Trump Rejects Pleas From Business For More Clarity On Tariffs: ‘They Always Say That’, He Drove 74,374,172 Impressions Through Making, TikTok US Generates Over 12 Billion In Ad Spend, Do YouTube Ads Perform? Lessons From 190 Tests

0:00Let's talk about the tariffs because I was talking to one of our clients today and the tariffs if they go through will affect him pretty hard let's just say he's in construction and you know you put over here Trump rejects pleas from business businesses for more clarity on tariffs quoting they always say that yeah and you know how many of the market today right what the markets in a shitter yeah I think the Dow was down last I checked like 810 if it goes up 7 I know 890 if it goes on 7 % more we're in bear territory yeah S &P is down 155.63 yeah so let's give our let's give our thoughts on on the tariffs overall because they they don't affect us directly but indirectly they do because they do because our clients yeah it affects everyone because even if it doesn't affect you it affects your cost of living and to be clear it does affect us as consumers because we end up bearing the cost um but i think there's 4d chess that Trump is playing here and we're not saying we support him or not support him.

1:02It's more so to say that we have coming up on$39 trillion in debt and to refinance that right now at the current 10-year rates, it's really expensive to refinance it. Do they have to refinance? It would be good to refinance it because if you assume that Trump is really, he wants to have a really good legacy, which I think he does, right? He wants to bring our debt down and he wants to make America much more prosperous for the long term And so it's in his if he wants to have that big legacy. It's in his interest to do that That's how I see it. So then he just needs you. I think we're on a similar page I think he wants rates to go down, but he's explicitly said he wants rates to go down and Fed Powell is doing whatever he wants, but it went from Most people assuming or the market assuming I believe one rate cut in 2020 five to now three rate cuts he basically is he's playing chicken with paul or not paul volcker paul volcker is the guy that jacked interest rates up like 18 20 or something um but he's basically which with with powell he's like look if you're not going to lower interest rates i'm going to do it for you i'm going to crash the markets and then you're going to have to lower interest rates and remember we've been saying on this podcast a couple times it's going to have to get worse before it gets better because of all the drunken spending we've done and all the mismanagement we've had in the last couple years not trying to get too political here but most countries that go bankrupt it's because they take on too much debt and they're spending too much and he wants to be known as the guy that flipped that around and we'll see what happens there but I think largely up to right now he's used these tariffs to bluff and it's worked because he's gotten a lot of deals and he's known as a deal maker right so hopefully he can deal make his way into getting us into a good economy again.

2:50I just know if ideally inflation would stay down ideally no tariffs you know being added because I think it's causing a lot of chaos and a good economy and interest rates lower I think I said inflation lower and interest rates lower and no more tariffs. You've seen the interviews right so with the treasury secretary he's like he's basically saying it's going to have to get worse before it gets better and then Trump just did an interview the other day I think maybe yesterday just saying that like look it basically saying the same thing it's um it's it's tough but like you know what what would you rather have like you want us to continue going on like this like we can't yeah i agree we can't keep spending anyone who keeps spending money that they don't have eventually you're going to run into trouble like we need to treat it's the government's not a business but we should treat it like it is a business we can't just keep spending where money not there.

3:40Yeah you have one here I don't know if it's a typo he drove 74 million impressions through making or is it marketing? Through marketing I think. Here let me open it up. So okay levels oh okay okay through making yes I did say this okay so this guy levels.io Peter levels he's a next level marketer this came from Alex Lieberman who founded Morning Brew. so he's driven 74 million impressions across 100 posts on x since launching his flying game remember earlier i was talking about you can make these games so he made it public that he's making this game he's charging money for this game right now too um just to put this into context here's how much money it costs to buy this many impressions on the major social platforms on x 479 million dollars sorry no no 479 thousand dollars okay meta 605 thousand dollars tiktok 220 thousand dollars YouTube 160 ,000 snap for 77 and Pinterest for 47 and I just think it's impressive that this guy was building in public this game and then now he has not only that many impressions but he actually has people paying it that's crazy I didn't even know about this game yeah and this is this is why I said he made some he did 74 million impressions through making Jason Fried the founder 137signal said he's not marketing he's making and through that making and sharing marketing simply happens It's a byproduct of being great at the fundamentals of what he does and how he does it.

5:08That's why he's great Speaking of ad costs you see that tick-tock generates 30 billion in ad revenue. You saw the US numbers though No out of the 30 billion US generates around 12. Yeah, yeah Go on. That's a crazy portion some other company is going to end up owning the majority of it or a hundred percent of it whatever the government makes him do you know alexis ohanian was like the i think the day he did the dig announcement the re-announcement he said he wants to put put together a group to buy tiktok i think he's in one of the bidding groups yeah i do believe that tiktok u.s should stay owned by tiktok bite dance or whatever you want to call it it's a better experience for advertisers Because if you're running a global campaign, if they own it all, it can just be seamless.

5:53It's just easier for us. Now, I know the government has issues over privacy concerns and things like that, but most users who use TikTok don't care about any of this stuff. TikTok users are just like, we like TikTok. Cool. Sounds good. They don't care if it's US-owned, Chinese-owned. It could be Australian-owned, Nigeria-owned. It doesn't make a difference. They just like the app. Just let it be and just put your restrictions on them to make sure they're not doing bad stuff and I've heard some people complain. Oh Look at tick-tock China the content is much better for kids than tick-tock us actually not true.

6:28It's not true No, so I thought it was true where they would only force educational content And then my barber who's Chinese he has family in China It's like no, it's even worse in China because they view even like even even stupider things, right? So yeah, they actually don't censor that. Well, that goes to my point, because I was gonna say, well if people want to complain about that, why aren't they complaining about Instagram and their content being terrible for youth here in the US anyways? Yeah, people just complain about anything and everything. By the way, I want to come back to the tariff thing real quick.

6:57Dude, I've been using Grok for all this, it's great. So Trump says this, he's like, we're bringing wealth back to America, that's the big thing. And he emphasized a tremendous foundation for the future. And here's where he gives China credit. He's like look don't look at the stock market because that's you can't really watch the stock market because we operate in quarters Americans operate in quarters whereas China because it's coming from top down they're operating in Centuries right they're thinking long and when you look at by the way when you watch videos on China how they operate as a country It's it's pretty clean.

7:29It's pretty impressive what they're doing and you look at the the drones They they're they own basically most of the drone production Yeah, even our US drone. So they're extremely competitive, right? And I think, you know, I see this as an American Taiwanese person, that they are, they're underestimated, I believe. You look at DeepSeek, you look at Manus, I think they're severely underestimated. And, you know, whatever they're doing works for them. Now, that's not the point. Trump also says, I hate to predict things like recessions. But he did acknowledge a period of transition due to the scale of his economic policies and did not rule out economic turbulence But he's saying like basically yeah, it needs to get worse before it gets better I think he's pushing the Fed to take action if the Fed starts reducing rates, I think everyone's happy because Most people want to look at how much people are paying for on credit cards and this is affecting conversions When I look at conversion data for most e-com sites compared to a few years ago when people were being deposited money into their bank accounts, at least when we look at U.S.

8:29traffic, conversion rates were higher. And when I say higher, on average, we're seeing around 14, 15 % higher. Yeah. Look, I think if he doesn't, in his mind, if he doesn't do this aggressive tariff strategy, it's going to take a long time for rates to come down. And he's just like, if we're going to drop it, let's just drop it all at once. So it says here, the final thing, we can move on. Trump's comments reflect confidence in his tariff strategy as a tool to strengthen the US economy long term while sidestepping a clear stance on an imminent crash Leaving open the possibility of short-term challenges.

9:01But again, if you look at his Treasury secretary, he's basically saying like Expect it to I think he's basically signaling like you can expect something to happen in a negative way. So And by the way, when's the last time we had an official recession official recession? I don't know but it's felt like a recession for a few years now. It has but We've been kicking the can down the road. Sometimes you just need to clean the gunk out Yes, and I don't understand their definition of a recession because it keeps change technically we had it in 2020 We there's two quarters of negative GDP growth. We had that they just never defined it Yeah, but they keep changing the definition because before wasn't it Negative quarter.

9:39Yeah. Hope hopefully I don't know different different admin now. Okay. Which one do you want to pick? Let's see does YouTube ads perform lessons from a hundred and ninety Okay, so this one's good. This one's from Olivia Corey from I think she works on analytics company called house So she just said we just published our full YouTube research House house you're talking about that to us H-A-U-S. Yeah, H-A-U-S dot I O it automates marketing incrementality testing Oh, yeah, we do it always interesting to me So, you know the difference between incrementality testing versus a B testing? No, but I thought you were talking about how's H-O-U-Z-Z.

10:19No, oh no, that's the different, that's the interior design one. But okay, let's talk about this for a moment. This is, marketers just like to redefine things, okay? So in your mind, A-B testing with you and me is okay, we're testing something, we're testing like one element. Against another. Another, and you're seeing which one has higher lift, and you're usually looking at the numbers, right? To see what, so incrementality testing is you're doing that, but the differentiator is you're focusing on how much lift you got. And I'm like, isn't that just A-B testing? So someone correct me if I'm wrong here like I could be being stupid, but I'm just like we're just trying to redefine these things You're you're you're just looking at That metric to see how much it changed Yeah, so incrementality testing is you're focusing on the lift that you got from you know The a versus the B or the B versus the a does that make sense?

11:04Just like an a B test where you focus on the lift exactly or the decline exactly so get it So again, I could be wrong here, but so she okay Let's go to the test or the the data that she has So featuring incrementality data, and it's such a hard word to say incrementality, A-B test, incrementality. How did this use A-B test? So from 74 brands and 190 experiments conducted over 16 months. Okay, so the study has been a true kid in a candy shop moment for me and is a remarkable body of work from Tyler Horner and the house team. Major takeaways, Google ads underreports YouTube's impacts by an average of 3.42x.

11:41That's a lot. Wow. YouTube is driving big halo effects across physical retail and Amazon and an average additional sales lift of 99 % beyond its impact to DTC sales okay when I first started my business the overwhelm was real I didn't have the tools to help me scale if only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind-the-scenes work Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started. The best part about it, it has everything you could need. Say you're ready to launch your own design studio.

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13:55That's framer.com, promo code MS. Framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. Number three, across all experiments in the study, YouTube's iROAS improved by an average of 79 % during the post-treatment window, signaling both a significant ramp-up and long-tail effect. I'm assuming iROAS means incrementality, return on ad spend. And I'm not going to read everything here. So YouTube reach campaigns can be used for direct response, only 12 % less efficient than video action campaigns. This one's interesting to me. Advertisers who's tested splitting out YouTube shorts by itself saw 20 % lower D2C iRO as on 55 % lower daily spend compared to VAC or demand gen addition to a 32 % increase in CPMs.

14:43High level here is YouTube ads works. Yeah, YouTube ads do work. They generate so much revenue and you and I have used it for a long time. It produces great I think YouTube is amazing for branding. If you have B2B, it works really well, and for B2C, it works well, too. That's one of the unique things about that social network. Not all of them work as well for B2B and B2C. Of course, I would say YouTube works better for B2C, but it actually does extremely well for B2B. We found that it's a little bit more expensive than Meta and Facebook, but the lead quality tends to be higher. Let's go back to our YouTube update, because you and I are spending more time on YouTube.

15:21So I saw you posted a new video last week and then yesterday I spent more time on the idea I find that the more time I personally spent on the idea and the actual packaging and then now I just use chat GPT for it It does way better What are you seeing with yours? Are you do you think you're going to take over the ideas at some point or what's the deal? I haven't Yeah, I already started taking over some of the ideas. I've taken over all the scripting. I Haven't taken over the editing because editing is good the editing is good but when we look at our pipe for youtube videos there's a lot in there that aren't necessarily my ideas but the new ones going forward call it two three months out people will start seeing much more marketing related topics that's interesting so we'll see in six months how we both have done better with our changes but i obviously the idea is the big impact thing yeah but you know your your ai one i think it what 400 000 views or something like that yeah yeah you just saw it right now four hundred eighteen thousand and your latest ones are more marketing related to you talk about branding and one-huh and I'm shifting towards more marketing and less quote unquote lifestyle yeah but some of the ones that are coming out in the next two months are non-marketing related but that's changing over time it's funny YouTube still looks at my channel it still looks at me as an SEO person so whenever I publish something on SEO it's boom right anything else to publish Really?

16:43Yeah, SEO boom every time. It's interesting. The best thing I learned from my whole YouTube experiment, we're spending an arm and a leg on editing. The editing is giving us tons of feedback from companies and people being like, love your content, it's very nicely produced. I read a lot of your comments from the new people and some people are like, I get a headache from all the, because it's all the switching. It's a lot, right? I've seen that, it's a lot of switching. What did you call that, fast cutting or what is it, Noah? Noah, what is it called? Fast cuts, yeah. Cause it constantly keeps you interested.

17:14It's like, if you're just watching me and my head moves around the whole time where it gets bigger and smaller, like it just keeps you engaged. But we keep it cause the metrics, when you look at the analytics, Way better retention. How much better? Like 30, 40%. 30, 40 % lift. That's super high. Hence the video views are much higher as well. So sometimes, I mean, look, there's the qualitative data that you get from the comments and then there's the quantitative data. You have to decide what to go with. In this case, he's going with the quantity. Yeah, I'm like, some people say they don't like it, but the retention's much better, so I'll go with the real data.

17:47Yeah, and plus, by the way, the people that comment are not necessarily the same people as the people that actually watch. And maybe people that watch don't care to comment because they've gotten the value already. I would just move on to another video. Eric knows me well. I'm a metrics guy. If 100 people say they have an issue, but all the numbers point up and to the right, then it doesn't mean you shouldn't listen to those people, but you've got to pick and choose how you listen to data. A great example of this is when we were doing our price testing for Ubersuggest, no joke, when I ran the survey, 90 plus percent of people, 90 plus percent said they'd rather have a lifetime offer than a monthly offer.

18:27I even put the price of the lifetime offer in there compared to the monthly. Almost everyone voted for the lifetime offer. Of course they did. When we look at the sign-ups, you want to guess what percentage of the sign-ups are actually lifetime? Like less than 5%. 15-ish. That's still pretty high. It's still pretty high, but that's drastically different than 90%. And when I say we ran a survey, we didn't survey 1 or 2 ,000 people. We were surveying our users who are using the product, and I think we surveyed like 40 ,000, 50 ,000 people. That's a lot of people. 90 plus percent said they would take the lifetime.

19:06How much do you charge for lifetime or did you charge for lifetime? I don't know. I haven't looked at our pricing page in a while. Call it 300 bucks. I'm taking a round guess. How much does Uber suggest now? I don't know. What? Dude, I don't pay attention to pricing. I get a weekly report when they run A-B tests, whether it's pricing or other things And I just see the results and I just go based on the numbers But the problem is we have so many different divisions in so many different countries and our offering in some countries are a little bit different So there's too many price points and offerings and all this kind of stuff to keep track of Yeah So my main thing is is I just look at the leaders who run each group I have regular calls with them and I just look at the data and I look to see if I believe it's the right decision for the company because sometimes they'll be like Neil We want to limit the free plan look at how many more upgrades we got when we ran a quick a b test I'm like, yes, but you're going to reduce the top of funnel in the long run and this is our advantage.

20:02I don't care for the short-term revenue because I think it's going to cause a long-term revenue hit. Anyway, that's where we're going to end it today. Thank you all for listening. Please don't forget to rate, view, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.