The Best Way To Do Paid Media Is… Not To Do Paid Media?!

0:00We're going to talk about why the best way nowadays to do paid media is to actually not do paid media. So Neil and I want to preface this by saying that the old days of doing paid media, it was all about how you structured your campaigns. It was a lot about the phrase matching, exact matching. A lot of that stuff has been taken away now. And a lot of it was really based on how deep someone understood the platform. And that was kind of the paradigm from before, right? But I don't know if you agree with this, but I do believe the paradigm is shifting now where the machines are getting better and better.

0:33and we can talk about also kind of what we're seeing from experience in our own respective ad agencies too because the old way is like yeah you're supposed to be optimizing a lot you're supposed to be making changes monitoring the accounts very closely but now because the ais have gotten a lot better it's shifting a little bit we still see if you just let them do whatever they want to end up doing you don't generate as high of a roi versus human intervention but we think this has been consistent for well over a few years now. The highest leverage point in paid advertising isn't actually focusing on paid advertising.

1:09It's related to the creative, the messaging, the copy, the landing pages, the ad that you're using and how appealing it is. How congruent is it messaging? Because if you just do people to get in the click and then the landing page doesn't deliver, the product doesn't deliver, you're not going to see the conversions. Or if you see the conversions and then you do people, you're going to get tons of bad reviews and refunds as well. So what we're seeing is the highest leverage point isn't the fine tuning of the campaign settings. It's typically all the other elements surrounding it. And that's where a lot of businesses and marketers aren't focusing on.

1:43They're focusing on like, oh, I'm going to tweak this knob here in this campaign setting. And it's going to give me a huge increase. Not really. Over time, everyone ends up learning all those tricks. It's all about the other stuff that you're not really doing on the ad platform itself. And that's how you make paid advertising effective. It's interesting because tweaking the knobs, optimizing, you start to get diminishing returns at some point. Same thing with CRO, you start to get diminishing returns at some point, but with creative, it's like a feast or famine type of thing. Your creative is either really good or it sucks, right?

2:14It's just straight up. That's just how it is. And so what I would say is you're still tweaking the knobs a little bit, but there's less knob tweaking today. And the way to do paid media moving forward is yes, there still needs to be some active monitoring of the accounts just to make sure the machines don't go crazy. But we've been saying this on this podcast, the creative is the X factor. And you know what's interesting, Neil, back in the day, let's say 10 plus years ago, when Google had its quality score, that's really what I was trying to say at the end of the day. It's how good is your ad copy?

2:41How good is your creative? How good is your landing page? That's what factors into a quality score. And they've been trying to say this for the longest time, but it wasn't until maybe in the last couple of years where a lot of DTC marketers started to understand that, oh, it's just a creative and really being able to have your data on lockdown. Hopefully you have your attribution on lockdown and then you're able to really unleash what it is that you want to accomplish. Dude, totally. So right now, if you want to do really well with paid advertising, don't spend all the time in the day learning about all the knobs and the tweaks and how the campaign settings and platforms work.

3:14Yes, you do need to know that and you need to know it well, but you should be spending more time on the stuff that's not within the ad management platform, such as your landing pages, the copy, the videos, the creative that you're using to appeal to people again to click over to your website, surveying potential customers and existing customers to figure out what would delight them so you can adjust your messaging or your layouts, doing eye tracking studies or using tools like Crazy Egg to figure out, all right, where people are getting stuck on the landing page. All these are the type of things that's really going to help you fine tune your paid advertising.

3:51And it's the stuff that most people who manage a lot of money on paid ads, funny enough, the bigger they manage, the more we see them neglecting the things I just talked about. I think this is an episode, those of you that have people on your paid media team, whether you're an agency or your brand side, send this over to whoever's handling paid media to really help put them on notice that, hey, it is important to understand how things work within the platforms, but it's time to start to understand how to optimize your creative and how to be creative. And if you don't know how, there's a lot of free information that's out there, whether it's on YouTube, there's a lot of creative people out there.

4:26Go look at what the Harmon Brothers have done. Chamber Media is another interesting one too. Harmon Brothers, FYI for everyone. So they made the unicorn pooping rainbow ice cream for the Squatty Potty. and initially the Squatty Potty team said no to it. They said, no, we're not gonna spend a couple million dollars on this ad. And even Lori Grenier, one of the sharks that invested said, no, let's not do that. That's too expensive, doesn't make sense. A couple months later, the founder, one of the founders of Squatty Potty was actually at a conference and they saw a unicorn. And at the moment they're like, oh, let's try to unicorn things.

4:58So they spent a couple million dollars and that ad still continues to run to this day and has generated multiple eight figures. And I think at the high point, Squatty Potty was maybe doing$20 million a year or so. And I think they ended up selling. But point is, they were really kind of just like chugging along until that creative came out. And boom, it exploded everywhere. Because once a creative is really good, people like to share it as well. And so you get the additional benefit, you get the additional engagement. So keep that in mind. Neil and I, I'll speak for myself, I wouldn't say like, we're necessarily the best creatives in the world.

5:28But we understand how important it is. So if you can't do it, go find someone that can ideally, or at least go learn it if you can't afford it. Neil? And also test a lot of variations too, because even if you think you know what's going to work, it doesn't always end up working that way. Just like the squatty potty example that Eric gave. Most people don't really see things as like, oh, if I have a pooping unicorn rainbow that poops ice cream with sprinkles, it'll sell a ton of these squatty potties. Hell yeah, the sprinkles, nice. Yeah. But when you think about that, it's just those ideas are so off the wall.

6:02They're a big hit or miss. And as for as many hits there are, there's many, many more misses. So a lot of this stuff, you have to do tests and you have to be patient as well. I think the best analogy of it is those types of ads are home runs. A lot more times you're probably going to have to go for singles. So go for the home runs every now and then, the grand slams every now and then. But just understand that it's high risk, high reward in some situations like that. So I love the Harmon Brothers. I love Chamber Media. I think they do something similar as well. I don't know if there's any other creative places, but that is it for today.

6:33And please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, five stars. It helps us a lot more than you would ever know. And we'll see you tomorrow.