S4E40 – Robert Brill – Why 62% of online ads fails

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Key Timecodes

• (00:42) – Show intro and background history
• (01:09) – Deeper into his background history and business model
• (05:37) – Understanding his testing phase and other strategies
• (09:51) – A bit about his clients
• (11:00) – What type of adds are ideal to start with
• (13:59) – Few practical tips from the guest
• (18:03) – What are the main add channels he uses
• (19:58) – A bit about his TikTok strategies
• (21:24) – How a company can scale up its advertising
• (28:52) – Deeper into his digital advertising strategies
• (30:38) – A key case study from his business experience
• (33:37) – A key takeaway from the guest
• (35:20) – What is the worst advice he ever received
• (35:56) – What is the best advice he ever received
• (37:45) – Guest contacts

Transcription

[00:00:00.300] – Show Intro

Hey, this is Sean Tapper, the host of Payback Time, an approachable and transparent podcast in building businesses, increasing wealth, and achieving financial freedom. I’d like to bring on guests to hear authentic stories while giving you actionable takeaways you can use today. Let’s go.

[00:00:17.550] – Guest Intro

Did you know that 62% of online advertisers fail because they don’t know how to advertise correctly? My next guest has been in the advertising industry for over 20 years, and now he has a firm with over 20 company, Employees. In this episode, they talk about what channels they use, why most ads fail, how much they charge, and what steps you can take to correctly advertise online. Please welcome Robert Brill.

[00:00:42.890] – Sean

Robert, welcome to the show.

[00:00:44.620] – Robert

Thanks, Sean, for having me. Appreciate it.

[00:00:46.640] – Sean

Good to have you here. So why don’t you kick us off and tell us about your background?

[00:00:50.300] – Robert

Yep. 20 years in advertising. Ten of those years have been spent growing my company, Brill Media, where a digital advertising firm, our Our job is to run ads on Facebook and Google, Hulu, Roku, with the goal of generating leads and sales for businesses.

[00:01:08.370] – Sean

Got it. Okay. And with your agency, do you primarily focus on advertising, or do you have other services as well?

[00:01:18.460] – Robert

Yeah. I’m sure over 99 % of our revenue comes directly from advertising. There’s a small amount of revenue that comes from developing creative and landing pages, et cetera. But all All of it is in service of getting advertisers up into the marketplace and growing their business.

[00:01:36.010] – Sean

Got it. I just want to get an idea of your business size, and then we’ll dive into advertising a little bit more. So how many employees at your company?

[00:01:44.680] – Robert

20 people.

[00:01:45.970] – Sean

Nice. Full-time? Yeah. Yeah, that’s fantastic. Okay. And then with advertising, we’ve got a lot of entrepreneurs in our audience that want to or are starting some online business It could be a SaaS business or it could be an e-commerce business. We even have a few people in the audience that are working on a marketplace. Think like an Airbnb, two audiences on the same platform. Uber would be in that category as well. Sure. And I found that, and there’s a lot of people out there on Upwork. There’s a lot of people. Every day, I’m not kidding you, I get contacted by somebody on LinkedIn saying they can do Facebook ads or Google ads for us. I hired an agency in 2023 that I thought, failed miserably at advertising. And I found a statistic within some of the content, I don’t know if it was on your site or whatever agency introduced you to me, but it said, or I think it was this quote from you, 62 % of ads fail because they don’t know how to advertise effectively. Let’s talk about that.

[00:02:52.370] – Robert

Yeah. I mean, it’s a minefield for investing your money and making it work for you. The In any particular place you want to start, the first is that most people are not going to be great at advertising because you’re probably better at something else. Like, the most extreme example of that are doctors and lawyers who go to school for many years, but then they want to run their own Facebook ads. That’s ridiculous. Your highest value work, your zone of genius is not running Facebook ads. That’s our zone of genius. So that’s number one. Number two, it seems easy because you’re on these platforms every day, but in fact, they’re far more complex than they seem. Facebook makes it easy to run ads through the boost. When you’re boosting, you’re running ads. But you don’t get any of the learnings. You get very little of the targeting capabilities, and there’s no through line between the posts that you’re boosting that you’re spending money on in the larger overall campaigns that you’re running. So the way to be successful with advertising at a macro level is to have a strategy. Who do you want to reach? What is your transformative value?

[00:03:58.720] – Robert

What are your economic How do you make money? What is the lifetime value? What is the transformative value of your business to your customers? What have you done with marketing and advertising in the past that’s worked and that hasn’t worked? You pair all of that information with expertise about what works right now in the marketplace. For example, one of the key changes that’s happening across these major platforms is that it’s going to be a black box. The black box means that you don’t see inside it. With Meta, the best practice is targeting age, gender, and location. Broad targeting. No keywords, no interest, no lookalike, no remark. Because when you target broad, Meta is making those decisions for you about which people are in your marketing pool, which people look like the ones who are ready to purchase. Meta routes your ad creative to the people who are most interested in your ad creative right now. The second component on Meta, specifically, is to do a creative testing framework so that you can know which is your number one ad out of hundreds every month. And that gives you learnings and insights as well. The outcome of the broad targeting and the creative testing is you are training Meta’s machine learning algorithm to find your best customers.

[00:05:17.900] – Robert

The old school way of running ads is you target a bunch of different audiences and keywords and interests, just like you target Google Ads and other types of advertising. But that’s going away because you really have to leverage leverage the algorithm. These platforms want you to leverage broad targeting parameters so you could be successful with your campaigns.

[00:05:37.540] – Sean

When you work with a customer, I’m assuming you’re going through a phased approach. You’re testing and you’re refining copy and images, and then you zero in what’s working, what’s not working. How long do you go through a testing phase and then lead into a lead gen and almost revenue-generating phase?

[00:05:58.580] – Robert

You’re generating revenue on day two or three.

[00:06:01.810] – Sean

Really?

[00:06:02.820] – Robert

You’re optimizing to the revenue-generating goal in day two or three. So the way it works is you spend about two or three days doing a control and variable test on all your headlines all your images or video, and all of your primary text on meta. Out of those elements, you are going to find the top few combinations of ads, the top 20 combinations of ads. Then with those top 20 combinations, you are then going to run ads, optimizing to a lead or a sale, which gives you an opportunity to serve your business fundamentals, what grows your business. You’re optimizing to that metric. For the next two or three weeks, remember, you already spent three days. For the next two or three weeks, you are going to run ads where Meta is going to insert the best ad that it thinks is relevant to the customer. After those two or three weeks are over, you’re going to figure out which one out Out of the 20 that are left is your all-star ad. Then you will just always keep that all-star add on. Then the next month, you do the exact same thing again. Two or three days of control and variable testing, call a bunch of different variations down to a top 20.

[00:07:16.570] – Robert

Then the month two, you’re going to find your all-star add. The benefit here is that this is how you train Metta’s machine learning algorithm to find your best customers. It gives you insights back into your business so that over time you understand which type of imagery resonates with people, which products and services resonate with people, which services do people really want, and which services, no matter how much you push them, are really not that interesting to customers. That’s the benefit of running advertising with a strategy and with an expert partner than doing things like boosting posts or trying to learn how to make advertising work on your dime.

[00:07:57.130] – Sean

Let’s say you go through month one and you find that that first all-star ad, and then you do another month and find another all-star ad, do you then A/B test between the two all-stars?

[00:08:07.820] – Robert

So the process is you never stop doing this creative testing. So in six months, you’re going to have six all-star ads. In a year, you’ll have 12. What ends up happening is meta is going to serve your, let’s say after a year, twelve different ads to the people who are most interesting. The algorithm will then self-select which creative executions are going to be most interesting out of those twelve. So you’re not A/B testing. That implies one and two testing between two ads. You’ve already curated hundreds or by the end of the year, thousands of ads down to twelve. And of the twelve There will be winners within those. So your process is really about ensuring that you’re giving Meta enough variability in your creative executions to appeal to different types of people. So here’s the insight that people don’t realize about Meta ads. The ads that work for one person will not work for another person. Some people respond really well to positive ads, like grow your business. Some people respond really well to negative ads. Don’t lose out. Some people respond to lots of text. Some people respond to one line of text. Long-form videos, short-form videos.

[00:09:22.430] – Robert

Images of people, images of products. Different types of people respond different types of ways. So our job as marketers is to provide the best creative we possibly can that resonates amongst different groups of people. So the targeting goes away from audience targeting. You’re not targeting by keyword or interest. You’re targeting by different types of creatives. You’re creating niches in the creative execution.

[00:09:51.940] – Sean

Got you. Okay. And then what businesses do you typically work with?

[00:09:55.860] – Robert

So a lot of our clients are actually agencies, creative shops, Social media firms, strategy firms, influencer marketing firms. In terms of advertisers, we run, we do health care leads, we sell CPG products, consumer packaged goods. We help open up movies We help people in different states prevent tuberculosis. We do business to business, business to consumer, just a massive variety. We help with the restaurants, we help sell home goods. It’s a massive variety because Because the way we niche down, we niche down into our services. We do really well one thing, ad buying in digital marketing for 2024. That’s what we do really well. As a result, the fundamentals are what’s important. Everyone’s looking for growth hacks. Everyone’s looking for shortcuts. I got no shortcuts for you. I got no growth hack for you. All I do well is the fundamentals, and that’s what grows businesses.

[00:10:59.500] – Sean

Yeah. What ad spend should people be expecting to start with, right out of the gate?

[00:11:07.750] – Robert

To work with us, I’d be looking at a minimum $1,500 a month. $500 of that is our fee, $1,000 goes directly to the platform. If you want us to develop the ads for you, the creative executions, that’s an additional $500, so then it becomes $2,000 a month. But the core idea is, you could run ads for $10 a if you want. Nothing you should. But $1,000 gives you enough to do the testing. The creative testing component can be really inexpensive at the very first few days. Then you have a few hundred dollars left, probably like seven, eight, $900 left to actually generate leads and sales for your business.

[00:11:49.600] – Sean

It doesn’t matter if it’s a B2B or B2C, that budget still applies.

[00:11:54.160] – Robert

That budget still applies. Now, B2B, for example, you may want to say, Well, LinkedIn is our audience. Absolutely. The next thing to know about advertising in 2024, and this is not new, but it’s still relevant, is that all of these channels work together to create a symphony. They’re the orchestra. Linkedin works with Facebook, so meta. Google works with those channels. Hulu works with those channels. But they all play a different role in the marketing and advertising opportunity that you’re running. So we never want to be in a position where We’re not here to sell you Facebook ads or Google. If tomorrow everyone starts buying newspapers, we’d be selling you newspaper ads. Because our job is to achieve your business goals via the strategy, via advertising. Now, the reality is that 45% of all digital advertising will be spent either on Meta or Google. So chances are we’re going to be on those two platforms. But you start with Meta as a creative testing framework, and then you syndicate all the learnings across all your channels. You’re all-star ads from meta, go to LinkedIn and go to YouTube and go to Google and get deployed in some capacity for Hulu advertising.

[00:13:08.360] – Robert

So they all have to work together, and that’s also a big part of the strategic component of advertising.

[00:13:13.410] – Sean

Got you. Let’s take a quick commercial break. So do you have an interest in investing in the market, but you’re not sure where to start? In that case, I invite you to join Tykr for free. However, if you want to go a step further and really get up to speed, you can go to TykrEDU. So check this out. If you go to Tykr. Com and then click on Courses, it’ll take you right to TykrEDU, which includes a few courses such as Stock Investing for Beginners that can help you get up to speed in about a week or less. And then I also have How I get the most out of Tykr, which shows you exactly how I use Tykr in every way, shape, or form, and even has a few real-life stock reviews within. So if you want to start investing with confidence, I invite you to check out Tykr EDU. So let me share with you my own case study/lesson learned, so the audience has a comparison to how you approach this and how other agencies do. So I hired an agency in 2023 to help market our courses. We have Tykr, which is our main platform.

[00:14:17.340] – Sean

That’s the subscription platform where people, they can see most stocks and they can see ETFs and watch lists and create portfolio tracker and all that fun stuff. But the courses is really, it’s not so much a need to have, it’s a nice to have, but allows people to do a deep dive. And we hired an agency that has helped people in our same industry generate pretty significant revenue. We’re talking a few hundred grand a month and even more on investing courses. Okay, got it. So they have that experience and started working with them with a very similar budget to what you’re talking about. And I was able to generate organic sales on my own, but hired this agency. We went three three months, generated zero sales. And I was like, Guys, what are we doing here? And they’re like, Well, we’re still in testing phase. How long do we need to test? So I started peeling back the onion, asking them questions, breaking down their model. And they actually… I want to hear your response on this one. I backed into the numbers, and it was not a terribly contentious conversation, but it had friction and arrived at it would take about 5 to 6 months and about $50,000 to get through testing, and then we could start making money.

[00:15:37.780] – Sean

And at that point, I’m like, Guys, we’re done here. I fired them. I thought that was ridiculous.

[00:15:44.100] – Robert

Yeah. I mean, What we advocate for is whatever your budget is, cut it into a third so it goes longer. I’m an entrepreneur. I bootstrap my business. I understand what it means when money leaves your bank account. So basically, we just have a playbook that we run. The creative makes a big difference, though, right? So what I’m interested in is, where’s the breakdown in that funnel? Were people clicking and then bouncing off the page? Were people clicking but they’re not the right customers, and then they were bouncing on the page? Were people going through the funnel and just not buying so that there’s nothing wrong with the funnel, but you’re just not hitting the right customers? I’m trying to figure out where the breakage is happening, but really at the At the end of the day, one of the biggest assets you have as a marketer is the ability to train Meta to find your customers for you. Because Meta has 10 or 15 years of data, possibly even closer to 20 years of data on a lot of us, both on Facebook, on Instagram, and outside of those channels, Pandora, Spotify, all over the web.

[00:16:51.630] – Robert

It knows what we’re buying and what we’re adding to cart, and when we abandon cart and we go shop for similar products. Whenever I look for a product, I immediately start to see 10 or 20 different ads for competing brands. I was looking at a vacation, I started seeing ads for Dubai, and not Yemen, but Jordan, and then Hawaii, and then Disney World, all within three minutes of doing searches. So if Facebook knows what we’re into and what our interests are right now. So I would say, look, it shouldn’t take $50,000 to generate business. That’s a little ridiculous. I think you were right on the mark of cutting it off at three months. You should be seeing some positive forward momentum, at the very least some positive forward momentum in three months.

[00:17:41.970] – Sean

No, that’s… Based on your budget and how you split that up between service and ad spend, I think that’s very reasonable. And to see results so quickly, it’s like, okay, you have my attention here. That’s really good.

[00:17:56.840] – Robert

Absolutely. And we want you to have more runway, right? I’d rather it be a lower spend now so you have more runway in the future.

[00:18:03.250] – Sean

I want to zoom out a little bit and talk about what are the most common channels people use? You said it was about 45 % are either Facebook or Google. Can you give us an idea what other channels you mentioned? Linkedin. Did I hear Roku earlier?

[00:18:18.960] – Robert

Yeah, Roku.

[00:18:19.980] – Sean

Okay.

[00:18:20.920] – Robert

You’re about to see ads on Amazon Prime television, Netflix, Paramount Plus, digital audio, including Pandora and Spotify, Amazon on ads. So we have hands-on keyboard buyers. In addition to everything I just mentioned, we have LinkedIn, X, Pinterest, Quora, Reddit, Nextdoor. For search, you have Apple Search, which is an app store. You have Amazon Search, you have Microsoft Search. What most agencies don’t talk about that we do is the larger display ecosystem. So it’s really valuable to be able to get ads on local news and sports sites or blogs. There’s a whole dramatic layer of targeting that’s available. Millions of segments, an infinite volume of custom-created segments that can be created targeted targeting ads on specific pages, targeting ads based off of the keywords on the page. So not Google search ads, but if you’re reading a recipe about how to make apple pie and you’re selling apples, your ads can appear next to the people reading recipe about apple pie or something related. Sure. So we’ve got a lot of people talk about Meta and Google because they’re the big platforms, but the largest advertisers in the world are spending billions of dollars outside of those platforms because those local news and sports pages are very valuable to grow businesses as well.

[00:19:58.680] – Sean

I saw a comment in your marketing material that said, You are bullish on TikTok advertising.

[00:20:04.250] – Robert

Love TikTok.

[00:20:05.320] – Sean

Okay, break it down.

[00:20:07.100] – Robert

Well, as a content platform, it’s primetime programming. Every hour is primetime, and it’s custom programming. Timing for you specifically based on your interests. So number one, just as a content play, it’s a great place to be placed in front of the right people at the right time. So we create content five days a week on TikTok, which we then then syndicate out to all the major social platforms, including LinkedIn. From an ads perspective, it’s valuable because we start creating content and posting ads, and a few things happen. It reignited old relationships. So like 50 people I I haven’t worked with in 15 years reach out to us and invited us to work with them. We got opportunities to pitch big advertisers because of people I’d met 5-7 years ago. And we’ve connected with people who I didn’t know in the advertising business who brought us business. So it’s a really valuable way for B2B businesses, reignite relationships and ensure that you remain top of mind for that moment when people have the need for your service and they are reminded that you exist and you can work with them.

[00:21:23.070] – Sean

Right on. My company, Tykr, it’s very global. There’s no It’s not brick and mortar. You don’t have limitations on who we can serve. But let’s zoom in a little bit and speak to the entrepreneur that maybe has a very local small business. I’m thinking of a restaurant or maybe an automotive detailing shop or something like that. They only can serve customers in a certain radius. Could you talk to how does a company like that scale their advertising?

[00:21:52.900] – Robert

Yeah, the same way. Age, gender, and location. So if you’re a restaurant, the key indicator there is probably going to be location. So we run restaurant ads, and you can only order and get delivery within a five-mile radius of the address. So your total addressable universe is five miles around the address. So your location is five miles around the address. Age is probably going to be everyone or maybe 25 plus if you’re higher end, whatever the case is. And then gender, you’ll sell to men and women food, and that’s your targeting. And then you deploy the exact same principles, creative testing, train meta machine learning algorithm, learn how to sell to your customers. That’s why we can work across a lot of different industries because the principles remain the same.

[00:22:41.440] – Sean

It sounds like, and correct me if I’m wrong here, but, and this is probably the mistake the agency I was working with, is they’re trying to overengineer it. They’re working really hard, but they’re not leveraging, for example, the meta algorithm. They’re forcing their own process into a system that doesn’t need it. What are your thoughts on that?

[00:23:02.180] – Robert

Yeah, my thoughts are this is what we do that drives success. And I know that the largest agencies in the world are doing exactly this.

[00:23:09.760] – Sean

Okay.

[00:23:10.490] – Robert

And by the way, this is what Meta has told businesses how they want Meta to be used. They have something called the Performance Five. It’s language from Google that tells you in some general scope of how to leverage an account structure in your ad account to ensure that you’re successful, and it goes essentially very broad so that Meta can find it your customers for you. We’ve deployed it and got more granular in how we deployed, but I’m not I’m picking this up. This is what Meta wants you to do, and we’re just practitioners, and this is what you get by working with an expert, right? You can take courses and you can take certificates. I’m not talking about college certificates. That’s different. Two-year courses, that’s not it. I’m talking about people who spend three weeks learning Facebook ads. Yeah, you learn that. But the minute something changes, even a little bit, you lose the ability to really stay connected to the platform because running ads as a full-time job. And it’s not just a job, it’s a career. Dare I say, a lifestyle. Talk to my wife about that. I work always working. But the point is, many years of experience got us to this point, and that’s one of the big differentiating factors in our business.

[00:24:34.560] – Sean

That’s a good segue into a big issue I have out there is, and we’re talking about this offline, I get a lot of people on LinkedIn approaching me saying, Hey, we can run ads for Tykr or Upwork all the time. People contacting me there. Dm messages through Instagram. We can run ads for you. And what I see happening is these people take a $15 course on Udemy or some piece of junk core somewhere and learn how to do ads in the next half hour. And then they’re a quote, unquote, ad expert, but they really have no idea what they’re doing. And I see a comment here also in your marketing that You get a lot of business from people trying to work with these people, and they switch to you. Can you drill into that a little bit? What are the reasons why people are switching from these, you could call them these novice, inexperienced people to switching to an experienced an agency like yourself?

[00:25:31.140] – Robert

So I’ll answer that by telling you what you should be looking for in an agency, because this is why people switch to us. Number one, you need experience. Go to the LinkedIn and determine if this person has been working in advertising for any period of time, or were they a crypto expert three years ago, and before that, they’re doing something different. They were in real estate or whatever. Yeah. Nothing wrong with crypto, nothing wrong with real estate. What’s wrong is jumping in and out of things and claiming to be an expert. That’s the problem I have with it. That’s This is the only thing I’ve ever done. And my team are people who have been in the business 10, 15 years who are doing this as a career move. That’s number one. Number two, you’re looking for agnostic media buying. I’m not here to sell you Facebook or Google. I’m here to grow your business based on a strategy, and we’ll help you define that strategy. Too many people are really focused on Facebook because they’ve been told to niche down, which is fine. I get it. There’s some value there. But the minute you need something else, you can’t work with those people anymore.

[00:26:32.290] – Robert

So they’re going to try and incentivize you to work on just the stuff that they know. We know we’re agnostic across platforms. The third thing is a communications framework, context, communication, and consistency. We want, which then leads into transparency. We want our clients to understand the work that we’re doing. We’re not holding back on how we’re growing your business. The more you know about the work we do, the better it is for us because you understand how hard we’re working for you. There’s no black box with us. There may be a black box with the platform. That’s a different story. But there’s no black box with us. We want to ensure that you understand why we’re making the decisions we’re making and what happens if we need to pivot and how How are we going to pivot and how are we going to teach you more about your business? How are you going to learn more about your business? Because advertising is a real-time focus group. It tells people more about their business. So the communication point is we need to be available to talk to you and bounce ideas off you because there is so much our clients tell us about their business.

[00:27:35.610] – Robert

You have to be honest with us so that we can help you grow. So we have to be a trusted partner. And then the last part of this is consistency. You need to know day in and day out that we’ll be there to answer your call and we’re not going to ghost you for two and a half weeks because one guy was on vacation. The last component here, which is more of an inside thing than an outward-facing thing, is the reason we’re successful is because of standard operating procedures procedures and redundancy. Standard operating procedures are the growth unlock for any business, not just ours. People are happy. Employees stay with us longer. When they stay with us longer, they create systems that can be deployed. Clients are happier, and we have an ascension plan. Our current director of media started out as our media buyer. And then redundancy. We don’t have one person buying ads in a corner. There’s peer review of the advertising campaign. There’s supervisory review. There’s account manager review. Account manager is looking at success. Our media buyers are looking at data, all in the service of success, but different lenses of the same information.

[00:28:43.290] – Robert

That’s how you grow a business. As an entrepreneur, and that’s how we grow businesses as people who service clients.

[00:28:52.960] – Sean

I love it. It’s not just one person, quote unquote, running ads, disappearing for a month and saying, I’ll get your results. It’s like you got people with different skill sets working on your specific ads. That’s the peace of mind I would want to see. And then this leads into my question, do you set up a reoccurring, a weekly touch point, even if it’s a half hour with every customer, or is it bi weekly?

[00:29:19.500] – Robert

So all of our clients get a dashboard, and then they get meetings. So the meetings can be weekly, twice a month, monthly, whatever the client is interested. If they’re interested in weekly, we’ll do weekly. Every single day, our clients get access to have a dashboard that updates once a day as all the advertising, all the creative executions, all the audience performance, everything that you’re doing, so that if you have a boss that needs a meeting in 45 minutes, you can actually download the data and do further analysis if it’s in a pinch. If you give us time, we’ll do the analysis for you. But the point is this speaks to the transparency in the context component. You need to know what we’re doing. Then from a context perspective, we will interpret the data that’s on the dashboard for you. We will teach you how to look at the dashboard as well. All the different ways of communicating so that we appeal to everyone and the ways that each different type of person needs to be communicated with.

[00:30:16.670] – Sean

Awesome. I love it. I’ve talked to a lot of people in this space, and you guys definitely have a well-oiled machine when it comes to the processes, systems and processes, the standard operating procedures. I can’t tell you how many people overlook and say that’s overrated. I’m like, Uh-uh. I want systems in play. I’m going to see what your systems are. Can you share with us, you don’t have to give a specific company name or even hit, but do you have a really solid case study you’re proud of? It could be maybe an e-commerce company, SaaS company, maybe even a small service business.

[00:30:51.900] – Robert

Yeah, there’s a few. There’s a business where we spent, I think, $1.3, $1.4 million the course of a year and a half, maybe a little bit less. And we immediately drove down the cost per acquisition by 35 %. It was a Google search ad campaign and volume. It was ensuring people get access to technology help when they needed at a very specific moment. We have another lead generation campaign where we activated a campaign. So we helped develop the media plan, but it wasn’t exclusively our decision on how we would go to market. Sure. And immediately, we drove down the lead cost by 90 % over the course of four months because we quickly optimize the heck out of that campaign. We’re like, these five channels don’t work, these two channels do work. Lead costs dramatically dropped. And that’s the perspective of following the data, and that was millions of dollars as well. So our goal here is, and then you have small businesses. We touch so many clients. I don’t have a purview over everything we do, but we have plenty of case studies on our website where we talk about these components. But the core idea is we want to, what I think really important that a lot of agencies miss is they need to understand the motivations of the people they’re working for.

[00:32:17.280] – Robert

Are you the business owner and you just need sales? Are you a brand manager or director and you need to get a raise or a promotion and you want to make sure you look good in front of your boss? Are you an investor and you don’t care how this stuff works. You just want to make sure it works? So I think for the agencies that they’re listening, it’s really important to really put yourself in the shoes of the client and speak to that experience that they’re trying to achieve.

[00:32:46.670] – Sean

That’s awesome. Yeah, to the audience out there, I’m looking at brillmedia. Co case studies. There’s actually testimonials, case studies that leads right to. And there’s different industries on it with different case It’s definitely worth a read. I’ll be taking that offline. So thanks for being up front and transparent with what you’re doing out there because people want to know, Hey, if I put in a dollar, am I going to make $2 back? Or $3 or whatever. It’s like, I want to be getting a return on investment unlike the experience I went through, like putting in money and getting nothing back month over month, right? And then part of you can try to trust the process and and hear them out and be like, Well, it’s just going to take more time to start making money on this. It’s like, we should be seeing results by now.

[00:33:35.400] – Robert

Come on. A hundred %. Yeah.

[00:33:38.000] – Sean

Yeah. Awesome. Well, before we get to the rapid fire round, is there one key takeaway you can give to our listeners if they’re interested in moving forward with advertising?

[00:33:47.230] – Robert

Don’t do it yourself. Hire an expert. Consider us. Even if you’re doing $1,500 a month, we can work with you. But even if it’s not us, find a group of people who you know you trust, you like working with, and work with them because your time probably is more valuable than figuring out how to make Facebook ads work.

[00:34:07.910] – Sean

Right on. Awesome. All right. Well, let’s get into the rapid fire round. This is the part of the episode where we get to find out who Robert really is. If you can, try to answer each question in about 15 seconds or less. You ready?

[00:34:20.620] – Robert

Ready.

[00:34:21.440] – Sean

All right. What is your favorite podcast?

[00:34:24.590] – Robert

Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway.

[00:34:28.220] – Sean

Heard of it. Yeah, Scott Galloway read one or two of his books. All right. What is a recent book you read and would recommend?

[00:34:36.300] – Robert

Persuasion or Persuasion by Robert Chaldini.

[00:34:41.060] – Sean

Nice. All right. The movie question, what is your favorite movie?

[00:34:45.290] – Robert

Man, I got to pay homage to the shirt. I’m going to say Back to the Future, too.

[00:34:49.980] – Sean

Great film. The second one. All right. We’re going into- The second one. Yeah. Going to 2015, into the future. Into the Future. Into the Future.

[00:34:59.550] – Robert

Or not the past. And now the past. Yeah, I mean, I’ll say as a kid, the future component was very interesting to me. I think it still plays as a really cool fantasy story, but I don’t know if the future component is going to be that interesting, considering we’re past that point in time.

[00:35:17.790] – Sean

Yeah, still. It’s still a fun movie. Cool. All right. A few more serious questions here. What is the worst advice you ever received?

[00:35:25.430] – Robert

Balance.

[00:35:26.510] – Sean

Really? Can you expand on that?

[00:35:29.150] – Robert

I Look, I think there’s value in that advice, but balance doesn’t mean equal balance. I think the intonuation of that balance is equal balance, but it’s not. I think it’s okay to be obsessive and to have a desire to be impatient and to do work and to want to get ahead. I think that’s a feature, not a flaw.

[00:35:54.410] – Sean

Right on. All right, flip that equation. What is the best advice you ever received?

[00:36:00.230] – Robert

If you want to go fast, do it alone. If you want to go farther, do it with a partner, something like that.

[00:36:09.150] – Sean

Yeah.

[00:36:10.220] – Robert

And that’s in reference to marrying my wife.

[00:36:13.600] – Sean

Awesome. All right. Last question here is the time machine question. If you could go back in time to give your younger self advice, what age would you visit and what would you say?

[00:36:23.300] – Robert

I 100% would not do that because I’ve seen enough time travel movies. I’m a big time travel nerd, and you change any one thing, next thing you know, my five-year-old isn’t my five-year-old anymore, and my wife isn’t my wife. I wouldn’t mess up with a thing. But let’s say we could overcome that in some capacity, because I wouldn’t touch a thing because my life is excellent. What I would say is I would call… I don’t know. I have to figure out the years, but I’d connect with myself in 2008, ’09, ’10, somewhere around there. Three words, but if I could say more, I’d say it. Buy Bitcoin 2010 independently wealthy on one of my seven islands that I own.

[00:37:09.630] – Sean

Sure. Debating the pros and cons and regrets of time travel. I’m sure you love that scene in Avengers Endgame when they’re discussing the legitimacy of, Hey, is this even possible or what can happen? It’s like the real nerds are like, Yes, that’s… To be I’m going to fly on the wall on those conversations.

[00:37:32.780] – Robert

100%. I mean, the back to the Future… I’m sorry, the Quantum Leap reboot. I’m such a nerd. It gets such bad reviews, but I freaking love that.

[00:37:43.680] – Sean

That’s awesome. That’s Cool. All right. Where can the audience reach you?

[00:37:47.770] – Robert

Brillmedia. Co. Click on the Start Now button and leave a message, and you’ll be prompted to schedule a time with me, or send me an email, robert@brillmedia. Co.

[00:37:59.440] – Sean

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time, Robert. This is great.

[00:38:02.390] – Robert

Thanks, Sean.

[00:38:03.400] – Sean

Hey, I’d like to say thank you for checking out this podcast. I know there’s a lot of other podcasts out there you could be listening to, so thanks for spending some time with me. And if you have a moment, please head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review. The more reviews we get, especially five-star reviews, the higher this podcast will rank in Apple. So thanks for doing that. And remember, this show is for entertainment purposes only. If you heard any stocks mentioned on this podcast, please do not buy or sell those stocks based solely on what you hear. All right, thanks for your time. We’ll see you.