We'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. There's a lot about the phrase matching exact matching, and 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, and 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'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. There's a lot about the phrase matching exact matching, and 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, and 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 HIV 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. It'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 into 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, 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. They're focusing on like, oh, I'm gonna tweet 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 and self, and that's how you make paid advertising effective.

We still see if you just let them do whatever they want to end up doing, you don't generate as HIV 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. It'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 into 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, 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. They're focusing on like, oh, I'm gonna tweet 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 and self, 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's either really good or it sucks. Right, It'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 ten plus years ago, when Google had its quality score, that's really what it was trying to say. At the end of the day. It's how good is your ad copy, how good is your creative, how good is your landing page? Like 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 start to understand that, oh, it's just a creative and really being able to have your data on lockdown, hopefully have your attribution on lockdown, and then you're able to really unleash what it is that you want to accomplish.

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's either really good or it sucks. Right, It'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 ten plus years ago, when Google had its quality score, that's really what it was trying to say. At the end of the day. It's how good is your ad copy, how good is your creative, how good is your landing page? Like 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 start to understand that, oh, it's just a creative and really being able to have your data on lockdown, hopefully 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. Yes, you do need to know that, and you need to note 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 to get them to click over to your website, serving 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 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, and it's the stuff that most people who manage a lot of money on paid ad. It's funny enough, the bigger they manage, the more we see them neglecting the things I talked about.

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. Yes, you do need to know that, and you need to note 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 to get them to click over to your website, serving 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 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, and it's the stuff that most people who manage a lot of money on paid ad. It's funny enough, the bigger they manage, the more we see them neglecting the things I 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 reinformation that's out there, whether it's on YouTube, there's a lot of creative people out there. Go 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 going to spend a couple million dollars on this ad, and even Lori Greneer, 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 Unicorn and at the moment they're like, oh, let's try to unicorn things. So they spend a couple of million dollars and that ad still continues to run to this day and it's generated multiple eight figures. And I think at the high point, squatty Potty was maybe doing twenty million dollars 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 the 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, but 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.

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 reinformation that's out there, whether it's on YouTube, there's a lot of creative people out there. Go 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 going to spend a couple million dollars on this ad, and even Lori Greneer, 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 Unicorn and at the moment they're like, oh, let's try to unicorn things. So they spend a couple of million dollars and that ad still continues to run to this day and it's generated multiple eight figures. And I think at the high point, squatty Potty was maybe doing twenty million dollars 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 the 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, but 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 creaming with sprinkles, it'll sell a ton of these squatty potties. Yeah, it sprinkles nice. Yeah, But when you think about that, it's just those ideas are so off the wall. They'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.

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 creaming with sprinkles, it'll sell a ton of these squatty potties. Yeah, it sprinkles nice. Yeah, But when you think about that, it's just those ideas are so off the wall. They'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 gonna 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, and please don't forget to subscribe. Five stars. It helps us a lot, more than you would ever know, and we'll see tomorrow

I think the best analogy of it is those types of ads are home runs a lot more times you're probably gonna 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, and please don't forget to subscribe. Five stars. It helps us a lot, more than you would ever know, and we'll see tomorrow