Insights
Practical advice on paid media, creative strategy, and scaling ecommerce brands from a team of industry veterans.
Agency News
2025: What We Built, What We Tested, What We're Taking Into 2026
A quick note to wrap 2025 and share a few things we're carrying into 2026 — measurement, systems, testing, and building.
Creative Strategy
From Hook to Hold: How to Keep Attention in the First 3 Seconds of an Ad
The first 3 seconds decide whether your ad gets watched or wasted. Learn how to think in frames, not scripts, and create hooks that stop the scroll.
Meta Advertising
Scaling Smart: When and How to Increase Ad Spend
Scaling paid advertising isn't as simple as allocating more budget to top-performing campaigns. For eCommerce brands doing more than $5M in annual revenue, scaling smart means increasing ad spend while also increasing topline revenue without sacrificing substantial profitability.
Artificial Intelligence
The Future of Lifestyle and Product Photography in the Age of AI
AI photo generation is evolving at lightning speed—what once took a full production team can now be created with a few prompts. So, where does this leave photographers, editors, stylists, and content creators?
Google Advertising
Ditch Performance Max for Better Google Ads Results
Why Standard Search and Standard Shopping campaigns can give you better performance, lower costs, and more control over how your budget is spent.
Agency Tools
Know Your Crowd: Deep Buyer Insights, Delivered Fast!
I've built a handy AI-powered tool that creates detailed buyer personas for your brand, digging into over 50 psychographic, demographic, and behavioral data points.
Meta Advertising
Measuring Incremental Revenue from Google and Meta Ads: A Comprehensive Guide
Understanding the true impact of your advertising efforts is crucial to optimizing your marketing strategy. Incremental revenue—the additional revenue generated directly by your ads—is a key metric to measure.
TikTok Advertising
Scaling TikTok GMV Max: A Practical Framework for Profitability
Scaling on TikTok isn't just about throwing budget at ads—it's about controlled growth, structured testing, and maintaining creative momentum.
Meta Advertising
Why Creative Diversity Is Essential for Meta Ads: A Deep Dive
Meta says if your ads are 70% similar or more, their algorithm treats them like identical twins. Learn how to keep your ads diverse and Meta happy.
Company News
Celebrating 10 Years of Sum Digital!
Ten years ago, Terry Whalen and I took the leap and started Sum Digital. We had a vision, deep expertise in media buying, and a passion for helping e-commerce brands grow.
Meta Advertising
Understanding Meta's Ads Algorithm
Whether you're running campaigns for e-commerce, services, or any other industry, grasping how Facebook and Instagram decide which ads to show can make or break your campaigns.
Google Advertising
Is Google Evil?
Federal Judge Amit Mehta thinks so. "Google has exercised its monopoly power by charging supra-competitive prices for general search text ads."
Creative Strategy
Using Buyer Personas to Unlock Scale
Despite the trend towards broad audience targeting on platforms like Meta and TikTok, our audits reveal a critical oversight: most advertisers aren't using buyer personas.
Meta Advertising
What I Learned at the Meta Performance Summit (And Why It Matters for You)
Last week, I had the privilege of attending the Meta Performance Summit, an exclusive event for top digital advertising agencies.
Meta Advertising
Navigating Meta Ads Manager for Dummies
Pictured above is the Meta ads user interface (UI)—specifically, the campaign view. If you're unfamiliar with the UI, it can seem overwhelming with all the columns, rows, data, and hidden tabs.
Agency Tools
5 Premiere Pro Tips I Wish I Knew Sooner
In the age of mobile-first short form video it is key to know how to quickly convey important information through video editing. Unfortunately, Premiere Pro is tricky and not very user friendly.
Creative Strategy
How to Create Compelling Stories for Advertisements
In the ever-evolving landscape of advertising, one thing remains constant: the power of storytelling. Whether it's a thirty-second commercial or a series of social media posts, storytelling has the ability to captivate audiences, evoke emotions, and leave a lasting impression.
Case Study
Case Study: Kindred Bravely
How Sum Digital helped Kindred Bravely achieve 5X annual sales growth, 1 million orders, and a successful exit to TZP Group.
TikTok Advertising
4 Ways to Optimize TikTok Ads with No Minimum Investment
Do you want to optimize your paid TikTok strategy but don't know where to start? Sure, TopFeed ads get you all of the exposure, but that requires a hefty budget. No need to fear, we will tell you how our strong conversion-based campaign structure led to solid results in 2023.
Creative
Behind the Scenes: Creating Viral Ads that Clients Will Love
Have you ever wanted to create awesome ads but weren't sure where to start? In this article you can see my step-by-step process of how I turned ideas into finalized advertisements for one of our clients.
Meta Advertising
Advantage+: Avoid These 3 Critical Mistakes
As a paid social agency with decades of experience, we've seen businesses make all types of mistakes when it comes to Advantage+ (Adv+). This is especially true when prospective clients request us to perform account audits.
Agency Tools
Foreplay.co - It's Like Pinterest for Paid Media
In paid media agencies it is pretty common to use Facebook Ads library to gather inspiration for new ads and keep track of the ads that competitors are uploading. But let's be honest and admit that using Facebook Ads Library is a pretty clunky and unintuitive process.