Break the rules, build your brand 🚀 | Brad Mac

Every single account I've ever looked at is spending at least 80% of their budget on brand key terms. It's wild. It's like giving somebody a commission for working on the till at the supermarket. If somebody searches the brand name, they are already going to buy. All the, the entire purpose of that is just to protect the brand overall. So 20% of your budget, the brand stronghold, we call it, to protect the brand from competitors. But if you use the rest of that budget—

and isn't that just Google manipulating the market and allowing competitors to do that for their your own profit.

Absolutely. And it's the same problem with Meta, right? It's people—

it's a racket if you think about it. Yet this week's Millennial Master is Brad Mack, co-founder of Unreasonable. He's the guy ripping up the marketing rulebook and showing brands how to win with creativity, not just clicks. Brad's approach flips the standard agency mindset, putting brand building, bold creative, and real profit over empty metrics. In this episode, we talk about why most brands waste their ad budget and how to fix it, the real secret to viral creative that actually sells, and how to spot and hire killers in a good way for your team. Millennial Masters is brought to you by Jolt, fast, reliable web hosting built for founders. Whether you're launching a WordPress site or scaling an app, Jolt gives your project a rock-solid home starting from just £3.95 a month. You'll get 99.99% uptime, support in under 30 seconds, and flexible payment options including Bitcoin and Amex, so you can rack up those points while you build. Get your first 3 months free at jolt.co.uk. Smart hosting for people building what's next. Brad, welcome to Millennial Masters. How are you today?

Yeah, great. Thanks so much for having us, Daniel. We're just talking about the background there. Everything looks good, but yeah, brilliant. Really, really good.

Well, you're in the Unreasonable offices, which are in—

We are in Fairsor, about a 10-minute walk from Buckingham Palace.

Let's start with your co-founder origin story for Unreasonable before we explain to people what exactly you do, because I heard that your origin story involves a bathroom and Westminster Hall.

It does, it does. So my co-founder is Olivier Yonchef. Olivier Yonchef was the founder at Flight Story with Stephen Bartlett. I had an agency before, I've had little businesses pretty much my entire life, but I knew I wanted to go and join something really great. Like, I wanted to go and find somebody that was really doing it, you know, so you could really accelerate that learning curve. Oliver was very much one of those people, might have ignored a couple of LinkedIn messages. So I thought, you know what, like you've just gotta, you've just gotta go for it. So funny enough, it was at a Stephen Bartlett event and I was waiting to hang me coat up and I saw Ol going to the toilets and I thought, what's that horrible saying? Seize the day, seize the moment. I just, I saw Ol then, you know, just, it just takes you. So yeah, I ended up chasing him into the bathroom and then pitching him the idea for Unreasonable and here we are. It was probably the most uncomfortable 60 seconds of Ol's life, I think, but we made it, it was all right.

Well, you got it at the right moment because I guess Oliver said yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it all worked out in the end. We were the first official company alongside System7 to launch with Co-Created, which is Ol's new venture, the parent company, which has gone so, so well.

For those who are just tuning into this episode, they would be able to go back about 3, 4 episodes when I also had a Millennial Masters chat with Oliver. Who shared his origin story and how he ended up building Co-Created, which is how we ended up speaking today. So before you were doing Unreasonable, you were running Chanel's paid media, but you also did all sorts of little businesses before. So you've had this entrepreneurial flair for quite a bit, but then you also worked in marketing. What's That's the background to it.

Yeah, exactly. I'll try and give you the short version. I've got a tendency to waffle, but really all it was, it was growing up in Spain where I grew up. It was very difficult to get a job. I speak fluent Spanish, which is great, but with a thick northern accent.

Why was it difficult to get a job in Spain?

It's me accent.

Okay.

Thick northern accent trying to speak Spanish. So the only work I really could get in Spain was, you know, it was kind of restaurant work. I was like 17, 18, maybe 16 at the time. It's very underpaid. I tried modeling for a little bit then instead when I had a much stronger head hairline, hence the cap. And it didn't really work out. So I thought to myself, do you know what, like maybe there's a way I can kind of cheat the system and try and get, try and get some jobs myself. So we built a quick website, called it Mack Models. We did some Google Ads and that absolutely flew. The Google Ads also started getting leads through for big jobs. Ironically, still didn't get any modeling work, but we got the leads and then the business was building. And then, um, I think the biggest one that we got through there actually was, uh, was Game of Thrones. So we ended up working with season 5 and 6 of Game of Thrones, which was incredible. All the doubles and extras on set, it was so much fun. And I applied for the body double of Jaime Lannister and didn't get it, but we got the lead. It's all good. It's all good. Um, and then we were starting a couple different things. I've had a couple of businesses since then, but they're all kind of micro. And I've always been like obsessed with, um, you know, some of the bigger businesses and seeing how they operate, how they think, and some of those bigger people. And Olivia Mathers, I think, being the biggest example at the moment, or David Ogilvy, the original madman, like obsessed with that kind of work. I know I didn't say his name right and I never do, but it's fine. I admire the guy. I've read his book, so you can say that. So I was kind of trying to find out how these guys do it, how the big brands do it. I messaged a few people, Olby being one of them, didn't get back. Well, he did get back to us on LinkedIn. He was very kind about the rejection there a couple of years ago before the whole Unreasonable thing. And then I ended up just thinking to myself, right, if there's 3 or 4 brands that I really want to work with, then I have to take a different approach. Watch it. So instead of sending out the CV and doing the usual thing, I made Loom videos, 15-20 minute breakdowns of basically, I went through the entire website, all the media and showed them a different way to buy media of like building the brand with story, but also driving that kind of performance marketing. And yeah, I somehow accidentally found myself in the hallowed halls of Chanel pitching media strategies, which felt like a complete accident.

But, um, but we, you just shared, it was very intentional. You did a whole 20-minute breakdown of how to do it and what you would do. And who did you send it to? Did you send it to their marketing department or to anybody with a Chanel email address?

Everybody. I even apologized at the end of the video. I would say that if you've got through this much of the video, I apologize that you had to listen to me voice for this long and for fucking you, because it's just, it was terrible, but Hey, you've got to get attention by any means, right? We know now how congested the marketplace is, not just for businesses, but for people trying to learn, people trying to get jobs. And you've just, you've just got to go for it. And then value upfront, always provide value upfront wherever you can. That's how you're going to get attention. It's the same for us now when we're hiring. If somebody goes the extra mile, value adds either in the beginning of the relationship or, you know, overall in the first initial process, then it's a yes, it's a win. Because even if they're not that experienced, we know they're eventually going to get it. But yeah, it was nothing short of an absolute privilege, and I hope I was able to contribute a little bit of magic to Chanel and the brand and Gabrielle and everything overall is beautiful.

Okay, so then you pitched Unreasonable to Oliver in the Westminster Hall toilets. He said yes. What was day one like for Unreasonable?

It was incredible. So I first started working a little bit with Owl just on a couple of different projects in the background. That's how the initial relationship kicked off. And I basically just dropped everything as soon as we got any work or anything in through Owl because, you know, they were literally at the forefront of everything. It was like, drop what I'm doing and make it work. Everybody jokes that I was the guy doing like 4 different things. So I started doing work with a couple of, you know, Owl's clients on performance and stuff, and it just did. By magic. I always like to say magic because everything is just a big wonderful, like, imagine— not emagulation, it's not a word, but it is now— of just good timing, right? Good time and a little bit of luck and, um, skill stacking and just being in the right place. And so we did really well on those clients, um, and that's what kind of knocked us into performance marketing a little bit more because I realized how, you know, kind of just poor the industry is as a whole. These guys, these big performance agencies, I think they have so many clients that they lack the ability to go as deep as you need to go to really drive true growth for a business. Yes, I was working on those, did really, really well. And then I got a call from Ol scheduled in. I didn't tell him I was on holiday in Vietnam at the time. And so it was like 1 in the morning. So I was like, right, trying to stay awake and stuff. But you know, it's value add again, as they're always way busier than I am. So I'm always happy to make the time. And yeah, to be honest with you, I thought it was gonna— I thought he's gonna offer us a job. But he fell off the chair.

He didn't. He offered to become your co-founder.

Co-founder. Yeah. And co-founded Unreasonable with the real aim to just completely break everything, everything that's a norm, every little bit of performance marketing that's given such a bad name. You know, when, when you talk about things like direct response marketing, and it's an art form, all the greatest marketers in history are direct response marketers. Why has that been ruined by Facebook ads?

Let's break it down then. Let's break it down. Let's get to the core of it. What is the problem with the performance marketing today?

Let me think of an example. So there's, there's, we work with some really good clients now, really scaling up, some fantastic brands and I think the biggest problem that I see when I go into performance accounts is just the chaos. And we took an account the other day with over 1,000 live ads. And I think the problem is that by the time the team or whoever's working on it, even if they are doing a phenomenal job, has found the ad that's working, it's probably already fatigued, right? And you've got to start that whole vicious cycle all over again. It's not manageable. All you end up doing is that you put more money in, you change the creatives, and any performance agency will tell you it's the same playbook. 40, 50 creatives. That's what Meta is telling them what to do now. Just keep bashing the same images in over and over and over again. But what's that really going to drive? It's not going to drive connection because it's a static image, you know, trying to sell you something directly. And there's a large percent of people that don't buy from ads. It's not going to drive any kind of real resonance with the brand that builds that relationship over time. And paid media is just that. You pay for media to be distributed. So why not distribute great media? But it can also be profitable, which is fantastic. So rather than spamming a load of creatives and a load of ads, we try to lean on true marketing, big headlines, true copywriting, great images, things that get your attention, things that grasp the sale. And then we aim for stability overall. So we only ever run one campaign on any account at any given time. Most accounts will have 12, 15 campaigns, top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. We use one singular campaign because I believe that when you find that one bit of content and optimize towards longevity, you can unwittingly sometimes find that little bit of magic and that piece of creative can go viral. And if you can get a viral paid ad, it'll transform the business. And a couple of good examples there being like the recent Through Dark Shroud ad as an example, a little bit of magic, but if you optimize towards ROAS and these front-end metrics, it's going to give you the same results, the same creatives, there's no true growth for the business. And you end up basically like a day trader. So all you're doing is being reactive to the markets based upon those shifts. It's very stressful. It's very, very stressful. So rather than being a day trader, why not invest into media like an investment banker over time? And that will compound. So why not just make it steady, make it stable so there's clarity? That's the only way you can really scale a business, right? If you know you put a pound in, you get £3 out consistently, and then increase the budget incrementally over time and allow it to get better. And that way you're doing much, much better in the long run. And it allows you to optimize towards things like lifetime value of a customer rather than average order value or the lowest CPA. Good example there being, think about it, CPA is the only thing marketers ever talk about. It's wild because there's two options there. You can go for a higher CPA or a lower CPA. Everybody's always going to go for a lower. Cost per acquisition always. But that's just going after worse quality customers. Because if I put a 50% off discount sticker onto an ad, it's going to get a lower CPM, impulse purchases, lower quality cohorts. It costs more money to acquire a new type of customer. But is that customer more valuable? And that is what performance—

that's where the lifetime cost comes in. They might buy unprompted by advertising next time, or it might be remarketing. But speaking of your approach, it sounds to me in a way like going back to the basics of marketing instead of the click-driven internet era for the last 20 years when some people and some agencies and some businesses made it just a math game of, like you said, Putting spaghetti, seeing what sticks, and then, and then maybe continuing with that. You went back, you're going back to the core message and to the core job of marketing and that. But one of the big challenges of traditional marketing and brand advertising used to be the measurement of the performance. So how are you able to do that?

So there's two different things that we use there. The first one is by only running a single campaign, you can measure cause and effect. Effect. So it takes out all the noise because whichever creative that you put into that one campaign, it earns spend. And if it earns spend, that means it's that particular creative that's driving all of that traffic. And you can see the uplift from that particular cohort. And then we actually measure the cohorts over time. We use, we don't use ROAS. We don't use, it's, it's a, there's a swear jar that I'm reasonable for ROAS. We don't use any of these metrics. And we don't use MER. If anybody's still using MER, by the way, just don't listen to them. That's a god-awful metric. But we focus on profitable scale and margin, which is something that we came up with at Chanel, funny enough, but it focuses on the lifetime value divided by the CPA plus the COGS. That takes into account the cost to acquire the customer, the lifetime value of the customer, and then also the cost of goods landed. So it takes in the actual brand's cost as well overall. So you can measure the cohort of that customer profitability and we can go right back. We can go days, uh, the customers that we acquired in a single month to see how profitable the way they were. And you see it time and time again. Like I might go back to a January campaign as an example, and we can see that the profitability of that cohort is through the roof. However, the CPA is a lot higher. So all the media budget's being put somewhere else because if you measure for LTV, you've got to give that time. You got to give it understanding and it's just a better way to invest into media overall. You're compounding into building a customer base. It's the same thing. If you want to get a high ROAS, go on TikTok, press one button, GMV, you'll get an 11 ROAS. But what's that going to do for the business? Packaging's terrible. There's already all these problems around it. There's no data for the brand either. How the brand shows up is completely different. There's all this discount messaging. So. Yeah, it's focusing on quality of the customer more than anything and what that can bring to the brand. Big lessons from Chanel overall as well.

So the promise there is that you're not just bringing revenue through leads, but profit. And that's what really matters at the end of the day. So how do you make sure you're building brands with staying power and not just short-term wins?

Great content, not ads, content more than anything, right? An ad that somebody scrolls past is just an ad, but something that hits somebody emotionally, that, that's true content. And we always say at Unreasonable that we chase goosebumps, not algorithms, right? We don't just allow the algorithm to distribute whichever message it sees fit, because if you're going to optimize towards maximum conversions, you're going to get a low CPA, it's not going to work. Goosebumps, connection. There was a study recently, and I'll send you the link afterwards if you like, Daniel Ionescu, done by TikTok, funny enough. And it found out that the first impression that was made by a brand onto a person, if it was a positive first impression, that the return on investment in the long run could be over 4 times higher than a negative impression on the first thing. So why not just show up with great content, up with ads that don't look like ads, spark engagement, spark virality, and then all you've got to do is make the offer so fantastic after you've clicked that it's hard to say no. It's a full funnel approach. And by leading with great media on the front end, there's so many benefits. And I think one of the main benefits that's overlooked by marketers so often is the lowest CPMs, which basically means the lower cost per reach. Anybody who's optimizing towards conversion will largely ignore CPM as a metric, but it is the tectonic plate for the rest of the account, it dictates everything else. If I can reduce my CPM by 50%, then everything else will come down with it. It's so important. On top of that, the CPM is really the metric that measures the quality of the creative because it's based upon the user's interaction. And Meta's right there to keep the person on the platform, right? More than anything. So if we distribute great media, get a great connection, great first touchpoint, lower CPMs, and it means that we can beat all these big spenders, which we do time and time again, literally just by going back to the basics and distributing great ads, great media, great content.

Then you also produce the content for the businesses you work with. You don't let them do that, and then you just place it and promote it.

I think the funny thing is, and it's another thing coming back to marketing, just like you said earlier on, where, you know, people allow the data or the math to dictate things. Data is fantastic, but it's rooted in the past. It's very hard to find those magic moments focusing on metrics that are rooted in the past because we need that newness, right? We need that virality. So when we talk about the— sorry, what was the question again? See, I always go off on tangents, Daniel.

That's okay. Tell me, Brad, about a time when a campaign flopped, and what did it teach you about being bold versus being smart.

Yeah, I can think of them. I can think of one recently. So we set up amazing creatives for this, this new brand that's a vodka brand with celebrity endorsement. And it's a different— a big celebrity endorsement as well. It's a very difficult thing to do, sell alcohol online. It's against natural behavior. People don't generally buy alcohol online. But we found out when they do, they tend to spend more money. So the thought was, you just really got to give them a reason. I think there's a couple of learnings, but a big thing there for any FMG brands. I never say that correctly either, but especially spirits is that you have to make it look delicious. Condensation, all these crazy things, but flavor profiling. So we've got a natural cherry-based vodka for this particular brand. And one of the headlines there was, um, if cherry Bakewell and vodka had a baby. And, um, killed it. It did so well and it's still going today. It's got 900 comments. The virality that's— it's transformed the entire business.. So we thought, okay, this traffic is stable. This looks great, right? Why don't we try and incentivize people to spend more money? Because that's what the data— that's rooted in the past. That's what the metrics say. So we did that. But in doing that, we realized that we were de-incentivizing, if that's a word, the purchase of the single unit. So it dropped off. Great CPMs, um, fantastically over the top in terms of click-through rate, everything you want on an ad, but then the conversion rate after the click, because people of trying to be like incentivized towards spending more money. It's almost like if the £1 menu was £4, but then you could get something else, it incentivizes it. Do you know what I mean? So what we did there was just rapid testing. So flavor profiling, and then we'll add it up with a testing framework. And in that instance, you've just got to be quick. You've got to be like you've said, bold, and you've got to go think of outcomes and think how you can solve it. So we did a couple of things, but in the end, we ended up aligning the offer and then laddering the offer up, which basically means that we made the first purchase amazing, really easy to buy. And then the second purchase even better and the third purchase even better. So still upgrading. Yeah, absolutely. It's just, it's really, really taken off. And there's so many examples I can think of, so many things have flopped. You're going to have so many flops when you're trying new things, but everybody's heard it, but it really does. And I've seen it. It just takes one thing. To take off. And that's that. I think that's what we're really searching for, right? When we talk about optimizing towards LTV, um, you know, the profit margins, that allows us to invest into media like a banker, so it's stable. But the real goal is to take that time and try and find those explosive moments more than anything, because we know if you have that compound steady growth, if you have one big spike in the middle of that, then you can bet you'll have an elevated growth line afterwards. And that's what we're searching for. Stability, compound interest over time, which allows you the freedom to then go ahead and test, break some of the rules, right? Have some fun and things that can transform the business. And then after that, you see these elevated baselines of just revenue growth because you've got an entirely new dedicated cohort. That's where the magic really happens for businesses. So much fun.

So speaking of taking risks and being bold, do you ever struggle to convince clients to take creative risks and/or to spend more on the marketing materials and promotions that they do than they do on the distribution of that media as well?

Yeah, of course, because, you know, it's changing, it's changing a person's mindset, right? Locked in on return on ad spend, CPA. But there's a bit of unrest in the market at the moment, Daniel. And I think Unreasonable is coming at the perfect time. Everybody who's been smashing performance marketing for the past 5 years has hit a ceiling because everybody else is doing it. Long gone are those wonderful days, the same as when I had, you know, the business doing Google Ads where you could get a click for a penny through to Google. Right? You could drive 1,000 people through the website for like £10. It was ridiculous. So all you had to do was to have a very generic landing page, very generic offer, and you could really capitalize on all that untapped growth, all that untapped potential. It's the same for Meta. I don't know if you remember when Meta ads were just on the right-hand column, CPMs were like 20p. You could—

before they had— before they—

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, before all of that. You could probably get away with things like a picture of a girl in a bikini and saying click here to lose weight, right? So it It was wild, the things you could get away with. But it just, again, it represented an untapped opportunity for growth because the cost was low. So the early movers, the people who adopted that methodology early, are now seeing the benefits more than anybody. And so the real, the real opportunity is trying to let clients know first and foremost that this way of doing it is broken and they can see that because it's getting more congested. Cost fucking—

the market is saturated. Everybody is on. Saturated.

Yeah, so saturated. One of the first things that we do when talking to a new prospect, we'll have a conversation and I try not to do pitch decks more than strategy decks. Again, it's a value add, right? So I want to make sure that every touchpoint I have with a brand, that I'm providing value. And of course there's a criteria, right? Like you've really got to believe that you can do a better job than the other agents, the other potentials there. And we'll always provide that value upfront. But the main thing with convincing them to go ahead and actually take the risk is just showing them. So we'll actually map it out. As an example, I don't know if you've seen the recent update from Meta, the 2026 update where they're going to take over the entire marketing funnel with AI supposedly.

Yeah, well, let's move on to the AI bit. It was on my list of questions. So let's talk about it. But just to, just to give everybody a quick brief about that, Meta wants you to basically upload a picture of your product or something graphical and maybe some ideas about your product, and then it wants to let AI roam free and create multiple versions of artwork and then distribute them also through AI on their network.

Exactly.

Yeah. So is that good or bad? Terrible.

It's such a big problem in the industry, the mindset around media buying, all these different things in general, but Meta has basically gone to update creatives in real time based upon where somebody is in the funnel. So video creative, still not quite there. It's very, very close. We're still trying to lock into that. But image creative, you can absolutely get away with it. So updated image creative in real time takes the need for all the creative that everybody's smashing into these accounts all the time. What this does, it makes it very, very easy for people to buy media on all these platforms. And see a return. Just like GMB on TikTok, you press a button, you're live. You don't need an agency anymore. You don't need an expert. You don't need a creative. It's all done for you. But what happens when something becomes easy? Everybody does it. So we, with clients, and I touched on that a little bit earlier, we'll take their current CPM and we'll map out the CPMs in their industry, their region against their competitors. We'll go really in depth and then we'll run that through different models to basically map out the inflation of the CPM. Up to a point where they're going to be put out of business completely. And I can say for 9 out of 10 businesses that we've spoken to, by the time 2028 comes around, so 2 and a half years now, you are no longer going to be able to acquire customers on Facebook profitably, because the CPMs are going to be absolutely through the roof unless you do something differently. No chance.

So what does AI help in marketing with?

Yeah, so there's, um, so there's a couple of things, you know, all says this a lot, but, um, Oliver says this a lot, but I do really believe that all great AI usage right now should be invisible, right? There's absolutely still a bias against AI in general. Um, if anybody was to spot an ad that looked AI, you know, they're just, they're not going to click it because it loses that trust. There's that bit of disconnect. The moment it becomes a trusted product—

What's the difference though, between a fully retouched ad and an AI ad.

That's the magic, isn't it? Because you can't quite put your finger on it, but you just know it's AI. Apart from maybe a person having 7 fingers, you know, you can always catch those little things out.

Yeah, but we, we kind of like gone past that era now. The models have greatly improved since, and this 7-finger part was more than a year ago. Ever since, it's been much better.

Yeah. Yeah. So, and We use AI a lot for backgrounds in the creative. So it's very good for generating different backgrounds of product shots. And we'll use it mainly when we want to test out different messaging. So one of the core parts of marketing, as you know, and it's one of the reasons that we don't use AI in copywriting, we still believe that should be a human process. And maybe the other bits can be helped out with AI. We might test out different headlines and we might test out different hooks, different offers, different resonances with that AI, just because of the ability that it has to put out that volume. And we might put out, say, 100 ads, £10 per ad to test. It might be colors, mainly messaging, mainly headlines. Then you can take that single concept that has the highest engagement rate and then put the real manpower behind it. So I will say for AI, you're right, it's far past that era. It's very good right now for testing, especially at low cost and things like headlines, things like messaging overall.

And with everything shifting now, TikTok, Meta, AI, performance fatigue, you said it's coming for everybody. What's really the future of growth marketing? Is it still worth launching a new brand today? Or will it be a battle between established brands in the future?

It's absolutely always possible to disrupt just by doing things properly. So I think a lot of the big brands have these big activations, but we are seeing more brands now more than ever just explode onto the scene. So we, you know, what we're about this, we'll talk about the Marilyn Monroe moment for Chanel, right? That catalyst for growth was Marilyn Monroe. What do you wear to bed? Why, No. 5, of course. Beautiful ad, great creative. Michael Jordan for Nike, right? Jordan, nobody ever would have seen that coming in with what he did for that brand overall. But it looks like the power is moving away from celebrity, from spending power, and it's moving back to creators, back to people and just great content. There's been a big shift in media over to interest-based media. So we no longer in our feed see content, we know so much from friends, family, like we used to. Now it's all based upon engagement, right? Which is where CPM comes into it.

So predominantly TikTok was the one that changed the game when it comes to that.

Absolutely the pioneer. Yeah, yeah. It's, it's a, I always like to think of TikTok as like Instagram after 8 Red Bulls. It's a great platform to fatigue creators. You know, sometimes there's a valid reason to fatigue creative as well. Maybe it's taken up all the spend, maybe you can't get rid of it. Maybe you want to test something new, then you might want to move that idea over into TikTok as an example. But TikTok's also very good for rapid testing, getting those rapid results back. But yeah, does that make sense?

So yes, launch a brand, but your product has to be good and distinctive then to make a mark.

I know, it's all— see, I always have a waffle, go off on tangents and then get lost in the middle of it. And we see brands now, the power coming back to the creators, right? So if you think about different creators like Liquid Death, one of my favorite examples, we'll probably stay away from the UK launch a couple of months ago. That didn't do too well, but brilliant, right? What good creative. And they're creating these kind of viral loops and it's probably the kind of content somebody is going to sit on the toilet and watch, right? You're going to watch it over and over again. It's got loads of comments. You're going to share it with your friends. That's how you build presence. I don't know if you've seen the famous Man in the Field video that pretty much explains marketing overall.. But it starts off with that one weirdo in the field having a little dance. I think it's at the outside of a concert. And he's dancing there for about 5 minutes, and you get another weirdo comes in and joins him, starts having a little dance. And then after about half an hour, you've got a field full of people dancing, and it's the new norm. So these brands are coming up with these kinds of content and these new ideas, and they are absolutely getting lower CPMs, higher engagement, more reach, and therefore more brand recall and building brands overall. Chamberlain Coffee, absolutely smashing the coffee market. There's queues of them. We work with a lot of US clients and partners, and we were just told that there's queues for Chamberlain Coffee's physical store that are over an hour long for a cup of coffee, just because she's doing these great storytelling pieces, these immersive worlds, you know, true content. Another one we're looking at just the other day was, I think it was, it's called Salt Lizer. I always forget the name. Salt. I'm terrible with names. Salt. They've seen those guys recently, the electrolyte. Product really works. But the creative, just a man chewing half a lemon, fantastic, right? The colors, it gets you. Oh, that's that brand, Spashed With Water. So more than anything, these brands are disrupting by creating memorable moments. And you don't have to have big budgets anymore to do that. You just have to make great content.

Now, you mentioned we, the social networks, TikTok is not a social network, but it's It's kind of still seen as one, but it's a distribution network. And we talked about Google as well, but what about traditional media, TV, digital, print? Does it still have a place in your marketing playbook?

It's so difficult, isn't it? Yes, absolutely. Anything that has large brand recall. We ran an ad for a client recently, and it was a big ad on the tube, and it did very, very well. It never drives initial sales, and this comes in a large brand market, right? But The only way to actually build a brand is to get new eyeballs, right? And then you kind of want to funnel that attention down into, you know, the compelling offer in the bottom of funnel. And one of the best ways to do that is just to put the ads where everybody already is, but it comes down to true marketing, right? You've got to have a great headline. You've got to have a great message and you have to have a compelling reason to think when somebody's seeing that ad, maybe to see the product on the shelf or to see the product online, they go, ah, I remember that. And that's, that's the real point of it. But there's, there's two, there's a couple of different schools for advertising. And this is why it's so difficult to kind of try and discern what a good ad is now. So like, we'll use LinkedIn as an example to follow great marketers and see what they're posting about. But I think a lot of people now think that ads are for accolades and awards, right? So I think there's ads that people think do well. And then there's ads that actually do well.. And those are those great ads that do things like, well, selling indirectly. That's the point of an advertisement, isn't it? To build the business, to sell the product. So if we can do that in a way that doesn't make it appear like an ad and sell the product indirectly, then we're absolutely flying. More than anything, if you go right back, right, I love historic marketing campaigns. One day when I've got enough time, blog incoming, I'm just going to nerd out about old marketing campaigns forever, pull those fundamentals out. The Marlboro Man, right? 1940s, it was a woman's cigarette, eventually, originally, right? And that big— the repositioned it as a man's cigarette, Marlboro Red, the cowboy, same as Jack Daniel's. And it's those kinds of moments that you want to distribute with big media. I think the social platforms now are favored just because you can get attribution, which you can't— it's completely broken, right? If you left it up to Facebook, you'd be responsible for 640% of your revenue.

Plus historically, they, their stats were also wrong or wildly exaggerated.

Almost. Yeah.

And I've read some studies which say that a million YouTube views would only be the equivalent of up to 10,000 views on traditional television. So with that in mind, how much of of the media spend budget of your clients do you push towards traditional media? And how much do you reserve for digital and/or social media? And what's your general advice for anybody building a new brand now? Because in a way, traditional media can be way more expensive upfront.

Absolutely. Every brand should have a core conversion funnel. Every brand should have a sustainable, scalable way to get from zero to £1 million in predictable revenue in the UK. For the US, it's more. We always say with our clients, you have to be able to spend £100,000 a month profitably on ads before you can really move up. And to do that, all you have to do is find that single thing, that one thing, that one hero product that the brand becomes known for, and market the hell out of it. So when we talk about using AI, If you need to find a hero product or something that resonates, use AI for that. Nobody's going to remember what the brand is now. They're going to remember what the brand is if it becomes successful. Look at Gymshark, prime example. Their best marketing moment was when the guy ordered way too many t-shirts at the university event. So he had to give like 20,000 t-shirts away. Ben Francis only bought that domain because it was cheap. Like it was available. He was just going to dropship this stuff. It became something afterwards because he found his core offering and his core people. So we always like to focus on one hero product, find out whatever that hero product is through testing, and then define your audience. All great work should start with research after you have your product, right? What's the uses of it? What's the barriers? What kind of audience is going to want it? What are the reasons for buying? What does the competition look like? And then you kind of want to distinctly find out a full funnel offering. So when you have that core funnel, profitable. That's where performance media can come in. That's when you want to use these big moments to kind of amplify everything. And that's, that's where we really come in. So we take that, the performance mess, and we'll make it easy. We'll make it sustainable, make it scalable, which gives the brand permission to kind of invest into these bigger moments, which gives more into the brand. We did a study recently because it's very difficult taking performance clients and then getting them to do brand work, right? I remember When I first started at Chanel, I thought brand marketing was just a big retargeting campaign. I'm just really glad I never said that out loud.

You did now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's the same for, you know, everybody in the same mindset. We're all taught the same things in performance marketing, right? And that's that brand marketing is essentially a waste of money. But what you can do is you can start to measure things like incremental reach, right? True reach. You can't trust reach on Meta or even new reach because it will still go after the same people. There's absolutely no chance. Incremental reach is the amount of new people every month that you've actually reached. And if you really want to grow a brand, then you have to reach— 40% of your budget should be going towards incrementally reaching a new audience, whether it's the same SKU, whether it's the same type of audience. You should always be chasing those new top of funnel people overall. And the only way you can do that profitably is with great media, right? You get— and if you want to put it on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or Pinterest, great example of up-and-coming platform right now, then you have to look for ways to reach these people efficiently, bring them into the funnel, great messaging. And that's what's really going to allow you to distribute great media on all these different channels, you know, out of home and all these things. Definitely no crazy expert in that field, though I've had some success, which is fantastic. But again, even if you want to look at platforms that are underutilized at the moment, you said YouTube, 32-minute average watch time. 22 minutes.

That's what I wanted to ask you next. What's the most underrated marketing channel right now? You mentioned Pinterest and then you came to YouTube, but is— yeah, you can name a few. It's okay.

I think each of them has their own underrated nuance. And this is what I love tapping into. You can just get obsessed with it. But for instance, Instagram, right? If you optimize a campaign, conversion campaign like everybody does, and you know, the optimizations, maximize conversions, lowest CPA, you can bet your ads are going to be showing up on Facebook next to some weird shit, some odd stuff, the top, bottom. There's a new placement on Facebook, which is just wild because it says it's getting the cheapest conversions, right? Instagram, right? Get rid of Facebook. How do you want to show up as a brand? What does that first touchpoint look like? How can we show up in Reels as an example, right? Not always natively unless you use UGC and stuff, but not always natively. The best platform to convert from, but it's a cinematic placement. What a fantastic opportunity to get the user's full attention and immerse them in the brand before they click through and explore the brand on their own terms, right? That's a fantastic positive customer journey. So that's one, you know, there's different ways of buying media even on the most congested platforms. Pinterest is wildly underrated. Pinterest creators are some of the most special partnerships you can find. Everyone's advertising with statics on Pinterest. Video. It gets the— stops the scroll, it gets the feed, people watch it. You can get cost per views on Pinterest right now with good content for a penny. I haven't seen that since COVID It just hasn't happened. It's sensational. Roast has gone on Pinterest, that kind of things. But Pinterest is quite often, especially for beauty and fashion, the largest indirect driver of sales of any of the platforms. Wildly underrated. YouTube, like we just said, right, with a good creator, and 22-minute average watch time. We're all wrestling for 15 seconds, right? 30 seconds. What does the hook look like? 22 minutes people are watching these videos for. These videos live forever. People come back and they watch them again and again and again, years later. 8% conversion rate. Percent. Wild and it's wildly underrated right now as well in terms of costs because YouTube's largely managed as an afterthought through PPC managers and PPC guys. You can get some great ones by the way. Google's largely undervalued. We'll tap into that one next, but YouTube is an example and people are talking about demand gen and all this kind of stuff, which is great. But for the last 5, 6 years, well, since it launched, Google's very much been a data-driven platform. Now we have YouTube, we've got YouTube Shorts, we've got YouTube Partnerships. So it's massively undervalued because the data guys are still managing that platform. Platform, even though it's creative first, which is wild, right? So we can tap into that beautifully. Google, so much potential on Google. Bing, Bing's, um, is how people are starting to now, um, show up for ChatGPT more than anything, right? So Microsoft owns half of it. So showing up on Bing's really undervalued, bit of a weird place to show up, I think, but definitely worth it if you're going to be showing up on the large language models overall. Google's a very easy one. Every single account I've ever looked at is spending at least 80% of their budget on brand key terms. It's wild. It's like giving somebody a commission for working on the till at the supermarket. If somebody searches the brand name, they are already going to buy. All the entire purpose of that is just to protect the brand overall. So 20% of your budget, the brand stronghold, we call it, to protect the brand from competitors. But if you use the rest of that budget—

And isn't that just Google manipulating the market and allowing competitors to do that for their own profit?

It. Absolutely. It's the same problem with Meta, right? It's people—

it's a racket if you think about it.

Yeah, it's a com— I just did a keynote for Google, so we'll focus on the potential. But yeah, no, no, it absolutely is. You know, it's, it's very easy to buy media on these platforms and to get a high ROAS, but when you start looking under the hood, it's actually broken. And this is why businesses aren't scaling because they're just allowing the algorithm to take their money and do as it pleases because they're getting a high ROAS. What's— I think 97% of people who go to Google are searching for information, not solutions. Information. A lot more starting to transition, as we know, over to LMMs. I think last time I checked, it was 3%. Paid social search now, TikTok and Pinterest is absolutely flying. But if we talk to people at 97% and we give them information, right, instead of solutions, then our conversion rate's going to go through the If we get a high conversion rate on Google, well, then the cost's going to go down overall because Google understands that. Talking about search as well, you've got Pinterest search, wildly underrated right now. You've got TikTok search, again, wildly underrated. SEO on these platforms is incredible. For instance, you can find like a really high-ranking query or a really high-ranking term, brief that out to the creators, place that organically and paid. On platforms like Pinterest and TikTok, and you can bet that paid asset's going to absolutely fly, but it's also going to show up organically middle of funnel because you're answering a question. I can go on forever about untapped opportunities, whether it's like different ways to use the platforms, different ways of thinking, traditional marketing, but they're just some of the things that are unreasonable after we've stabilized the easy part, right? And don't tell performance marketers I said that. After we've stabilized the easy part, it's about what comes next, right? And that's, that's where the true marketing happens. Plus it's way more fun, right? Having these big swings and trying to unlock and do these big marketing pieces. We only live once, life's short, right? I think I'd much rather take a big swing to transform a business than just sustain it overall. But I'm waffling again.

We talked about brands and product brands, but I wanted to get your take as well on personal branding, because I've seen that for building your own business, you leverage that quite a bit. And a lot of founders nowadays also use it in the same way. And a lot of the personal brands now are built on LinkedIn. What's your take and/or tips for anybody doing that?

We've had great success on LinkedIn. I did a post a little while back on Wrexham Football Club, and it just took off. We got like 13,000 likes, 900 comments, which is was wild for that. I was surprised myself. I was sending so many screenshots of this post going viral.

Well, football, Ryan Reynolds, it's a good topic.

Yeah, I know it was perfect timing and I positioned that in a way, I think one of the lines said that you need content creators now more than you need strikers, you know, for football teams because it's talking about how Ryan Reynolds is generating revenue for Wrexham and how it's now an attention game versus an actual skill game. So it was definitely ragebait. A little bit. I got a lot of angry football fans in the comments, which is great. Lower CPMs. Don't do that for your brand, by the way. That is not a tip. You do not want negative engagement to give you a lower CPM. Obviously, it's a terrible way to show up. But, um, so we've had big success there. We've had big success with other kind of posts as well. My favorite thing to do on LinkedIn, you know, past all the normal things, post 3 times a week, be consistent, all that stuff's just fundamental. I use that time to give myself the permission just to research and find out and have some fun. What's going on in the market? What am I interested in? Am I reading a book? That's something I want to share. I read an Ogilvy book recently and I shared 19 learnings from Rory Sutherland that got over 1,000 likes, you know, grew our following massively, both business and personal. So yeah, I would say more than anything, my tips are just to share the things that you've picked up during the week, right? Once a week, 3 things. It might be ads that you've produced, something that you've seen, and give yourself permission to actually spend some dedicated time and go through that. That. All the greats, well, when it comes to content creation, all the greats now, you can bet that an hour of their day as a non-negotiable was spent creating content. And I can think of some very famous examples off the top of my head where that applies.

I see. Let's talk about building the business now, because that links pretty easily into the personal branding part. So you started Unreasonable about 8 months ago. And you've started growing by basically hiring one new person a month. Yeah.

So it's, it comes off demand, right? So I think the way that we buy media, we tend to get a lot of very good referrals. And I'm going to come back to why that is in a second, because again, it all just comes down to brilliant basics, Daniel. Everyone's always obsessed with these things over here and what's the new thing and what's the new thing. If you just do the basics brilliantly, if you do the fundamentals, it should not be a nice addition to be a good marketer and a performance marketer. It should be a necessity. You should know how to write copy, right? You have, because you're advertising. That's the entire point of it. And when it comes to the hiring, it's just, it's through demand, right? And we've got a big waitlist of clients now, which is, it's always a big privilege to have. But it's just because we want to make sure that we are doing the right things for the right people. So I'm on every account and I do not believe in hand in, work off at all. It doesn't mean to say I'm in charge of every single account. There's people at Unreasonable that are far better than me, which is again, a huge privilege. One of them is just sitting right there, Eliza. But it's really just getting these great accounts and then finding the right people to do the best work. But as I said, yeah, we have a waitlist because we're only taking on absolute killers at the moment that can. Because that's the, that's the aim of the game, right? We're looking to take businesses to do this, right? You can't do that for a business unless you've got great people. You just can't. Which is why I really do believe in that you have to be, like we said earlier, in depth into the business more than anything, right? And I think, again, well, hey, I don't know why, you know, when you get on a train of thought about somebody or something and you just keep going with it, but you know, Oglivy again, right? So his famous line for Shell petrol, you know, Shell, the biggest company in the world now, again, he's bloody responsible for that. But it's just because he went in deep, he spent time with the client, he researched the product. And he found out that basically, we have common sense now, but petroleum was the core ingredient for petrol, like it was the core thing that made the petrol work. So he just said, with extra petroleum, or something along those lines, fortified petroleum or something think, sure, right? Just from that one little thing. And that cannot happen without understanding the brand, its nuances, its products, its customers. You have to go in so deep. And I think this is a big problem with performance marketers is that performance marketing in general has got all these accounts. Everybody's frantic, ROAS, you know, yeah, everybody's trying to manage this beast all of the time and up and down. The accounts leave because they've had a bad month. Of course, you're going to have a bad month if it's up and down. And then you end up basically in this never-ending cycle of low-quality clients, which means that if you do get a killer or somebody who's immediately adding value to the brand overall, they've got 21 other brands to manage and they are knackered. Worse yet is when they hire a manager to look after those brands, right? And that manager doesn't work on the account. You cannot manage an account. You cannot manage a brand if you don't actively work on it. And little things like this, like, I believe you should always build your own Facebook ads because you should be in the platform to understand what's going on if that's where you're spending your money. So again, I think it really does just come down to that human element.

So you said you're looking to hire killer people in the good way.

Yeah. Yes. Yes.

To do that, you also have to go through a lot of interviews. So I'm wondering what's the most unreasonable thing someone's ever said to you in an interview and whether that led to a yes or a no?

So, I always like to keep interviews super informal and I like to give people a shot if I believe in them. And I have a criteria beforehand and whether or not I can just assess on somebody coming in. I don't believe in things like making somebody do work for free. You know, if too many times before in the past where I've been helping other agencies out during the interview process or a freelancing process, I would have done a project and then I've seen my work used to close a prospective client. It's wild. I've seen my strategies, somebody's tried to apply my strategy through that. So what I always look for in a person is a value add. And, you know, we get thousands of applicants. We were recently featured in Forbes and so many applicants came through that. Now you've got to go through everyone in detail because if somebody's taken the time to apply, it's your responsibility to find out whether or not it's a good fit. Unreasonable, more than anything, should be a hub for great people to to do great work and really just do special things for a brand. So it's my responsibility to make sure that I read everything that comes through. And then more than anything, I'll normally send screening questions and I'll be like, we want the people who are responsible for the results and we don't want the people that were part of the process, right? Unless that's what we're specifically hiring for. But normally these people come along and it's funny because it's kind of similar what I do without realizing, but they'll value add immediately. Instantly. But like, like I said, Loom videos, right, sending those through. One of the people sitting right next to us, again, funny enough, sent through some ads, ads, some of the best headlines, one of the best ads that we've ever worked with. And just as an upfront value add, and that's how I know that that's going to work out, because it doesn't matter about— it doesn't matter experience, but it doesn't matter too much. If you get somebody that's that committed and willing in the beginning, can you imagine if you just unleash them onto a brand that's got growth potential, right? So that's, that's it overall. And then I like to get them in. I like to give them a shot to really show what they're worth more than anything. The traditional interview process I try and stay away from because it used to wind me up terribly, like 3 months, 4 conversations, 2 projects, an email, in person. It's just, it's crazy. But yeah, hopefully that answers the question.

What's an instant red flag then when you're screening CVs or you're doing an interview? View.

So there's, there's, there's different types of people. There's left brain and there's right brain. I tend to be very drawn towards creative people, as you can tell from all of my hand movements. Um, so it's very important for, you know, somebody to be in the room when I'm talking to people to kind of combat that weakness. And a big example now will be something like attention to detail. Um, and I say right brain's my weakness because, you know, I get so invested into somebody that's got character that maybe they missed something that I'll overlook. An example being somebody sent through a thank you letter the other day, but attached another thank you letter underneath for a different job they were applying for at the same time. You know, that's fine. And I felt so bad for it because I've probably done something similar in the past, but you can't have that poor level of attention to detail when you're responsible for growing some of the UK's fastest growing brands. It's just not acceptable at this level. So yeah, I would probably say Yes, be fast-moving, like a bull in a china shop and all these kind of things.

How do you screen for attention to detail? Because everybody can put that in their CV or say.

Yeah, of course. It's just, it's, it's giving somebody a shot, Daniel, more than anything. I think the, I think that the process for hiring and interviewing is dead. Um, you know, you get a million CVs through LinkedIn, which is how they are making a fortune, by the way, because you pay per application on there, don't you? Everyone's just copy and pasting AI. Everyone's getting better and better at AI. So there's no personal touches, but you can tell when there is. And so I think that overusing AI, definitely use it, especially if it's on like an executional level, right? And if you're just fresh out of university and these kinds of things, then you absolutely want to be using AI, otherwise you're going to be left behind. But overusing AI, maybe you've used one of those big lines. Well, if you've been on social media for the last 3 months, you've seen that everybody's spotted that, as an example. So it's just, it's again, it just causes—

The em dashes debate. Yes.

Yeah. I was with a professional copywriter in the industry for 4 years and he was like, I actually use those and I can't use them anymore. And I was thinking, well, where is that on the—

Likewise.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were good. Yeah, dash. But I think you'll know this as well. It just goes back to spending the time that somebody deserves more than anything, Right. We've got somebody coming in now, but, um, reading the CV end to end, read it all thoroughly, read it properly, and you'll be able to see what their attention to detail is like. And, you know, just conversations and the entire process overall.

Then I'm wondering, Brad, how do you, then you start growing, how do you stop the agency from turning into the kind of agency you wanted to escape? Could clients push you in the wrong direction? Direction if you bring in a client, or how do you see this?

Of course, it's, it's a challenge. Of course, you know, when, when you're trying to move into a new direction or trying to redefine an agency, it's about shifting people's mindsets. So you've got to have a client that's brave, right? And to be honest with you, especially with the way the CPMs are going, half the businesses now don't have the budget to play it safe. Safe. It's that simple. You can see by mapping out the CPMs, if you keep playing it safe, you're gonna be out of business. Like I'd say, you're gonna be finished. So it's data, right? Always lean back on data. Show, don't tell, right? So you always want to have somebody actually looking at something that's working. And I think more than anything, people can feel when something's going right. It feels right because there's something changing in the business. And that's what true marketing really is. You don't really understand. It's that weirdo dancing in the field, It's those little magic moments that feel right and you know they're going to pay off. And so yeah, I guess it's a very difficult conversation to have with clients often, especially if something's gone wrong, which it will if you're always testing. But as long as you can back up the results with data, which is where Performance Marketing and Brilliant Basics come in, then you're always going to fly. Which is why the focus on profitability as well, to be honest, Daniel, because if you're just spending a client's money on a gamble then there's just no chance. You have to be able to maintain that profitability. So we always build the foundations of a business, one campaign, leading with great creative, optimizing towards LTV and profitability before we break the rules and play.

And you said you have your offices in central London. So how important is having everybody in the office for you as a creative business versus other types of businesses which can be fully them out.

Yeah, of course. I believe in, and it's an old Netflix line, I've read every business book ever written or listened to it twice. But I think one of my absolute favorites was when Netflix said that they want all of their people to have freedom and responsibility. I have read Netflix's, I don't know if you've seen it, I'll send it to you. It's Netflix's criteria for like what the business wants to be. It's gold. If anybody hasn't seen it, go back and read that. One of the lines on there is about freedom and responsibility. You have the freedom to do what you want as long as you drive results. And that's how you create an environment for the world's best people, the most ambitious people, give them the freedom to go after and do what they want to do. So I think remote has its place now, especially more than anything, right? Because for some reason, I think working from home is meant to make things easier, but I think everybody seems to be working more. There's a, there's a book written by a guy called Cal Newport, and he wrote a book called Deep Focus, which was fantastic. He's just written a new one called Slow Productivity, and it's, it's kind of talking about the problem in a Zoom-oriented world and how to really get back into that flow and beautiful state of work. But in short, it's very important to have the team here. So we have this space that's open to the team at any time. Give them freedom and responsibility to do great work. Reward them, look after them, make them, not just make them feel they are part of it. I always say that this is just as much theirs as it is mine. I'm also just employed by Unreasonable, right? We are the guardians of what this thing's supposed to be. We're the ones who are going to take get there. And I love the name as well, because it gives them permission to do absolutely anything, doesn't it? Unreasonable. Yeah, give them that freedom, give them that environment. And I think you'll, you'll see they'll start showing up more often than not. I keep getting surprised when I come into the office and see how many people are here. It's absolutely fantastic. And that energy, right?

So they don't have to be in the office every day. But you created an environment where they want to, and they come into the office most days.

Yeah, exactly. We're just here, like I've come up to the quiet bit to have this meeting, but it's beautiful, the space. It's a great space, very creative, beautiful area. Hyde Park's just there, so you can go for a big walk if you want a bit of a refresh. Some amazing restaurants, we're forever going out for really good lunches. And then we also have big client meetings downstairs in the boardroom as well. It's a beautiful big space, beautiful area. And so people tend to come in more often than not. One of the things I absolutely absolutely hated at previous places I've worked was the whole idea that sitting in a line on a Tuesday works. It's ridiculous. So many high performers are leaving agencies in droves and they're going to brands because they hope they'll get the thing to express themselves. We always fall back into this trap and I don't know what happens, but people maybe after 100 years of, you know, when, when Unreasonable's become the next Dog Livi, which it absolutely will, we'll beat them day, maybe then it becomes a point of where you have to look at things from a data-driven perspective. But if you sit a high performer next to somebody who must be in the office from 9 to 5 on a Tuesday, they're going to be demotivated. They're going to go somewhere else. So, but you don't want those people, the ones who are just here for a paycheck. But Daniel, the world is full of people that want to do great things, absolutely full of them. You've just got to give them the chance and the freedom overall.

Speaking of losing motivation, and especially since you're in the the building and scaling side of your business right now. And I know it can be hectic and consume you from every single side. What are some of your habits and routines that keep you sane and productive?

Well, I'll tell you, it's been so fast growing. It's unreasonable. It's been insane how fast this thing's grown. And it's just because we're providing something special that's actually working And it feels different, right? You can feel it when you come in. And I think overall, sanity, trying to keep it. I spend a lot of time in saunas. There's a rooftop sauna place I've just been to, and I was there from, I think, 7 this morning till 8, so 60 minutes sauna. I listen to a lot of audiobooks.

Steam or dry?

Whichever is available, whichever is cheapest, depending, because I do need my peace and quiet as well, preferably dry because I do like to read, but depending on the book in the sauna, it'll melt the glue, which is absolutely no fun. I've got so many copies of books because I've melted them in the sauna. And I would say there's, there's a couple of fundamental habits that you can fall back onto. I think one thing I wish somebody had told me is that the habits you form before you get the opportunity will stick with you more than anything, because it's very difficult to form new habits when you're doing all this. We're working with, with most of like quite a few of the UK's top 100 companies, the fastest growing companies, that requires energy, time, focus, and you've got to keep up because not only is your team full of killers and high performers and incredibly talented people, so is their team, right? So you have to be able in every meeting to keep up. So having that peace of mind, own the habits now whilst you've got time, put them into practice, just do it, just absolutely just do it. And then a couple of things I like to focus on when it comes to it, whenever there's a big big problem. This too shall pass, the old, uh, quote, right? Everybody's going to be dead soon. And the Egyptians were kicking about ages ago. We'll probably be there soon as well. So just have fun with it. Understand it's a learning. This too shall pass. One of the things that we do at Unreasonable is a mistake log. So a lot of traders do this thing, and basically we have this big log. If anybody's made a mistake, write it in the log, right? Write down who did it, what the mistake was. If you've done that, you can't get into trouble. What the mistake was, what you did to rectify it, and what you're going to do next time to make sure that it doesn't happen again. As long as you don't lose reputation for the agency, everything's forgivable because there's going to be failures if you're going to be testing all the time. You're always— we provide our clients with these big, beautiful experimentation decks and we experiment once a month at least, or biweekly, and then we'll feed it into that. And then there's a couple of ones that I always fall back on during hard times.

Yes. So besides your daily sauna, or as often as possible.

Yeah. The ones I fall back on to hard times, most of all, I like to use inverse thinking. So whenever I've got a problem, um, one of the laws, see, I'm not very good with names, but one of the laws states that, um, you've already solved 50% of the problem by just writing it down. So giving yourself that permission, write the problem down and then think, reverse map it. What can I do backwards to make sure that this is fixed or this is worked working, and you can just get through that with speed. Don't think about it, just do it, just get it done. And eat the frogs, a big one as well. If you have a business, you better believe that your 9 to 5 is going to be meetings. And so that's why I think, um, Stephen Bartlett said it, says it famously, but the real work day starts at 7 PM, and it absolutely does. Oh, get up early, right? You've only got one shot at this thing. I'm up at 4. I was actually up at 2:30 this morning by no happy accident. I could not sleep, hence the early sauna. But, um, get early, eat the frog is the old expression. Do the hardest thing on your to-do list first. I always do me to-do lists the night before. So I'll take everything from the day, I'll map it out in terms of priorities. Then I put a black star next to the one thing I need to get done.

Written or digital?

Always written. I mean, this is me. I've got to-do lists coming out of the wazoo. Okay. Helps me retain information. Team is digital. Um, so we have a guy who builds out all of our Notion boards for that. It's really, really beautiful. But for me, that's my time to just stay get on top of everything and get control. Do that one thing, put the black star next to the most important thing. What's going to drive the most results? What's that one thing? Do that first. Don't think about it. Don't overthink it. Don't— in the moment, do that one thing. And then also inverse thinking. So rather than thinking about how can I win, just think about how, how can I not fail? Charlie Munger, um, if you haven't read the book, by the way, buy it, read it, print it on the backside of your eyeball. Principles. And he was the first guy, I think, to mention that principle. And it's basically, he said, if you have a, if you have fish in a barrel, how do you shoot them? Right? Your brain instantly goes to trying to shoot fish in a barrel, remove the water. Right? So rather than how do I win, how do I not fail? And then that's going to compound over time, right? Again, investment banker as we move up, there's a million principles, you know, you've got second-order thinking, And delayed gratification overall, but really just focus on build the habits before, build the habit process, and then do the hard thing first. If you do that one thing, the hard thing first every day, watch how much everything else flies. It's magical.

And that's some really interesting advice to build the habits before, but I have 3 quickfire questions to wrap up our conversation.

Oh, has it already been an hour? Gosh, how's— It's—

time is flowing quickly because we're having a good chat. So let's, let's go through the quickfire.

Yeah.

What's the most unreasonable idea you've had that actually worked?

The most unreasonable idea that I've had that actually worked. God, that is a good question. Normally I can answer this right off the bat. Ah, here we go. So we ran an ad recently, we found out for a client that when a customer spends £160+ on the first order, those customers are 4 times more valuable in terms of lifetime margin. So profit 4 times more valuable than somebody who spends £159 or lower. So how on earth do you get somebody to spend £160 from a Facebook ad or from an ad in handle. And so we tested a bunch of different things, but we ended up doing that. We just got one of the— we've got one of the ambassadors go and stand in front of like a wall and do a demonstration talk or a tech talk. And then we did this offer off the back of it that kind of fed all the way through the funnel. My God, that ad stayed live absolutely forever. So I think the biggest— and that's just the first step, but it was shifting that entire business's model away from selling customers like £40 t-shirts to £160 item in one big movement. It was absolutely terrifying, to say the least.

Okay, second one. What's one thing you wish brands would stop doing immediately?

Measuring on ROAS. Stop measuring on ROAS. It is a day-to-day metric. It's not right. You can dig into all the little things and go with a performance agency. They will tell you to optimize towards last-click attribution, and they'll use budget controls and cost controls and smash in 50 creatives. It's a frantic way to build a business, and you'll never see any true growth funnel from it. Focus on your audience, find out what that audience wants, how to communicate with them, test like crazy, use those findings to build a beautiful funnel led by great content, something that's memorable more than anything. I think that's probably the best way to do it. Focus on the content. That's where the magic happens.

And finally, what's the worst advice you ever got in your early career? That proved to be totally wrong as you're building up now?

Worst advice. Oh God. I think the problem is with being this personality type is that you move so quickly and I'm probably a little bit too positive for my own good. So I tend to just shred through things. If it's bad, it's a learning, right? I would say the worst advice I've ever had when something wasn't working, take the time to figure out like the rational part of it. If funnel or a creative or an ad or this, this big swing isn't working for whatever reason, use the time to do the due diligence. Don't, just don't go straight through it. Bulldoze, be responsible. You are ultimately responsible for everything in that account. If, if, if the power runs out in the street, it's your fault because you didn't buy a generator, right? It's nobody else's fault. So bulldoze through, test quickly until you find something that's working, when it is working, that's your time to be rational, but do not be rational in the beginning. Rationality is not magic. It does not end in magic. Irrationality does, and sometimes doing before thinking and then figuring it out afterwards is the way to go. Jump, learn how to fly as you fall, not the other way around.

That's a good parting thought for today's chat. Thank you, Brad, for sharing some of for your marketing lessons and wisdom and sharing your journey so far. And I can't wait to see where Unreasonable goes next.

Thank you so much, it was a real privilege, great conversation. Thanks for the time, Daniel.

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