Ep 541: Mastering the First Second: How Chris Erthel Hooks Attention in Meta Ads

0:00I helped 142 companies in e-com, so I've seen a lot. And I'm not kidding you, half of them send their traffic to the wrong page. I don't want ads to scream like, hi, hi, I'm an ad. You know, like all these formulas that everyone has. If you follow only all the formulas, then you also look like a very generic thing, which also like, you know, it's going to happen more and more with AI, but all the thing is going to be more uniform. This ad, I think, is the most copied ad that I've ever made. It's been ignored by the whole industry how important the comments are, and I've been preaching it since four or five years.

0:35But check the comments and work on the comments. Black Friday is coming up. I can give you one, one big tip.

0:48It's the D2C podcast, and today I am having a reunion with my friend Chris Erthel. Chris and I met, was it 2018 in Barcelona, Spain? It was actually the final event I ever did with iStack training in my previous event life, the Affiliate World crew. And I don't remember how we got connected, but what I do remember is you being my favorite speaker at this event. You brought, not to hype you up too much, but you came with a ton of dynamism. You came with a lot of really practical ad advice for people. You were doing really cool things all the way back then with AR and being able to sort of simulate cool animations in your ads, I remember.

1:27So we kept in touch loosely throughout the years and really glad to have you on the DTC podcast, man. I'm very glad to be here. And yes, exactly. So you can actually jump into this right away. So everyone, hello, audience. I'm a German. I'm from Munich. But the important thing is when you said it was your last event, it was actually one of my first events. So this is why like in this speech, I wanted to pack so much things because I remember Eric announced me to the stage and I was like, okay, this is one of my first big speeches. The first one out of the European market where like global, I was preparing for this like crazy.

2:03And I was wearing exactly this outfit, this shirt, this one. So I was like to honor Eric and to honor this thing. Let's go back to it. Just that day I had my hair short and colored fully white. If you remember, like I remember you're crazy. The guy with the crazy white hair, he really, he had nothing to sell. He really gave a lot of nuggets. And yeah, and I try to keep my speeches like this. I've always like, you know, even the speech that I wanted to hear when I was learning, you know, like full on knowledge. A couple of things I brought for today of like, you know, no bullshit, like tips that really work for especially e-com right now.

2:41Nice. Well, I want to get into that. But for our audience who didn't hear you in Barcelona, give us a little bit of your hero's journey in this e-commerce world. Hero's Journey would be like during my uni, I did my exchange semester in South Carolina and was partying every day and like going crazy. And I can really recommend that because in the end, a lot of things I learned in uni is connections and, you know, social things. So I was like, I really was like, I would do it again like this. But after uni, all my friends were like, we're going to be founders. We're going to, you know, start this, start that.

3:14And I was like, I didn't really think about it. I would just take something. And I was looking for, I was studying in Vienna and living from Munich. So I got a couple of good job offers there. But then my heart was always in Spain. So I was like, no, I got to come to Barcelona. And then from there, I looked and I didn't find the same job opportunities for the big car brands or all those things. I would find Germany and Austria. And I was like, all right. So then guess I'm going to become a founder. And started things and failed things. My best friend, we tried an app called Selfie Hunter. where both cameras activate.

3:46Like we always tried things for sometimes for a month, no? Like we tried selling shoes to California with another friend, sold two pairs after a month. Okay, not a market, kept on trying, kept on trying. And then eventually found more and more things. And now I have like 14 projects where I started in my life. Recently, and a couple of ones, yeah, still alive and very good. But again, recently started one SaaS company that I thought was a genius idea where you can see the ad spend of every ad because I was in Japan in Uniqlo. So Uniqlo booked me to help them. And they told me like, hey, look at the ads of H &M because they are crushing it in Poland and we are not.

4:24So I went through the ad library, all the ads and step by step. If EU ad transparency, you can see the ad spend. But it took forever. And I was like, there's gotta be someone writing a code for that. No one did it. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna find a coder, do it. And that company failed. A lot of people are like, this is a good idea, but it also failed. And it's an important thing. and like I've been failing a lot and winning a lot. And so in general, like, you know, if you do this, you win. Like in general now is a very good moment, but a lot of things went well and went bad. One thing I'm very proud of is helping the United Nations.

4:59Like I always wanted to be working there, but they never took me. And then I could be there as a consultant with a World Food Program and share the meal of the app. And there we even got, there was one call even with the director of the World Health World Food Organization, World Food Program and Max Zuckerberg. And Zuckerberg even gave them 1 million repeating budget every year, which they can spend in ads without having to pay it, which is very beautiful. That was a cool project I'm very proud of. And that now has like 200, I think 30 or even more, like minimum, it could be more by now, but I can dare minimum, minimum 230 million meals shared in this one.

5:36So that's really cool. And there was one, as I'm German, I also do have a lot of Swiss and German companies, especially going to US and these things. And there was one German skincare company and they reached out when they were small. Small, I mean like 30 million. And then they only did influencer marketing, no Facebook ads. And then we made it together to 107 million and then they sold for 330 million. So that was also a cool case to be a part with. And then I learned, like I got very good compensation there, very good bonus. But then that's how I learned of like, you know, you want to take equity in companies.

6:13So now I also, either I help very big companies now or I do startups. So then I also take equity because, you know, like that would have been a smart thing there on that exit. And then what is your specific area of expertise? Is it in the creative side of things like it was back in Barcelona or is it sort of whole business processes? Yeah, it's still creative side. But obviously, like after so long, like whole business processes and a lot of the things, it's like, look, when we make very good creatives, we focus on the first second. But also then nowadays, I'm very expert. I want to be among the two or three best in the world when it comes to the first second of a meta ad, especially Facebook newsfeed, to be honest, and all the audiences.

6:55But we'll go into this. but obviously after doing this for so many years like 10 10 plus years now i know a lot a lot about the landing pages about the so a lot of times when i help projects and companies i'm like okay we need to do this but you need to change this and and also offers like another thing so the thing that i really want to be world class is exactly which offers to test how to test them a b testing and creatives and things i'm good at is global strategy internationalization and a page like which which page to send the traffic to this i love testing but also um to um yeah what elements on my website to test now and here if you want i can actually share the first big knowledge bomb with the audience because it's been pissing me off but this has been done this error has been done by so many people and i want to just help people to not do it so half like now I helped 142 companies in e-com.

7:52So I've seen a lot and I'm not kidding you. Half of them send their traffic to a wrong landing page, like to the wrong page. And for me, I want to quickly help people to just like, you know, you don't have to work with me to just do it. And you will very likely win. So over 99%, there has been one case that has been equally good in every other case. it's been a clear winner sending the Facebook traffic to the collection page. Let's say one example, you have a belt company, okay? You have like 400 different belts. Obviously, one is a clear bestseller. What everyone does makes the ad of a bestseller.

8:29That's right. What everyone does then is like sending the traffic to a bestseller, to this one product, to be like, hey, it's one less, Chris, it's one less click. It makes sense. They're going to go through easier and i'm like no can we please run a b test on this they have to first trust you that you're a big company if they see okay this have like one product it doesn't seem big love trust is gone if i see 400 products very good another one i helping has 14 000 products in the sleep area like amazing you know like the trust but um this and also your average order value will be much much bigger and people will still buy the best seller they saw on the ad but they will they more they will have more trust the numbers couldn't be more clear that's why i'm telling like everyone like every time i start working with someone i look at this first because i've been seeing it the last three years of like it's done half by half people is done wrong so i can just like this with and it tastes tastes 10 10 seconds you go change the landing page on the ad which you can even do a mass change and it's such a quick hack and it can bring up to 20 percent higher higher average order values and return ad spend which you know you really want to have It's such a direct marketer's mindset, I think, to go from the ad directly to the page to reduce all friction.

9:44But it's more of that brand marketer's mindset where you want to introduce them to your world of products as well. Because that could influence them down the line, right? Exactly. So that's something I love sharing things of like, you know, just do this. Like if you're currently sending it to your bestseller and you have more than seven products. If you really have like only bestseller and one more, maybe, okay. But if you have more than seven products and you're doing this, then please try it. And then if you want, send me a thank you message to my Instagram or my LinkedIn or whatever. But yeah, you will see.

10:15You will have a more profitable company. I've often thought about the amount of intelligence that's available in the ad library. And I've thought about a way to sort of like score a brand or something about how many different kinds of ads they're running, what their velocity of ads are. So I'm interested in this sort of SaaS product that you said that maybe didn't reach the heights that you wanted it to, but I bet you've gleaned a lot about the kinds of ads that work best in accounts by looking so deeply into the meta ad library. Exactly. Like for me, and also that's why we still, like internally, we are still using it, but we just, you know, we tried to, I think, what price did we have?

10:51We tried to put it to market at 29 or 39 euros. And it was growing. So it's like, don't get me wrong. It was not like people did get it, but it was just growing slow. And none of us, we were free co-founders. None of us wanted the slow growing company because we all have other companies that are fast growing. That was one of the things. But I have to tell you, we were really sure that at one point the banks, everyone will be interested in this because you can see the ad spend of everything. You can see which one they should invest in. There was so much data in it. But I guess I could say the market was wrong, but I guess we were wrong.

11:28But yeah, I'm really happy we did it, honestly. Like it was really a fun, fun project. Like it was a side project, but it was a fun, fun side project. And so you mentioned your expertise within that one second of videos. Talk to me a little bit more about that. What should our audience be thinking about in terms of all the different ways you can maybe maximize the effectiveness of that first second? Yeah. Nowadays, where it's different, like obviously what I can always tell you is like try very, very different, different ad areas in this way you know like so currently like i help currently a lot of fashion brands fashion is currently the hottest industry like you know how it was 10 years ago sunglasses was the hottest then eight years ago it was jewelry then it was skincare now it's fashion there's always cycles no so currently is a lot of fashion and so here there's different things now like imagine now an ad that starts with three things three things that uh that people say about X brand and then there's different people very quickly like very quick burst and they say three words about it which in this case we thought about it as a branding ad and it's getting a crazy roars so now we're doing it for this and for other brands because it's a branding effect because you have like three things like in this skincare industry no microplastic and so on but like but in this case we have like it's a very profitable ad and it gets into hooks right away you know like then obviously and bold statements is something that is an evergreen.

12:59Like you want audience questions. If there's a comment on Facebook and then you put it there and you answer a question that nearly everyone has before buying this. When you go into this, like let's get your attention. Another thing that I love is always a bit more harder and not all the founders want to do it. But every time we can, we want humor. Like an ad that the first second makes you laugh. Like something goes wrong or something happens. you know like um i think there was this one ad that i showed when when this car drives over this guy but in a funny way of like you know like he is like it's a comedy ad it's a clear like it sounds bad but it's a clear comedy ad and uh and uh you know he's driving over people because milk's running out and then there's this milkshaker so these ads that like get get people to laugh at something but then also in the first second because now it's been shifting a bit so we also same fashion industry we're seeing a lot of like these clean close-up shots which actually don't have a first second that hooks you in a way of like like an ad but just the product is so beautiful like you see like this very beautiful i one company i'm helping i'm making this seven eight thousand euro earrings but they're crazy cool so they would have like a woman's ear close up and this really cool like earring but it's like filling the whole ear it's like a crazy thing and you see and this is the first second we get your attention but then the ad is just slowly moving around it it doesn't look like an ad and this is something that obviously i don't want ads to scream like hi hi i'm an ad you know like all these formulas that everyone has like put the bold statement there put this here put free usps like if you follow too much only all the formulas then you also look like a very generic thing which also like you know it's going to happen more and more with AI, that all the thing is going to be more uniform.

14:51So sometimes we think out of like, how can we do something that really fits to the audience, like a snowboard company, we would start with a double backflip. That would get the attention, you know, like I think you also do a mountain sports. So, you know, like you would get attention if you get like a crazy double backflip and then you see the snowboarding clothes when we're just putting the clothes. But also in fashion, a lot of times, now another first second, and I can talk about this forever as you see, Now, first, second is like a model spinning around, clothes change, spinning around, clothes change.

15:21And she's always spinning. And you always see different clothes from all the angles. So that's another thing. And this, again, plain, no text. So it doesn't look like an ad too much. So nowadays, we have some ads that are really screaming, I'm an ad. But then they are really optimized with a cool question and cool bold statement. Then also, we have clean things. And we let them run because every brand is slightly different. And you want to have both. It's so easy to make both. and that's it. But you really want to check and have these toolbox of different areas. But in the first second, also like camera motions where you have a fast film in or a friend of mine made an ad standing under a lamp and then he went out of it and he was like, this is a pattern interrupt.

16:04And then he started talking about what he wanted to talk about, you know. So there's a million things, but you want to get a way to get, you know. I always say on Facebook it's easier because on Facebook there's a lot of still, Facebook is still especially, what I love to target is Facebook for the audience 55 plus. And their content is still their friend posting what they had today for lunch. So you have to just make something that's more engaging than what they just saw. On TikTok, that's why I always tell my brands, go to TikTok. We're going to also do on TikTok, not even to make money there, But we want to compete there because if we can get good enough ads to win on TikTok, because it has to be better than organic content, then we can really win it big on Instagram.

16:49And the newsfeed, that hallowed newsfeed where you have those 55 plus people. I think that's performance marketers. Holy grail is that audience for sure. I saw some notes about your creative ad formulas that you talk about. What is a corner kick? Yes. Is that old? Is that old news? It was ChachiPG dug this up. It said heartbeat editing, surprise hooks, and corner kicks for our North American audience, soccer, football. It's the corner. We call it the corner trick. So now you would have an ad. So let's say now you would have a woman wearing a sunglass for a sunglass company. And then all of a sudden, it falls like a page of a book.

17:30Let me see. Here, I have this one here. It falls like this over. And what's behind is the website. and you see already all the different products and everything. So you get already very familiar of like, oh, this is how the website would look like. That's how other things they have. Oh, interesting. And then you click on it and you see exactly what was where when you clipped it, exactly this is what happened. It's just pre-framing, just sort of pre-framing the situation. Yeah, and you already put them into a mind, oh, I could click on this. By the way, that's very important. Where does, for your audience, let's everyone think about it, where does the first click go to many times?

18:09The first click, when they like an ad, where do they click first? Think about it for a second. The first click goes on, see more to see all the comments, especially on Facebook. And a lot of the brands, they don't take it serious enough how important it is to, first of all, answer all the questions, hide the bad comments, and even a lot of times we like to gently shift the discussion in the way we want. So by this we mean like I have one ad and all of a sudden I see, okay, this ad has seven rows on high ad spend. I mean like no comments yet. Okay, this ad could either be ruined now by a comment or it could get even better with some good comments.

18:54So what we then do, we click on share the link. You click on the ad and you can go like share this ad. you can share it in a whatsapp group with colleagues or friends and be like hey if everyone four or five people could make a nice comment here of like i really thought about getting it and then this but then i bought it and arrived after 24 hours and it's really even better than i expected something like this that's what you want to hear or i was skeptical like but like in a way good comments that are real and good comments that the audience will like oh yes that's good to hear good to hear it comes fast, good to hear it has this quality, good to hear if it's close and they're marketed as very soft, for example for one of my clients, we're like, oh this is really incredibly soft, the softest top I've ever had you know, like this is something that you should take much more seriously we take it so seriously at, the other day I saw someone talking about it I was like, finally someone else talking about it because it's been ignored by the whole industry how important the comments are and I I've been preaching it since four or five years, but check the comments and work on the comments.

20:03I remember Michael Brenner came to our, another German, I believe, came to our event previously that we did in Berlin. And he did a mastermind talk about increasing the revenue from his product, something like 20 or 30 % just by being really diligent by curating those comments in the way you've described. Yeah, he's very great, exactly. He knows what he's talking about. One of the things that came up in my research, my ChatGPT research, was your use of AR. And I've been seeing some, I don't know if that's accurate. I've been seeing, I remember you gave a presentation about ads, and it's similar to the corner kick, essentially, ads that would kind of reframe the ad unit so that it would be doing something, you know, where you'd think you'd be looking at an ad image, but it would be shifted just suddenly.

20:50And it actually was a video that kind of broke the frame. and you saw, I think it was like a hand reaching in and grabbing some sunglasses out of a carousel or something like that, putting some AR in ads. I saw a really interesting website the other day that had all of their product images on their landing pages interacting. So someone in the top frame is wearing a sweater and they have an ice cream cone and they dump it and the ice cream falls into someone's bowl into the image below or whatever. And I was wondering what - That's really cool. The website idea I never had, that's actually i might i might copy that if you see that to some some brands now um exactly yeah um yeah like we we love to do that you know like um having having effects that so surprise people this ad i think is the most copied ad that i've ever made like i've seen it and i'm really happy because i've been showing it and i've seen it like i i would really say more than 80 variations of it by brands who are like you know just didn't ask but just took it but this is you know the best compliment ever.

21:51So like, you know, it's beautiful. Are there other examples of ways that you've done sort of innovative animations in ads that have worked well? This, a shout out to a colleague, Bosco, he came up with a following thing of like, for Mella, for the Sunglass brand, no? He came up with the effect of like, we made an Instagram effect. A friend who lives in Bali, he made an Instagram effect, an Instagram filter. And then you click on the ad, it doesn't open the landing page but it opens with filter and then you can try all the Meller sunglasses on so that was a really beautiful thing and working well but the truth is Meta doesn't care about your business and they don't care about sometimes crushing your hopes on certain things it's a thing we have to all learn at some point I've been going through it and everyone will so they just decided I think two years ago you just stop with the filters and they just crushed that part of that fully.

22:50And they just do it from one day to the other. And, you know, like, I mean, it's just gone. So that was a really beautiful idea and it worked really well, but they don't, you know, they don't care. Zuckerberg crushed it. Classic Mark Zuckerberg. One of my other notes here is just the idea that, like you've mentioned a little bit about A-B testing and the importance of sort of A-B testing all aspects of your funnel. Is it true that you try to build a culture of testing where you're running over 40 A-B tests per day? or is that hallucination on ChatGPT's part? Per week, per week. Per week, okay.

23:20That makes more sense. And then give me some examples maybe of like A-B tests that are in your go-to that you will always test. The most go-to A-B tests in the past was like, you know what, in the past it was like you would optimize and you could optimize towards telling Facebook, we want purchases, but you could also tell them we want add to cards or we want view content. and so there was a time but that was a while ago where view content was outperforming so much to getting purchases like you would get just so much more data points but then I think Facebook at one point saw this and corrected this in a way of like very few people figured this out and they then had a higher ROAS but Facebook was like most people click on purchase so I think they just tweaked the algorithm so that it purchased it took it more into account and so and we lost this advantage but there was like a for a long time there was a go-to but in nearly all the cases was a winning one now i would say the most typical a b test we make is now we have one content piece working and now we still work with a lot of real creators and now we let's say for a big brand now a very well working ad a typical big brand wants like a 3.8 rows so this one ad gets a 4.4 ROAS.

24:40It's good. We're all happy with it. It's not like magic, but it's very high budgets behind it. It's a very nice performance. So what we do, now we paid like, let's say, 2 ,000 euros for its content creator. This big brand has a lot of budget. So we're like, okay, now let's get 10 other women in a similar price range and let her perform the same things, the same ad. Be like, you know, it works really good because she was in this fancy living room. Let's put them there, have the same thing. And then a lot of times, and then we will see that six of them perform way worse, four of them perform way better, and one of them performs really good.

25:16And we just earned a lot and learned a lot. So there are a lot of the tests that really make a difference is how the audience reacts to different content creators and who can really talk to the audience. And that's something that might shock you. Again, question to the audience. One big brand that gas, How much money they spent for her content to one content creator? Everyone guess. And then the next question is, guess the revenue that they made with her. Like tracked revenue thanks to her. So Facebook ads with her and her post and so, guess the amount that she earned in a single year. 100K. 6 million.

26:006 million. How did that work? She was just right. She made her custom skincare collection with them, posted strongly about them, had over, I think, 2 million, 3 million Germanys, but very loyal followers in Germany. She was very talented in sales. That's something that normally they are not. And now guess the track revenue that we put into her, how much have we brought? Let's say 10 million. 31. 31. So that was the brand with$107 million, you know, but$31 million were out of her. So we always said, I know he's not so known in Canada and the US, but like she would earn more that year than Thomas Müller.

26:45Thomas Müller is like the football player. He now actually went to Vancouver. Yeah, I've heard of him. Yeah, the Whitecaps. Exactly. So that was a performance deal then. She got paid more because the ad did so well. What does that deal look like? No, it was actually, it wasn't a performance deal because the manager was not so smart. It was really, they just kept rising prices for the posts for when we use her for this. But she was not, it was not a performance deal. Like she could have gotten more if she had been a performance deal. Yeah, I guess so. But she just kept, it just kept working because it had such great audience fit with her and her sales ability.

27:21Exactly. You mentioned when we were talking in the pre-interview, a company that you recently helped exit for a solid nine figures. Can you talk about that situation a little bit? Yeah, this I can talk because a lot of, now it's currently a lot of things happening in the market and good things. But this one we can go into detail, yeah. Tell me about it. What was the brand and what was your role with it? Yeah, so for this one, and this has happened quite a lot now. So now the current case is a lot of like mid-sized companies and they are around 50 million. And they come to me like, hey, Chris, now we've been there for a while and like we need the next push now because I've been doing this a lot.

27:59And then for me, it's quite easy to help companies to internationalize. A lot of them are Germans. They're like, hey, we want to get out of there and do more. And also what's limiting us? Like why can we not spend more profitable? Like what are the limiting factors? And that's quite easy. In their case, I can go quite easy into the details. And so now, for example, now these days I'm talking to a brand, like a 200-year-old brand with 14 ,000 products. and they are like they have been the last six years stuck at 50 million and the last you know like they are super old 200 years old like so many generations family-owned business they're 50 and now a new person got in the brand like you know like took it from over from his dad and he is like my age and he's like okay now it's time to you know make this way bigger and his goal is 500 million now he's like chris can we talk about how we can do this together and also So we're currently structuring a deal similar to the deal I had with this HelloBuddy with a skincare company.

28:58But with them, so I was quite, they really told me like, Chris, I know you're doing other things, but we really need you quite hands on. We really need you like, in this case, now I can do it with Les, but they're like, we really need you for 20 hours a week. But you really help us hire the right people and train the right people. You know, like being an interim CMO. And then I was there for quite a while because it was going really good. But it was like hire right people, train right people, and then help us. They had an agency, help us move away from an agency and have it in-house because they already thought, okay, we want to sell one day.

29:34And it's much easier to sell to a big brand. They sold to Henkel. Maybe you know about them. Yeah, I know Henkel, yeah. They sold to Henkel. And obviously Henkel wanted to have the in-house skill of like Facebook marketing also, you know. and so like if they had an agency they would have gotten a way way worse deal and here the biggest thing i can share with you is um i convinced the the two founders and we talked a lot about all right so now they were doing a lot of like 30 discount on the big big events you know and i was telling them 30 it just doesn't hook it's like it's um it's not quite like of course we get sales and we are growing with this but I'm telling you at this point I think the numbers if I have them correctly because it was been a while ago but I'm pretty sure it was around they got an average order value of nearly 100 so it was good but also 29 euros cost per action, like cost per purchase you know and it was quite high with 30 % then and then we were like I was testing like can we please have budget to test and I want to prove you with numbers that 40 % would make the whole thing explode.