brand, he said.
The search term “grass finished beef” contributed 15% of the company’s Google Search-attributed revenue, and at a ROAS of 580%, according to the Albert AI data. In other words, when the company is able to educate and inspire a more nuanced search starting point, the advantage is clear in the ad campaign data.
It’s up to the brand to distinguish itself, Jarvis said. On the other hand, he added, big meat manufacturers can and do advertise heavily on the brand’s own terms like “Wellness Meats” and “grassland beef.”
But those insights are possible because Grassland has a vendor managing its search campaign, not defaulting to the platform AI.
With PMax campaigns, most search keyword data disappears. Grassland Beef wouldn’t know which terms are driving traffic or how Google is refining its keywords to identify new opportunities. Like if people searching for “non-meat protein” were unexpectedly coming to the meat site instead, based on a pitch around higher standards for raising cattle, that’s a useful insight.
That’s the kind of search keyword data and strategy that disappears inside the PMax black box.
“Incidentally, I was unfamiliar with the industry term ‘black box,’” Jarvis said.
But that’s the point, he added.
“We don’t have time to stay on top of all of this stuff,” he said.
The efficiency gains are worth it, he said, if a vendor like Albert AI helps a brand expand to many new channels that it otherwise just couldn’t tackle on its own.
