Is the ad spend on Super Bowl or Olympics worth it?, and Disney+, Hulu, and Max streaming bundle

Is ad spend on a Super Bowl or Olympics worth it? It depends who you ask. The data pretty much showed increase in overall brand awareness. Almost half of consumers, 41%, noticed, you know, the brands increased by roughly 41% according to Sports Business Journal through these commercials. But from an ROI standpoint, it was pretty much almost everyone didn't see a great ROI, but from a branding and awareness standpoint, they saw a huge lift. And the hopes was, In the long run, some of these people will eventually come back and buy from you.

Who's the one that said for every dollar you spend, like, you know, marketing works, but for every dollar you spend, you just don't know which 50 cents works. Let me find this real quick. We have to repeat this to people who haven't heard it.

I have no idea who said that, but the way I look at marketing is people have this big misconception. Like, if you do TV ads, it helps build your brand. Google Ads don't help build your brand. That's so false. If you're buying 5 million clicks from your targeted audience from Google and they're seeing your website, it's building your brand over time just like a TV commercial would. But it's easier to get a direct ROI from Google or Facebook ads.

Here's what he said, and I think we'll agree with this. So, John Wanamaker, 1838 to 1922, was a very successful United States merchant, religious leader, and political figure, considered by some to be a pioneer in marketing, quote unquote. He opened one of the first and most successful department stores in the United States, which grew to 16 stores and eventually became part of Macy's. He's credited with coining the phrase, half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don't know which half.

You had another similar quote that you used to use on your homepage, like 70% of CEOs—

78%.

78% of CMOs. What was the quote?

78% of CEOs think marketers don't focus on ROI.

There you go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's true. I think both statements are true. They're very true. Even today, it's probably more true now because like the obsession to need to track everything, I think that's going away now and I think there's more acceptance That, yeah, you're not going to be able to track everything.

Bingo. And I think that's why the acceptance is going away, that there are— the acceptance is increased that you won't be able to track everything because you have no choice and you won't be able to track everything due to all the changes that these guys are making.

Yep. Dude, speaking of tracking, remember we talked about retention.com? So I think he's— Adam Robinson's doing something interesting now. So retention will basically enrich your site, which is not necessarily new technology. We've seen this for years and we've talked about it since the inception of this podcast, to be honest. Yeah. So what he has done now, he created this new B2B version, right? Where you can put a pixel on your site and you can identify when I visit, you know, you'll get my personal email address, you'll get my LinkedIn URL, you get all these things, right? Now, he wasn't able to crack the code in terms of growing MRR for it and now, it seems like he's cracking the code. Basically, he's offering to agencies right now. He's saying, hey, go offer this to your clients. You can charge them whatever. We'll give it to you for free for the first like, you know, 200 contacts or whatever. And then you guys can just charge whatever you want and we'll just charge you like our fee which is like $200 a month or $500 So it's very much, it's like a freemium approach and he's choosing agencies. And I think there are some lessons in there because previously he wasn't able to get anything. Like a lot of people were using it, but he couldn't get any revenue.

It's cool technology. I think there's a lot of legal and privacy concerns with this in the long run. I'm not saying in the short run there is or if there is or there isn't right now, but I think in the long run there'll be a lot of legal issues with this.

But I think it's interesting how he's figured out After months of toiling that he was able to crack this code, right? So partnerships matter a lot.

Partnerships matter a ton.

All right, everyone, quick message from the Agency Owners Association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures, even 9 figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads, we share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions, their most burning questions, Personally, professionally, we'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment. So you can just learn more by going to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, that's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more, and we hope to see you inside.

Dude, speaking of partnerships, you saw the Disney+, Hulu, and Max partnership?

No.

You can now buy— Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. On Disney+, when you buy, you can buy Hulu and HBO Max or Max or whatever you want to call it. Did you buy the bundle? No, but I'm going to cancel my Disney, Hulu, and Max subscription and then get the bundle.

How much is the bundle?

I don't know, but it's going to be cheaper than if you bought them all separately.

Dude, the time you spend to do that is worth way more than just the amount that you're going to save on this.

I have to save the money though.

It's the principle, everyone. That's what matters.

Money is expensive. It takes so long to earn it and it's hard to earn it that like The easiest way to make more is just to save it.

That's actually a good lesson. The lesson is always continue to be frugal because the moment you stop being frugal is when you— because if you're frugal with the small things, then you're gonna be frugal with the big things. But if you're not, you're sloppy with the small things, you'll be sloppy with the big things.

And but then you find people like me who are selectively frugal. Some things I'm really cheap on and some things—

Some things you're unreasonably loose on. Yes. Yeah.

And some things I'm like really frugal on and I penny pinch.

I'm waiting for Neil to give me the sweaters that he doesn't want anymore because he's very loose on those.

Yes. What Eric is pretty much insinuating is I have a lot of clothes that I spent tons of money that just sit there in my closet.

If I go—

I need to go to my parents' house. My parents probably have like $200,000 of my clothes in their closet that I only wore a few times.

Yeah, I believe it. I have one of Neil's jackets. He probably wore it like 2 or 3 times. It's a very nice jacket, the Tom Ford jacket.

Oh yeah, that was a good one.

I only wore it like once. But, um, you, you tweeted something the other day where you actually— back when you had hair and you drove your Honda Civic. Dude, Neil's Honda Civic was like one of those gangster ones because you got the tripped out lights in the back. Yeah, yeah. Do you want to explain what that tweet was?

Yeah, so I tweeted the other day on You know, my first car was a Honda Civic, and that's what my parents ended up giving me. My mom had a business. Her business was called Tina's Daycare. So on the back of the Honda Civic windshield, it said Tina's Daycare, and it had her phone number. And it looked like kid block letters, but it was more so my mom wasn't able to line it up, so it didn't look good. It looked like a kid did it. She didn't intend to do it that way. She just wasn't great at lining up the sticker.

Yeah. Oh, so she did it herself. She didn't even have like a professional do it.

No, she didn't have a professional do it. And, uh, she would do it so that way more people would come to her daycare. And then my mom also would go out there to all the local schools in the city that we lived in that were full. They couldn't accept new kids because cities have laws on how many kids you can have at a preschool or a daycare. And my mom would say, here's some flyers. When people come because you're full, How about you tell them about my preschool? She didn't offer a commission, no affiliate fees or anything. She just kept doing that. She went from being close enough to empty and barely making money to generating a little bit more than $100,000 a year in revenue, which is a lot of money, at least for us, especially back then. And maybe it was like around $80,000 a year in profit.

And that was all from you?

No, that was all from her.

She— But you said she was not getting any customers. How did she get customers?

She, from the car, when people drove around and had Tina's Daycare and her giving flyers to the competition saying, pass this out to parents when you can't accept them, because then I can accept them.

And did she pay a commission on that?

Nothing.

Wow. And the, the, it wasn't just on your car, it was on her cars too. And like your family's cars, right?

Yeah. And the moral of the story was my mom was never embarrassed. She never had ego. She didn't care what people think. Um, it really never really was embarrassed. And she's just like, I'm going to try to get business. And my mom thought outside the box. We didn't have tons of money because she had no— we barely had income. So she couldn't pay for ads. But this strategy worked for her. And she did well over time.

It's really whatever it takes to get the initial traction. Like Charlie Munger talks about this, right? The late Charlie Munger, the first $100,000 is a son of a bitch, right? Like, it's hard to get that. And it's still true to this day. And she like, you have to, you have to figure out every little thing And you have to be willing to do every little thing.

Yes. And I don't think that in some people's cases, like my mom's case, she got to like $80,000 in profit. She wasn't able to really scale more than that. And I'm guessing around $80,000 in profit, but she never—

But that's great.

Yeah, she never scaled more than that.

Yeah.

But it was tough. She would grind it out. Like, no joke. Imagine walking into your competition and saying, hey, here's a flyer for our business. Can you please hand it out when you're not able to take on new customers? So at least I generate the revenue. Right. And my mom built relationships and funny enough, schools would refer her potential customers and she's like, yeah, this works. Yeah. And it's kind of crazy in marketing these days. People just assume that like, oh, I don't have the budget. Oh, there's no possible way. I can't afford Google Ads or whatever. People aren't willing to get creative and put in the time and energy.

All right. Quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain. And Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. Want to talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more and we'll see you inside. We have one more point we can end it on. Actually, we did the Agency Owners Association. I do these group calls, right? Eventually I was like, hey, Neil will come to one of these calls. They're like, where's Neil? Where's Neil? I was like, eventually. I said, hey guys, once we get to 50 paying members, Neil will come to one of them. Okay. Because then, because then what, by the way, what we're doing with these, these hangouts is we're actually sharing it as a 6th episode on Saturdays. That way it drives new members. to the group, right? Because it shares some of the behind the scenes from it. And we can talk about some acquisition strategies from it in the future. But one of the questions that came up today, and I think this works well for service-based businesses, you and I both do this. One of the questions was, you know, what are some creative ways to actually drive more customers, right? And then the topic of dinners came up. And it was a very nuanced answer. And by the way, like, you don't just, you don't just do dinners, you go beyond that. Do you want to explain? Some things that you do unconventionally to get new customers?

We don't really do dinners much.

You don't do dinners, but you do the lunches where you're teaching something and then it's like you have a bunch of people that come, right? Like marketing leaders.

Yeah, we more so— it could be dinners, lunches, actually usually very rarely dinners. We have had dinners with potential customers, but the main thing that we do is let's say if we're going into a city or town, we'll do an event. Like our most recent one is I was in Toronto. We partnered with the Canadian Marketing Association, the CMA, and we invited the CMOs from, and VPs and directors of marketing from all the big corporations in Toronto around that area and even in Canada. So like Royal Bank of Canada, like literally big corporations, right? And what we do is we'll give talks, we'll do panel, we'll network, mingle, and boom, we're generating leads from it. Sometimes we pay money for this, sometimes it doesn't cost much at all, or sometimes it's free because we partner with a conference that is already going on and they have attendees and we're like, okay, we want to do a private meeting. We want you to invite these specific attendees and we get to know them. You know, we talk about just, or we educate and at the same time we're collecting leads.

Yep. The cool thing is what Neil is doing, he's educating, but also I believe you're paying for like at least some food and drink too, right?

Yes.

And then they get to mingle. So they get to network, they get to learn and they get free food. So it makes it worth it.

Yeah. And we don't charge for tickets or anything like that, but sometimes we're able to pull it off for free because some of the conferences we partner with, We'll do the event not during a conference. We'll do it maybe like at nighttime. Like when I was in Brazil, we did one in São Paulo at nighttime. The hotel, JW Marriott, it was a Four Seasons. So it was a really nice hotel. They provided everything for free because they eventually want the conference to throw events at their hotel. So they're really flexible.

Oh, they're trying to win the—

The future business. So they provided venue space for free, appetizers and drinks. Nothing costs money.

That's interesting. So, I don't know if you're privy to the details, but were you guys like— because one of our mutual friends, he's pretty good about this, right? He's like, oh, well, his assistant will reach out and be like, well, my boss, Mr. Patel, is going to be here. He's going to be evaluating these hotels and he would like to know the best deal that you can provide, right? And he just put them against each other, right? Because there's that element of positioning that comes from the EA setting up the meeting and that's how he's able to get You know, the presidential suite for like $50 a night or something like that. So how did you guys go about setting it up and getting it for free? Do you remember?

I have a ton of people and they just do it. And they came up with it and I asked them, how much did it cost? They said nothing. That's how I learned we didn't pay for it.

There you go. But what I'll say, a couple caveats before we get out of here, is if you're going to do these dinners or any types of events, you want— you got to make sure you have the right people in the room because I remember I did a very small one that had like 6 to 8 people in San Francisco. That dinner alone probably led to 3 or 4 clients that led to Lyft, that led to Looker, I think, and it led to like a couple other ones. So that dinner had a couple of marketing leaders, right? Some were VPs, some were directors, right? Maybe there's like one CMO and that's how it went, right? So that one was good. But then I remember I've also done other dinners where it might cost me like anywhere from $8,000 to $10,000. where I got absolutely nothing, right? Because it was the wrong crowd at the end of the day. So you have to make sure that you curate your crowd. Otherwise you could lose your shirt.

Totally agree with you on that.

Yeah.

All right.

So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to grow your agency faster.

And yeah, make sure you go there. Next time you do a call, let me know. I'll join the call.

Oh, there you go. Join it. Once we get to around 50-ish paying members or so, we're going to do the call with Neil and Yeah, it's going to be a good time. Catch you later.

We're pretty close to that already, right?

We're at like 39, right? Yeah.

So join, would love to do it. And I can break down all the stuff that we're doing to grow. And we're growing fast. To give you an idea, we'll go from start of this year, 750 employees. My guess is we'll end the year with 1,200.

Yep. And we're going to keep— guys, we're continuing to jack up the price too. So it was $149 a month. Now it's $199 a month. And it's going to keep going up depending on the value that we add to it. So join now and catch you later.

Bye.