Facebook ads for a direct-to-consumer grocery business
A New York grocery delivery business left an agency that ran its account set-and-forget. In a category where stock changes weekly, creative now changes with it.
Joe, Asian groceries, DTC. Recorded October 2023.
Joe runs a direct-to-consumer grocery business specialising in Asian products, delivering across New York City. The density of the city makes the economics work — one driver can cover twenty or thirty apartments in a single run. The business is around three years old and has grown a substantial wholesale side supplying restaurants, which is now the focus.
Their previous agency ran the account set-and-forget. For most categories that is merely lazy. In groceries it is fatal: produce is seasonal, stock changes week to week, and an ad promoting something you no longer have is worse than no ad at all.
What changed was cadence. Creative gets updated every week or two as stock and seasons move, and last-minute changes turn around inside a day. That is the whole difference between advertising a catalogue and advertising an actual inventory.
The other thing Joe raises is creative supply. Like most operators he is buried in the day-to-day and cannot reliably produce assets, so the creative gets made rather than requested.
His framing of the value is worth repeating: a business under five million a year cannot justify a full-time in-house media buyer and creative person, but it still needs the work done at that standard. That gap is where most small businesses get stuck — too big for a hobbyist, too small for a hire.
If your category moves faster than your ad account does, no amount of optimisation fixes it. Someone has to be in there weekly.
In Joe’s words
“At the last place we worked with, it was pretty much just a set-it-and-forget-it kind of deal. If you’re in the grocery space, vegetables and fruits are very seasonal — it needs to be a bit more hands-on.”
“Every week or every other week, if something needs to get done or updated, you were there. And if there were any last-minute changes or issues, within a 24-hour turnaround time.”
“We don’t have the budget to hire an in-house digital ads creative person, and it felt like you were a full-time employee we could rely on without the cost of one.”
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