Digital Brothers’ Tips for Performance Marketing on the Open Web

As performance marketing continues to evolve, I chatted with the leadership team at Digital Brothers to get their take on what’s working, and why. With rising social media CPMs and pervasive signal loss affecting advertisers everywhere, we discussed why navigating the industry’s upheavals requires a return to core marketing skills, authentic creative, and privacy-durable media buying strategies.

Thanks to their hands-on experience scaling challenging categories like health and nutraceuticals, the Digital Brothers were able to explain exactly how they’re able to build profitable cold reach on the open web, cut budget waste in retargeting, and leverage first-party conversion signals to power their AI-led prospecting. For anyone trying to find their way in the post-cookie digital landscape, this may be the map you need.

What’s your take on the state of performance marketing right now? Where do you think the industry is at?

Performance marketing is going through the most useful correction we’ve seen in years. For a long time the whole space was riding on cheap, easily-tracked clicks on two or three platforms, and a lot of teams confused “channel that measures well” with “channel that grows a business.” That era is closing. Between signal loss, higher CPMs on the crowded channels, and audiences that are simply harder to trust, the operators who are winning now are the ones who go back to fundamentals: a real offer, disciplined creative testing, and a full-funnel view instead of last-click worship.

It’s less comfortable than 2019, but it rewards craft again, and that’s good for agencies who actually know how to buy media, rather than just push a boost button.

What’s changed most in how you reach audiences over the last couple of years?

The biggest shift is that we no longer assume we can follow a user around the web with a cookie. Signal loss and cookie deprecation forced us to move toward data that’s durable, i.e., declared and contextual, rather than inferred. Practically, that means we lean much harder on first-party signals we actually own or that are explicitly given, and on the context of the page a person is reading, rather than a fragile behavioural trail.

It also changed how we seed campaigns: we feed the algorithm real conversion events and soft conversions (form starts, add-to-cart, initiate checkout) so it can learn even when the deterministic identity layer is thinner than it used to be. The teams still trying to rebuild the old cookie-based precision are fighting the tide. We’d rather build on data that survives the next privacy change.

Health verticals have their own specific challenges — in your opinion, what’s so unique about advertising in them?

Three things make health different, and they all compound. First, the audience: a lot of our health and nutraceutical buyers are older, genuinely motivated by a problem, and rightly skeptical — you’re not selling an impulse gadget, you’re asking someone to trust you with their body.

Second, trust has to be earned on the page, not claimed in the headline. That’s why our best health work reads like editorial: specialist authority, a clear mechanism, ingredients and dosages spelled out, honest framing.

Third, compliance is a creative constraint, not an afterthought. In this category you win by being more disciplined: no aggressive before/afters without disclaimers, no explicit medical claims, no “cure everything” language. The advertisers who treat that discipline as a moat, instead of a nuisance, are the ones who scale in health without getting shut down.

With acquisition costs continuing to rise industry-wide, how do you keep scaling profitably?

The honest answer is that you can’t retarget your way to scale. Retargeting is the most efficient thing in the account, but it has a hard ceiling in that you can only re-engage the people who already came. Once you’ve squeezed that pool, pushing it harder just means paying more to reach the same faces.

Profitable scaling, then, means solving cold reach, and doing it without CPA blowing up. What changed the math for us was seeding prospecting with real conversion data and letting AI-led audiences carry the top of the funnel; essentially, conversion-seeded prospecting instead of manual, guess-based targeting. We still control it like buyers: soft conversions for the algorithm to learn on, gradual budget increases rather than Meta-style doubling, site-level blocking of anything with high CTR and no conversions. But, the growth comes from making cold traffic efficient, not from over-milking the warm pool.

Speaking of which, where do you see advertisers wasting the most budget?

Blanket retargeting is the number one leak we see. “Retarget everyone who visited” sounds safe, but it lumps together someone who read your whole advertorial and started the checkout with someone who bounced in three seconds, and you pay the same premium to chase both!

The second big waste is not separating engaged visitors from bouncers at all, so the algorithm never learns who’s actually worth money. The third is mismatched creative: sending a hard-sell offer ad to someone who’s still in the problem-aware stage, or a soft educational ad to someone who’s ready to buy. Most of the “our CPA is too high” problems that we’re asked to fix aren’t bidding problems, they’re segmentation and creative-fit problems dressed up as bidding problems.

Search and social keep getting more crowded and expensive. Where are you finding room to grow?

On the open web. Search captures demand that already exists — someone has to know they want the thing and type it. But, a huge amount of real intent never touches a search bar: it’s someone reading an article about knee pain, or hydration, or their finances, at the exact moment the problem is on their mind. That’s where we find room, capturing intent beyond the SERP, at CPMs that are still sane compared to what search and social have become.

It’s not that search and social stopped working; it’s that everyone crowded into the same auctions and bid the efficiency out of them. The open web lets us meet a high-intent audience earlier, in context, before they’re being fought over by 50 other advertisers on a keyword.

With that in mind, what’s actually working in creative right now?

Two things. First, authenticity beats polish, especially in health — UGC-style, shoulder-up, real-looking people who look into the camera outperform glossy stock every time. The moment a creative smells like an ad, an older, more skeptical buyer scrolls past.

Second (and this surprised some of our team!), motion has become a genuinely tested lever, not just a nice-to-have. When we test static versus motion properly, per vertical, motion has clearly lifted performance in some of them, particularly the ones where seeing a product in use tells a story that a still frame can’t. The real lesson isn’t “use motion everywhere,” though, it’s the discipline to test per vertical instead of assuming. What lifts a footwear/wellness offer may do nothing for a finance one. We test the lever; we don’t take it on faith.

How does your media platform factor into all of this?

This is where it ties together for us. Everything above — durable first-party and contextual data, capturing intent off-search on the open web, retargeting that’s smart instead of blanket, AI prospecting that carries cold reach, and richer formats like motion — we run through Realize as our open-web performance platform. The value isn’t any single feature, but rather that these live in one place with measurable ROI beyond search and social. We seed it with real conversion data, let Predictive Audiences handle efficient cold prospecting, keep retargeting tight on genuinely engaged visitors, lean on contextual and declared signals as the cookie fades, and test motion where the vertical justifies it.

As a buyer, what I care about is that the whole funnel is instrumented and the numbers hold up in Shopify, Checkout Champ, and Triple Whale, not just in the dashboard. On Realize, they do, which is why it’s become the backbone of how we scale on the open web.

With so many recent changes to contend with already, where do you think performance advertising is heading next?

Toward durable data plus AI-led buying, with the human buyer moving up a level — from pulling every lever manually to setting strategy, feeding the machine clean signals, and enforcing creative and compliance discipline.

The precision of the old cookie world isn’t coming back, and chasing it is a dead end. What replaces it is context, declared first-party data, and models that learn from real conversion events across the open web. The agencies that thrive won’t be the ones with the most dashboards open, they’ll be the ones with the sharpest offers, the most rigorous testing, and the judgment to know which of the machine’s suggestions to trust. Essentially, media buying becomes less about clicking and more about thinking.