#69: The Modern Marketing Playbook: Growth, AI, and What’s Next.

·1 hr 1 min·2 clips

Kevin Bell explains how Apple's iOS 14.5 broke the Facebook and Google pixel and why first-party integration became the fix.

1. Imran's Podcast #69, "The Modern Marketing Playbook: Growth, AI, and What's Next," examines how performance marketing changed after Apple's 2021 iOS 14.5 update and how paid social platforms are shifting now. 2. Host Imran, who mentions earlier ad tech work at Singa, talks with Kevin Bell, a performance marketer with over a decade of experience who started on Facebook ads and worked at Ethos and now Mochi Health. 3. The core thesis is that losing the browser pixel after iOS 14.5 pushed advertisers toward back-end "first-party integration" with Facebook and Google, and that Facebook's algorithm took until roughly 2023 to regain its footing. 4. For startups that have raised around $2-3 million, Kevin lists customer data platforms including Segment, RudderStack, Hightouch and Tealium, says sales teams often give credits covering one to two years, and names free Google Tag Manager as the alternative. 5. He says Facebook now pushes video creative, including low-production UGC, studio-produced UGC and actor-based formats, and that Mochi Health tests hooks and formats while segmenting campaigns by concept or ad angle, a method he credits to Common Thread Collective. 6. On formats, Kevin recommends uploading 1:1 or 4:5 variations alongside 9:16 because Facebook otherwise crops or scales a square ad into the story view awkwardly. 7. Kevin says LinkedIn is slow to change because it earns so much from recruiting, and Imran reports that vertical video gets more views on LinkedIn than static images or links. 8. Kevin explains that Facebook and Instagram built their algorithms around a user's social network while TikTok ranks the most viral content, and says TikTok "is not just a social platform" but "a search platform" while Instagram indexes search only by hashtags. 9. On TikTok's future, he cites India's earlier ban, expects YouTube Shorts to benefit, and expects any new US deal to resemble the prior structure in which the algorithm stayed in China. 10. Suited to marketers, startup founders and growth leads tracking paid social changes.

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