2180 - Insights on Modern Advertising Tactics with Unicorn Innovations' Maxwell Finn

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1:05with us right now it's maxwell finn a fellow orlanduan and uh maxwell you are the co-founder of unicorn innovations your website unicorn innovations.com maxwell it's great to have you it's good to be here man i'm excited we have bumped into one another uh over the years uh you know it's you know for folks that have been around a while in marketing or doing what they do It's a small world. But Maxwell, before we kind of get into what you do with Unicorn, for anyone who happens to be seeing the clip or video, you got a lot of cool nerd stuff behind you. Just a little bit. So I would imagine that might play into my first question here.

1:49And that is like, what are you into lately in terms of like, what are you geeking out on? Are there any shows, movies, TV games that you're like really into right now? Yeah. I mean, there's a, there's, there's quite a, I'm a big, big movie nerd, big TV nerd. But I think I game a lot like video gaming is like the thing that I do probably the most in, I go through cycles. I'll go through like a year or two years without without playing um because I have a very addictive personality so if I get into something like I get really into it and usually it's business related um but I've been playing a lot of Call of Duty lately I'm a big Call of Duty fan and specifically Call of Duty Zombies so like the new map just came out uh yesterday it's the third I think it was yesterday I was traveling so I forgot the release date but so I was up to like three three or three thirty last last night so if I'm not on my if I'm not on my eight plus game tonight it's because of Treyarch and Call of Duty, but it's fun because it turns my brain off, right?

2:47So it's one thing where it's like, if I'm watching movies or TV or even reading sometimes, especially audiobooks, I like to listen to audiobooks, it's hard to fully turn off. I'll be thinking a lot, right? My brain will still be ideas and brainstorming, which sometimes it's good when you talk about that. But when I'm gaming, it's like 100 % of my focus is on the thing because it's very active. And so I don't really have the ability to think about stuff, which is like almost therapeutic for how intense my days are usually? It is. And so, you know, sometimes you could look at, you know, downtime as being, well, you're not hustling or whatever.

3:21Like, that's okay. Like, that's good because, you know, if you're on and you're on six to eight hours a day, you know, it's better to be on at 100 % rather than, you know, be on at 60%, you know, 14 hours a day. I'm with you. Like, you know, I have to have that delineation. And particularly for those of us, you know, if you're working geographically independent, you don't necessarily have to go into an office, you work from home. You know, it's like, we need those demarcations. And, you know, that it's like, hey, I am not thinking about work. I'm not, you know, and especially, you know, if you're a founder, and you've got, you know, you're an innovator, and you're a visionary.

4:03Those ideas don't stop unless you actively, again, set a boundary, like boundary Resetting is a really valuable skill to learn in entrepreneurialism. It's, I mean, it is the thing that you don't learn until you've been in it for a while. And it's unfortunate because most people don't get to the point where they can be in it for that long to realize that thing. A lot of people get burnt out. And I don't really like the word burnt out because I've actually, I used to be more of a believer in burnout. But I've started to kind of, as I progressed in my career, believe more. it's burnout I think happens or the word burnout is from like doing things you really don't love like if you really love something you don't really get burnt out on it you want to do it all the time you're passionate about it right I think it's a combination of like you're just not doing the right thing you don't have the right system set up you don't have the right infrastructure set up you don't have the right scheduling you're not planning correctly right you're working too many hours on things that could have been delegated you become really when you're early on your career you're really bad at delegating and so you feel like you're working really hard not making progress because you're not working on the high lever thing.

5:09So there's all that stuff. But a lot of people don't get to the point where they figure all that out. And unfortunately, they just get washed out. They overwork themselves. They're like, this is not for me. And they don't learn the skills that would have made it a little bit easier for them. Yeah, well, Maxwell, let's talk about your superpowers, what you do when you're not shooting up zombies. You're riding unicorns. Share just a bit about what Unicorn Innovations is. I'm at a very high level. I've been running ads for 15 years. All I've really done in my entire adult life is help businesses acquire more customers.

5:49That's at a fundamental level. And so I've done that through multiple agencies, with four agencies, did the mass market, multi-office agency, full service, working with big 400 clients. I've done the high-end boutique agency. We've done coaching, education, teaching, consulting, advisory. We run businesses, kind of everything you can think of when it comes to operating in this space. And Unicorn kind of combines all of those things at a very, very selective high level. So we run ads. We run ads for just a handful of businesses. Most of those businesses we're equity partners in now. So we get ultra premium retainers.

6:25So we get paid a lot. But we also take equity and have upside in these businesses. We sit on the board of companies. We invest in some companies. we own a few properties in the e-commerce space that last year did about 30 million dollars um so kind of mid-eight figures and then also teach it and lastly we can maybe get to some point what we launched about a year ago is a ads manager program unicorn ads manager we actually help connect businesses with really talented ads managers media buyers so they can run ads for them and that's a really cool model the reason we did that's very interesting we can talk about why we did that and the problem with agencies and other things, but at a high level, that's what Unicorn does.

7:03So, so, so if I understand correctly, so a percentage of your companies, you're just basically going to be their, their marketing agency or the ad agency. And then there are going to be a percentage that you, or do all of them. Do you generally, as part of your agreement say, well, listen you know, we will probably work a little bit more inexpensively than just a paid ad agency, but we'd like some of the uptake. And then if that's the case, obviously there's a vetting process to make sure that there's great alignment and you believe in what they do, et cetera. Am I getting close to what your model is?

7:41We honestly don't reduce the retainers that much, but it's more so it's almost a prerequisite now for my partner, Jeremy, and I'd be directly involved in deals. There are deals that are not just cash, but they're cash and equity or cash instead of a profit share or some type of phantom equity, phantom stock, which is a lot easier because legally and stuff, you don't have to go through all the paperwork. It's just, hey, when we sell the business, essentially, we'll value the company at$100 million today. Hey, when we sell the business, anything over$100 million, you guys get 10 % of, 20 % of. So it's different creative deals and creative structures.

8:14But anything that we're directly involved in, we're overseeing growth strategy, we're bringing key players into the deal. we're going to get you know premium retainers uh if we run the ads we'll also get fees for that so sometimes it might just be we'll get paid to be kind of cmo type advisors for the business and help bring in the right people and oversee strategy but then if we're also having some of our team run ads and be directly involved unicorn will get a fee for that and in that specific instance yeah we're not going to uh you know uh charge crazy amounts there we're going to charge a premium because our team is talented and we need to cover our costs there.

8:51But we'll also recognize we're incentivized for the company to be profitable and grow because now we're partners in the business. So we don't want to, like that's where it gets interesting, right? The problem with a straight vendor-vendee relationship, a client-agency relationship, is there's not much long-term alignment, right? The focus is I'm an agency owner. And I'm not saying all agency owners, but at an average universal level is I care about closing deals, getting them in there, fulfilling them, closing more deals, closing more deals, closing more deals. And I don't really care. It's nice if you stay, but I just want to close the next deal, the next deal, the next deal.

9:27I'm just focused on acquisition. And if your business grows, it doesn't grow. It's not really a big deal for me. I just want to collect my fees. As long as you pay me, even if it's your last dollar, I'll take your last dollar. With the way we structure things, we're partners. We're true partners. And so what that means is that there's a point in time where we genuinely don't think that our team on the actual fulfillment side is the best team or be actually a better fit, either from a cost standpoint or just a unique channel they want to run standpoint. We're now incentivized to actually make an introduction.

10:00So we're making decisions that are aligned with what that founder, that business owner's decisions would be as well. And that's where it gets really cool. And we've seen a lot of great success there. And there's even deals where we're partners in AIGC company, a generative creative company and makes like life like avatars and stuff. And we were running the ads for them for six months. We had some disagreements on the ad side, even though we were getting good results, they were raising a series A, they were just some different KPIs that we're looking for. And so we got to a point where we said, hey, it's probably not the best fit that we run the ads, but that's okay.

10:31We're equity partners in the business now. So we're not collecting fees on the ad side anymore, but we're still partners in the business. They just raised a large round of funding. Our equity is more valuable. So we're still tied in there on compensation, but we're just not collecting fees and that's okay. Yeah. Well, so this begs the question, you know, you've been working in advertising for quite some time. Here we are, you know, coming into the middle of 2025. What is the state of the union for paid advertising today? Hard. In one word, hard. It's changing rapidly. It's very interesting because you're simultaneously simultaneously having a boom in technology that's making things easier and democratizing marketing and acquisition and basically doing everything with ai it's i mean there are we could spend hours just talking about nerding out on stuff like i do this my lead media buyer we're up every night like just talking about stuff i'm sharing apps with them and he's coming back the next day doing stuff i mean i can code websites i can code apps i can code full development projects i have no engineering experience but i can build whatever i want now because there's tools like vo There's tools like Lovable.

11:43There's these amazing apps, Replit, out there where I can put a prompt in and build an entire website, build an entire app. It's not going to be Google or Meta level, but it's going to be pretty good MVP. And then I can move it into production. I can, you know, now with ChatGPT 4.0, their new image gen, I can make static image ads at scale once the API opens up. But like right now I can do one-to-one. I can make for social. I can make all kinds of crazy graphics, infographics and things. I can take a link from a Statista article about the state of advertising, the question you just asked, and it has all the stats.

12:18And I can give it a chat to GPT and say, turn this into a visually engaging infographic for an Instagram carousel. I would give it a better prompt than that. But it would give me back an infographic using the stats and data from that article that I can now post on social media. Things that would have taken hours before I can downdo in minutes. And so that's made things really cool, really easy, faster. but at the same time it's gotten more competitive more expensive we've lost a lot of if you're a direct response marketer you've lost a lot of the tools that you used to have on the platforms a lot of the buttons you could push the levers you could pull the the kind of this black box environment that meta has and google has and tiktok has and snapchat has where you don't really know what's going on they're making that more and more of a black box and so it's gotten harder over here to run this stuff, but you've got a lot more tools over here to create assets and develop really cool stuff.

13:14So I think where we're going with this is the advertisers, the marketers, the solopreneurs that are running their own ads and doing their own marketing, the ones that are really relying on the hacks and the latest hot strategy and the technical stuff, and I duplicate this thing five times and six times, set this bid here and do this, and the button pushers, they're really going to struggle. The people that are really going to thrive are the individuals that understand the most important levers to pull, which is your offer, your creative, your angle, what makes you really unique, right? What can I do from a creative standpoint that's going to be something nobody else has seen before?

13:55I'm not just going to an app like Foreplay and searching. Let's say I'm a company selling dry erase markers, right? and I go to China and I order a bunch of them and I have markers, I'm ready to sell them. Most people, they're going to go, what are other market companies doing with Facebook ads? I'm going to go to the Facebook ad library, look at it, and I'm going to do something similar. You are never going to succeed in 2025 doing that. What you need to do is either one of two things. How can I sell this in the most novel, creative, unique way ever? Like I'm going to go out on the street and do art competitions and draw offs with people.

14:38Things that are outside the box and nobody else is doing that's going to be entertaining, engaging content. People are going to watch it. They're going to wonder what tool they're using. Or targeting underserved demographics nobody's talking to. And this is something that a lot of really big brands have blew up in the last few years did. You look at a company like Black Rifle Coffee. Black Rifle Coffee, multi-billion dollar company, entered a highly, highly commoditized market, coffee. It's a really, coffee is a really, really hard market. Any type of product where the switching costs are really high, meaning most people who drink coffee, they already have their routine.

15:15It's a ritual for people, right? So it's, I'm a Starbucks person. I'm a Dunkin' person. I have a Keurig. I have an espresso. That's their thing, right? Like for me, I grew up in Jersey, so I love Wawa. For anyone watching knows, if you're on the East Coast, Tri-Sandar, you know Wawa, right? And so now they're in Florida. So I'd go to Wawa every single morning and that's part of my routine. So getting somebody to switch, really, really tough. But they built a multi-billion dollar company. And the reason they did that is because the founders, Evan Hafer, Schaefer, Hafer, he was in the military. They took this company and he branded it as a kind of conservative coffee company.

15:53It's for pro-military, the veterans, first responders, people that are patriotic. That's how they branded the company. and it worked really, really well because every other coffee company kind of just talking to everybody, very generalist. The people that they were speaking to felt kind of underserved. They weren't talked to and they found that pain point. They found a mutual enemy and people like to throw rocks at an enemy together. And so those are ways that if you're looking to build a business today, you need to either have some really, really outside the box marketing strategies. You need to have some type of big mega influencer.

16:26It needs to be like Mr. Beast or Logan Paul. There needs to be something like, you know, kind of influencer creator led brand that gives you a huge X factor, or you're taking a commoditized product or competitive product, and you're targeting, hyper targeting a big enough, but niche enough market and going really, really heavy in your messaging. So again, that's kind of trying to condense a little bit, but the TLDR of that is if you can do those things, if you can focus on marketing psychology, if you can focus on the offer, if you can focus on the fundamentals of business marketing and not the lever and button pushing, then you could thrive.

17:02But if you're focusing on the hacks and the tactics and strategy and doing things the way they've been done the last 10, 15 years on online ads, it's going to be very, very tough for you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for the mini TED Talk. We'll end it here. There we go. Max, there's so much that I wish we had more time. I want to lead people to your LinkedIn because you share some really great quality articles. And there's one, if we had more time, I would love for people to understand the history of, you talked about Barclays and the Torches of Freedom campaign for Lucky Strike, which is just a fascinating story on human psychology and behavior and how advertisers, marketers, politicians, propagandists, we are all so predictable and very, very easy to manipulate unless you, you know, really, you know, again, we're not on autopilot.

18:03And it's tough not to be on autopilot because we're just bombarded by messages that we just accept as normal day to day. But fascinating, fascinating post. I just wanted to highlight that. So again, I hope you don't mind the plug for following you on LinkedIn. Just search for Maxwell Finn and then Maxwell, your website. That's how I got to your LinkedIn. You just go to unicorninnovations.com. You know, in our last couple of minutes here, I want to share just any other resources that you would recommend, particularly, you know, let's also speak to someone that would be an ideal maybe fit for you.

18:42In other words, like they're trucking along, they're at that right level, they're at the right budget level, you know, who would be an ideal person to reach out? So I want to, again, kind of talk about two audiences here. One, that they need to engage because they're appropriate to be engaging with you. And then the other one would be, no, you produce a lot of good content and a lot of great resources. So I'll let you kind of address that. Sure. So if you're in the latter, right, if you're just getting started, you're making kind of your first dollar in line or, you know, you're getting to$50 ,000 a month or whatever the kind of the first major, major benchmark is for your business.

19:18and you're not ready to really hire us or work with us. I would, again, going back to my last point, I would really, really focus on mastering those buckets I talked about, right? Consumer psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience, neuromarketing. Those are skills that are going to give you such a huge advantage over the competition because they're just focused on taking a Facebook ads course. And like that stuff, the course, it changes so, so fast. It's not going to give you real value. But if you can understand why people think the way they think, and I wish we had more time because there's so many stories we could talk about.

19:52Because I write about this every single day, all the stories. And you talk about Edward Bernays, right, the father of propaganda, Sigmund Freud's nephew, who understood all of these principles early on and invented a lot of things that we use today. Influencer marketing, social proof, all these concepts that are mainstream now. There's a lot of really great authors and books out there. So guys like Roy Sutherland, I would follow him religiously. he's uh the best he writes a book called alchemy which is probably one of my favorite books it's the uh that yellow one i shared behind me alchemy is an absolutely amazing book uh guys like daniel kahneman who sadly passed in the last year thinking fast and slow one of the best books if you're a business owner mark or to read guys like richard shutton um choice factory illusion of choice books on cognitive biases uh daniel arieli richard thaler there's so many people out there, you know, Misbehaving is a great book.

20:46I have a whole list. Actually, on my ex Twitter, there's a post from a few weeks, a few months ago about like it was 15 or 20 books that I'd recommend you read this year on the topic. So that's what I would say for if you're just kind of getting started and want to learn a foundational amount of information on this stuff is to read some of those books, follow those individuals. You'll also, once you kind of go and look at Daniel Kahneman, Roy Sutherland, it'll lead you down the rabbit hole of other people in that sphere there, because there's a lot of other great authors. In terms of working with us, we're looking for businesses that are in the$500 ,000, the very low end, a million to kind of$20 million a year range for our Unicorn Ads Manager offering.

21:30That's kind of, we see the sweet spot there. And that's our offering where we connect business owners with the top 1 % of marketers, advertisers that can actually run ads for your business on Meta, TikTok, Google, Snap, Native, all the ad journals out there. And that's been an incredibly effective offering since we launched it. It's been amazing to get the response from business owners that are like, I've worked with four agencies, five agencies. They don't care about me. I get B-level, C-level talent. And this has been great. I get a person that's like incredibly talented, really passionate about this stuff, constantly loving their skills up and they're embedded in my business.

22:04They feel like they're part of the team and that's such a unique thing. So we're really, really bullish on that offering and think it's a great fit for most businesses that are in that range. Once they get to a certain point, then it's, hey, maybe you want to bring in a house. You want to start building your own internal team. And that's great as well. Excellent. The website, unicorninnovations.com, is where you can kind of link to everything that we've been talking about. Maxwell Finn, again, founder, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a great conversation. Happy to be here.

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