I made it through three interviews, the last one being a presentation which was very negative. If you interview for these roles, you know that a shady thing agencies like to do is make you build out an account and then just ghost you, taking whatever insight you provided and leaving you nothing.
I don't know if that was Upgrow's intention, but I had built out a skeleton frame of an account and went through it to explain my thought process. So instead of building out every ad group and ad, I said "here's how I would build out ad groups, and I'd have this many ads based on X and Y" using only one ad group and ad as an example as well showing the other campaign setups (pmax, DSAs, etc.). But then it became more clear that they seemed to have wanted me to build an entire account, hours of unpaid work.
What was very uncomfortable was that Danny seemed to have thought I made a mistake in setup, but in reality, he had a wrong understanding of a bid strategy worked. I knew he was mistaken, and I verified I was correct after the interview, but it felt like in that moment, he had lost confidence in me as a candidate and I was unable to redeem myself, all for a technical misunderstanding that he had.
Danny also had a negative reaction when I said I had simply used the official Google and Youtube sales channel in shopify to sync products to merchant center, and used Google Sheets for additional feeds for adding product data. I've worked successfully with many ecommerce businesses and I still don't know what the hang-up was on this. I have experience with tools like feedonomics, but most of who I've worked with hasn't had enough skus to really warrant their use and not using them in those cases certainly isn't a handicap.
The worst thing however was no follow-up. It's very unprofessional and disrespectful to take hours and hours of a candidate's time and then, when they decide someone is not a candidate, not even inform of them of their decision.
If interviewing, my advice would be to firm on what you will do for the presentation. Do not give them free work.