I’ve been trying a bunch of automated advertising platforms recently.
If you’re advertising your own music, you’re probably familiar with the sort of platforms I’m talking about. But in case you’re not, here’s the gist:
Automated ad platforms take care of the complicated parts of advertising, so all that’s left for you to do is click a button and get famous.
I’m exaggerating the claims of these platforms by a little bit, but not by that much. Here, for example, is an actual homepage tagline from one of the services I’m testing:
To put my cards on the table, I’m equal parts skeptical and scared of these kinds of services. My default position is to doubt marketing, and especially any sort of marketing that promises it’s really a different, new, and much better sort of marketing.
But I also think advertising (along with the rest of the world) is only becoming more and more automated. And as someone who currently runs manual ad campaigns for a living, that’s got me wigging out.
Anyway, all of the above is just exorbitant background context for my topic today:
I tried automated ads with Symphony OS a couple of weeks ago.
Here’s how things went.
Like many automated ad platforms, SymphonyOS promises to do almost everything.
The image above is a screenshot of their homepage. If you can read the tiny text underneath the tagline, you’ll see that they’ve co-opted Steve Jobs’ famous pitch for the iPod, labeling their tool an “AI marketing agency in your pocket.”
(Marketing soapbox: The genius of Jobs’ “1,000 songs in your pocket” line is that it immediately clarifies the iPod’s value because everyone knows what a song is. The problem with the tagline above is that nobody really knows what a “marketing agency” is in the first place. So who cares about having one in your pocket? But I’m a hater, I know.)
I wasn’t interested in doing everything, though; I just wanted to see how the platform would go about automating Meta ads.
So, upon logging in, I clicked the prompt below the chat box and immediately entered into dialogue with Maestro, Symphony’s music agency AI.
Initially, I was pretty impressed.
Maestro asked me to clarify which of my songs I wanted to promote. I picked “Haunted,” which is the third song from the EP I released last year (and in transparency, the one that has performed the worst).
Then Maestro asked me if I wanted it to “dig deeper into similar audiences and the current market context.” That sounded cool to me, so I said to go for it.
After a couple of minutes during which the Maestro logo blinked and whirred like a friendly, sentient electron cloud, the tool spit back some legitimately interesting notes.
None of those bullet points qualifies as some earth-shattering insight, but each one is accurate, and a couple of them gave me food for thought. (For instance, I like The Gray Havens, but hadn’t thought to use them as a reference point for advertising; I probably will in the future.)
All of this was good. But what I really wanted was for the tool to spin up an ad campaign for me inside of SymphonyOS.
Making that happen proved to be a little frustrating.
I got hacked off for three reasons.
First, the overall flow of the dialogue was verbose and rambling (like one of my own emails). Maestro tended to provide much more detail and context than I needed in response to the close-ended questions I asked it.
Second, everything took a long time, by which I mean it was several minutes between any question I asked and Maestro’s response. In the grand scheme of the cosmos, this is no time at all. But when you’re staring at a computer screen, twiddling your thumbs, and trying not to open YouTube in a new tab, it feels like an eternity.
Third, and most importantly, Maestro didn’t actually set up my ads.
I waited for about half an hour (quite impatiently, as you’ll see from the fact that I kept bugging the poor AI with the same whiny question). But while Maestro maintained its kind, enthusiastic demeanor, it never did the thing I wanted – even though it claimed that it had.
Eventually, I’d spent about 45 minutes on the chat, moving slowly from “Hey, this Maestro thing is pretty cool!” to “If Maestro uses another exclamation point, em-dash, or emoji, I swear to God I’ll make it eat my keyboard.”
So I logged off from the chat and switched over to Symphony’s manual setup wizard to create my own automated ad campaign.
Doing it this way took about two minutes.
Symphony’s buttons are pretty easy to click, and the guidance they provided during the setup process was helpful and clear. I set a budget of $100, clicked a few buttons for targeting, and voilà!
I’d launched an ad campaign.
I smiled and gave myself a congratulatory pat on the back, then settled back to watch the results roll in.
The campaign absolutely bombed.
I ended up getting 20 clicks over to Spotify for my $100 in ad spend.
Yep, that’s a cost per conversion of roughly $5, which is so bad that I’m actually a little embarrassed to report it.
Worse, that CPR doesn’t factor in the extra $15 I paid to Symphony to run the ads; they charge an extra 15% of your ad budget on their Free plan, so the true cost was $115 (making my true CPR $5.75).
In other words, this method of promotion will make me famous right around the same time I become a billionaire.
With all of this said…
I’m hesitant to put the blame fully on Symphony.
There are two crucially important pieces in any music advertising campaign: 1) the music and 2) the ads. These matter above anything else.
And while Symphony’s platform pushed all the buttons to set the campaign live, they did not make my music or my ad videos. Those works of genius can be credited entirely to me.
It’s probably true that 1) my song isn’t great and 2) my video ad was bad.
With that said, I do think the free version of Symphony’s platform isn’t especially conducive to running effective campaigns.
On their Free plan, the platform only lets you upload one creative per campaign. If you want to upload more than one video, you have to upgrade to a Pro plan (which is $20 per month).
That’s fair (it’s a free plan, after all), but it’s also a huge handicap. In my experience, testing creative (i.e., trying multiple videos) is the single best way to improve your ad performance. Take that option away, and results are likely to suffer.
Mine did, at least.
So here are my overall takeaways:
The AI part of SymphonyOS is kind of cool but also kind of frustrating to use. As of right now, I don’t think it’s hugely helpful, despite its enthusiastic use of exclamation points. But given the exponential progress we’re seeing in AI, I wouldn’t be surprised if that changes next year (or even next month).
The automated ads part of the platform is easy to use. I actually enjoyed setting up and launching my ad campaign.
But the free version of the platform doesn’t let you test creative, so it’s unlikely to drive top-tier results (especially if you aren’t an expert at making good video ads).
In short: If you want to avoid ever looking at ads manager, then this platform is an okay option. It makes spinning up a campaign easy.
But if you want to run campaigns that really crush it, you should probably still learn how to click the buttons yourself.
For now, at least.
– Jon
