TODAY I’m hosting a free live webinar:

The Business-First Meta Playbook for Black Friday

I’ll walk you through how we audit and approach Meta accounts before Black Friday, including the Product Efficiency Analysis we run on every account.

📅 TODAY, October 14
⏰ 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT

I’d love to see you there.

Sign up here →

Topics we'll cover today:
💠 Same BFCM Playbook. Better Results?
💠 Meta Wants AI Agents to Behave Like Real Customers
💠 The Growth Playbook Behind a Brand in Major Retail
💠 Latest news in the DTC space

A few weeks ago, I asked all of you whether they were planning to change their offers and creatives for Black Friday this year.

Most said they'd stick with what they used last year.

And I don't necessarily think that's a bad idea.

But there's something I'd encourage you to think about:

What if you kept doing the same things, but found a much better way to execute them?

Let me give you two examples.

In 2025, Huel launched its Daily Greens ready-to-drink product in the US.

Nothing unusual about launching a new product, right?

But look at HOW they did it.

They seeded products to more than 6,000 creators, generating over 2,400 influencer posts and 6 million impressions.

Imagine launching a product with a few emails, organic posts, and Meta ads.

Now imagine launching that same product with thousands of people talking about it.

Same initiative. Very different execution.

Midnight Hour, a fashion brand, took a different approach to its October promotions.

Instead of simply announcing discounts, they turned every Friday into a mystery.

Customers received cryptic clues through the brand's app, leading them to a mystery product discounted by 80% for 24 hours.

They also added teaser emails and a Halloween scavenger hunt to keep customers engaged.

The result?

A reported 95.4% increase in revenue compared to the previous month, along with a 78.7% increase in app installs.

They were still running flash sales.

But they gave customers a reason to come back, participate, and pay attention.

Now, back to your Black Friday plans.

I'd encourage you to revisit your Q4 2024 and 2025 marketing calendars.

Look at your offers, product launches, creatives, budget pacing, and everything else you did.

But don't just ask what worked and what didn't.

Ask yourself:

👉 Could we have promoted that product launch differently?
👉 Could we have made that offer more interesting?
👉 Could we have coordinated our email, SMS, organic, and paid campaigns better?
👉 Could we have allocated our budget differently throughout the promotional period?

Because sometimes, an initiative underperforms simply because the execution wasn't good enough.

You might not need a completely different BFCM playbook this year. You might just need to execute it better.

And speaking of getting ready for Black Friday...

Today at 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT, I'm hosting a free live webinar:

The Business-First Meta Playbook for Black Friday

I'll walk you through how we approach Meta accounts, including product selection, targeting, campaign structure, and scaling.

Plus, at the end, we'll randomly draw six eligible 7-figure+ DTC brands to receive:

🏆 1× 30-Day Revenue Efficiency Program, worth 5 figures.
🎯 5× Product Efficiency Analyses, completely free.

Register for free here →

See you there!

Imagine a customer asking their AI assistant:

"Find out if my order has shipped, and if it hasn't, change the delivery address."

The assistant visits your store, logs into the customer's account, checks the order, and makes the change.

All without the customer visiting your website.

Sounds convenient, right?

Well, there's a problem.

How does your store know that the AI agent is actually authorized to act on behalf of that customer?

And how do you control what it's allowed to do?

That's what Meta and Sierra are trying to solve with the newly announced Personal Agent Protocol (PAP).

It's an open standard designed to help businesses interact with AI agents securely.

Shopify, Walmart, and Stripe are among the companies supporting the initiative.

Let's say a customer sends an AI assistant to your Shopify store.

With PAP, the agent could:

👉 Browse as a guest: Check product availability, shipping information, or return policies.
👉 Access customer accounts: With permission, check orders, update information, or initiate returns.
👉 Operate within boundaries: Customers decide what permissions to grant, while merchants control which actions agents can perform.
👉 Identify itself: Your business can recognize that it's interacting with an authorized AI agent and understand what it's doing.

And the interesting part?

The agent could move between your website, APIs, and customer service systems without losing the context of the interaction.

If you've been following the evolution of agentic commerce, you've probably noticed something.

Everyone seems to be developing their own protocol.

We already have initiatives from Visa, Google, OpenAI, and others.

Now Meta is joining the conversation.

And while these protocols address different parts of the agentic commerce experience, there's clearly some overlap.

PAP, for example, doesn't currently support payments. That could come later.

It's also worth mentioning that OpenAI and Anthropic haven't signed on to this initiative.

So we're still far from having one universally adopted standard.

For now, there's probably nothing you need to implement.

But I think there's a bigger shift worth paying attention to.

We're moving toward a world where your next website visitor might be an AI agent acting on behalf of a customer.

And that raises some interesting questions.

Will your store be able to recognize these agents?

Will they be able to access the information they need?

What happens when customers expect their assistants to handle returns, subscriptions, or order changes without ever contacting your support team?

We're still early, and it's unclear which protocols will become widely adopted.

But one thing I'd keep an eye on is how Shopify and other commerce platforms integrate these capabilities.

Because as AI agents become more involved in shopping and post-purchase experiences, merchants will need to think about how their stores serve both humans and AI assistants.

Would you feel comfortable letting AI agents make changes to customer accounts on your store?

Expanding into retail doesn’t mean using the same growth strategy everywhere.

Kate McLeod is available at Sephora and Nordstrom, both in-store and online, as well as Anthropologie, Goop, and boutiques across the U.S.

But each retail partner brings a different ecosystem, customer community, and set of opportunities. That means the team has to think differently about how it supports and grows the brand within each retailer.

In this episode of The DTC Insider, Brian Roisentul talks with Brittany Tomkiewicz, VP of Marketing at Kate McLeod about building a brand across DTC and major retail partners.

We talk about:

🎙 Tune in.

📰 Google Opens AI Mode Checkout to More Merchants [read more]
📰 OpenAI to Monetize the Time You Spend Waiting for Images to Generate [read more]
📰 Amazon Prime Big Deal Days in October Drove $9.86 Billion in Online Spending [read more]

📖 How To Set Up ChatGPT Ads
📖 Where 7–8 Figure Brands Get Stuck (And How To Fix It)
📖 What Do Successful Brands Have In Common?

If you found this interesting, please leave us a review. It’d mean the world to me.

Brian Roisentul is the founder & CEO of BSR, a growth marketing agency he started in 2013 to help e-commerce brands unlock hidden revenue by identifying misalignments between their marketing and customer behavior. He is also the host of The DTC Insider podcast, where he interviews thought leaders, founders, and directors in the e-commerce space.

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