Episode 43: How to Win in the Attention Economy w/ Ryan Desanti

What's up guys, welcome back to The Arena where our mission is to help people make more money, reach more people, and change more lives. And we are in service of the chiropractic profession. And today I have Ryan Desanti with me on the podcast. And as most of you know, he was my former office manager at MOVE and has now become my business partner in the Chiro Ads Academy, which is under the Making Moves umbrella. And he now has been the sole person that has worked with now upwards of 300 chiropractors inside the Chiro Ads Academy, helping them bring their Facebook and Instagram ads in-house so that they can reach more money, have more— make—

reach more money, reach more money.

You know what? We're going to leave this in there. We're going to leave it in there because that's exactly what we have encountered over the past, like, 45 minutes. Riverside, which is our, our podcast hosting platform, gave us both a run for our money, and we were trying to reach more of it. No, but it was really, really challenging to get to this point, so we almost didn't press record, but we're going to press record and we're just going to get this, this episode out there. And I'm hoping to have more of these coming up here in the future, at least one per month, because like I said, you have now become a subject matter expert. Ryan Desanti.

I know things.

You know things now. You don't, you don't just know things, but you've also got a lot of experience to back up those things that you know. So, you know, I will say that there are a lot of people that are pretty high up in the industry that are coming to you now trying to get answers on how they can optimize their Facebook and Instagram ads. And that feels really cool to know you and be your business partner and friend that does life together. And so I wanna talk to you today about mainly just like a little 2025 wrap-up because that's kind of popular right now. Obviously it's Friday, January 2nd. So let's just talk about the big things that happened in the Facebook and Instagram landscape in 2025 and how we've overcome those. And I would say the main one that you and I see on our algorithms, I don't know if it's on everyone else's, but you know, people doom posting about the algorithm update from Facebook ads. And, you know, we, we heard a lot from even inside of our program of docs being super concerned about it, but it's the Andromeda update. So let's, let's dive into the Andromeda update.

Yeah, there's a lot of mysticism here and just a lot of, I will say, like marketing angles. So, you know, scrolling through, next thing you know, like there's an ad popping up, Andromeda's here, have you done X, Y, and Z? So a lot of charge behind here. So let's try to demystify justify it. So you have to go back and have a little bit of the context of the algorithm, which the algorithm is like this ambiguous term people throw around, usually just, um, by marketing agencies to kind of, at least what I've found, disempower you a little bit. So the algorithm just means how do you get your ads in front of the right people. And Meta, they have a financial incentive to help you get your ads in front of the right people so you can make money, so you get that money. So back in like 2020, 2021, 2022, the targeting on Meta, like how do I get my ads in front of everybody, was driven a lot by the manual effort. Like I had to go into Meta and type in, I want to find people interested in X, Y, and Z. And that's evolved, especially with the Andromeda update here in 2025. So the difference between, let's say now in 2025 and 2021, 2022, et cetera, is so much more of the targeting in Meta is driven by the ads itself, the ads and the copy, the text that goes with the videos. So for example, if I'm gonna create an ad that calls out like a very specific avatar that has characteristic attributes and a certain pain point, Meta takes that information of like what's actually said in the video, and so much more of these days the targeting is derived from that information versus that manual effort long ago, or, you know, a couple years ago. So what that actually means for you, if you're a chiropractor listening to this, it's never been easier to run your own ads, um, because as long as you make a good ad and a variety of them— the other kind of part to the Andromeda I've found is just having more ads you know, people say, or we say all the time, content is king. What does that mean is we want variety. We want different conditions, different avatars, different callouts, different hooks. And there's a whole world of information within all of that. But if you can have specific callouts in a lot of different ads, it's relatively easy to get the ads in front of the right people and drive those high-quality patients. So hopefully that takes a little of that mysticism out of like, what is Andromeda? Should I still run ads? Are ads dead? Should I start going Google? Like, don't panic. If you're making good ads, you got nothing to worry about.

Hey guys, I know you're enjoying this episode, but give me one second of your time. This is my shameless plug for the Chiro Ads Academy, where we're teaching docs how to bring their Facebook and Instagram ads in-house and generate repeatable, consistent new patients month after month without the headache and hassle of working with digital marketing agencies. It'll not only save you $30,000 a year, but it'll also give you outsized returns. It's the same exact system that we're running inside our 7-figure practice right now. And last month alone, we generated a 34x return on investment. We spent $1,567 in Facebook ad spend and generated over $54,000 from Facebook ads alone. This system is proven, it's tested, and has been installed in over 150 practices across the world, and it can be installed in your practice as well so that you can generate similar results. Click Click the link in the show notes to watch a free training where I break down every single step of the entire system. And if you like what you hear, book a call so we can see if this system will work in your practice. Click the link below and I'll see you on the inside. Thanks for your time. Back to the episode.

Yeah. Yeah, that's— that's good. That's something that I've talked about a lot too on the podcast. I'm sure people have heard it before, was that initial iOS update in 2021, I believe, where they pretty much flipped the switch overnight. And I think they, they implemented the— what was it? The apps tracking— it was the Application Tracking Transparency Act. That's what it was. And so essentially, that's whenever that question started to pop up on your phone, allow apps to track across other apps. And so essentially what was happening was they were infringing upon your privacy and they were gathering way too much information. And that information was then being delivered to the different applications on your phone, one of them being Facebook. And so Facebook had a lot of insider information, a lot, a lot of way too deep personal information about you, which meant that advertisers could actually go in and they could target based on really personal information. And that's where all of that, like, layered manual targeting came into play. And that's whenever Facebook was crushing it because you could put— I mean, you weren't wasting any money. Really, there wasn't a lot of ad optimization that had to be done because you could target people so well that you, you knew that your, your ads were being put in front of the right people. And I remember I actually know someone who had a business that— an e-commerce business that literally overnight, whenever they did that iOS 14.5 update or whatever it was, I mean, so many e-commerce businesses went out of business. Like literally immediately. So this isn't the first time that we've experienced, you know, an algorithm update like this, so to speak. And you just have to adapt. And honestly, the Andromeda update, from how I understand it and how you've explained it to me and what you've seen on the back end there, has actually worked in our favor because we've always said that content was king and we always prioritized making well-scripted, well-targeted ad creative. So realistically, it actually just improved the performance of our ads. We didn't really see any decline. Would you agree with that?

We saw an uptick.

We saw an uptick.

It was almost immediate as well.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we saw an uptick in the practice. We saw an uptick across all the practices inside of the Chiro Ads Academy. And then obviously in our B2B ads, we saw an uptick as well. So it just means that, you know, as long as you're crafting well-scripted and formulaic ad videos, then you're not going to have a problem here as we go into 2026.

Yeah, well said. So I mean, what does that mean if you're actually trying to be successful on Meta? It's like you have to make good ads. So the first prerequisite there is like, be— if you're the doctor and you're the brand and you're the owner, be in the ads. Like, this is your time to step up and actually like be the leader in your community. I see, you know, it all the time. Even with us when we were using the marketing agencies, like they were generic voiceover. Sometimes you'd give them some like custom B-roll clips, but like they making the ads. It wasn't us. It wasn't you. Like, no one was leading them in the ad. So like, what's a prerequisite to all this? Like, get in front of the camera. Step up. Yeah.

Yeah. Be the community beacon. You know, I mean, that's what people are looking for right now, too. Like, they're searching for a leader. They're searching for a guide. And so if you can become that, then obviously we've seen how that can create downstream effects in our funnels as well. So I guess that leads into another hot topic, I would say, but we hear some of like the biggest creators in the industry saying that we're in an attention economy. And, you know, I understand that obviously with everybody vying for our attention and trying to pull our attention in so many different directions, but that we're also in a trust deficiency or, you know, like we're, we have trust is at an all-time low. And so what I'd like to touch on is First, I think we do both of those things really well. Like, we capture attention really well. We've learned to do that even in chiropractic advertising, which isn't always sexy. And especially when you're not just putting out those like flashy crack videos. And secondarily, like, we do a really good job of building trust. And, you know, we do it in a pretty structured and formulaic way. So let's talk about the attention economy first. What have you seen on the backend whenever you're, you know, being able to overview and review so many different practices across the globe now, international, which is crazy. Whenever you're able to see so much ad data, like, what are you seeing? How do you capture attention and how do you keep it?

Yes, I guess it breaks down into capturing, keeping attention, and then throughout the journey of the patient or the lead leveraging video. So Starts with, I mean, just overall big concept. You got to leverage video at every step. So I'll give you a little outline on how our system works and how we leverage video. But in terms of some like little specifics or some tactical things in terms of capturing and keeping attention in the ad itself, because that's step one, people see your ad. So riches are in the niches, so to speak. I'm sure everyone's heard that. What does that actually mean? It's just a specific approach. So starting with a specific condition. So we found that ads that speak to a specific condition rather than like, hey, do you have low back pain, neck pain, knee pain, etc., like everything, uh, performed significantly better. So once again, condition-specific ads perform better than generic ads. So you got to meet people where they're at. So once you've met people where they're at, let's say, you know, for a lot of you, especially if you're running like Cairo, T-Comp, and let's just for an average practice, like low back pain's probably gonna be one of the things your population relate to the most. So let's say for example, we're speaking to low back pain, we have to hook their attention. The way we do that, we have a couple different ads to house, but most commonly is you want to do it through a question, like meet them where they're at. Most people identify with their condition. Do you have low back pain and sciatica?

Great.

There's more to it than that. But we got to meet people where they're at. So they identify with the pain point. So can we call that out? And what's under that? Well, they identify with the pain point. They likely experience specific sensations. So if we can call out the pain point they identify with, take it a layer deeper and actually describe their sensations. Hey, like we know what your pain feels like. And then the cherry on top where I think in 2025, that's allowed our ad creative just to like explode and our, you know, us to get great results, our docs to get great results. Is what are the moments they're actually experiencing the sensations. So if I craft an intro, or like, you know, an intro to an ad or a hook, and I call out the pain point, the sensations, and the moments, let's say I'm the lead, or I'm the person watching the video, I'm scrolling through, I identify with low back pain, I have that exact sensation, and it happens in that moment, like, ah, you have my attention. I'm watching this video because you obviously know me. So I think it all starts in the beginning of the video, the hook, the intro, the first few things we say. And if we can nail that element, as long as you just don't butcher the rest, you're going to have attention. And then there's some steps that we can go into in a little bit here that will help actually get those people to take action and show up in your office. But I think it really just starts there. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's, that's exactly what, what I would have said, you know, is being extremely specific to the exact moments where they feel the things that you can solve inside your office. You know, and to give like a pretty broad example, something like, do you feel pain on the front of your knee when hiking downhill? Or something where it's like you're ultra specific. You, you're saying it almost to the point where they're like, wow, it's like they're inside my body. And they know exactly, Theo screaming in the background, and they know, and they know my exact pain point. And now I'm, I'm, I'm willing to hear them out. I mean, you're pretty much, you're pretty much selling them on watching the rest of the video within the first 3 seconds. And so if you can do that, then, obviously, now you've captured their attention and ensured that they weren't going to thumb swipe, onto the next video. And then that's where you can take them through that storytelling framework that we've done such a great job at replicating for multiple ad styles. And then give them a compelling offer. So, you know, what are the— what are some of the principles that you would say are the most important towards like crafting that story style advertisement that does compel them to actually act at the end of it? There's a few things that you always say, and I just wanted to see if you could kind of come up with that on the spot.

Yeah. So, I mean, once we have their attention hooked through those like layers of relatability, I mean, there's always going to be say what you can say, only say what only you can say, which is that unique selling point. We can dive into that a little bit, but we, I believe in providing a little bit of basic education on why they're relating that issue. And then when you talk about what makes you different in those unique points, maybe you combine chiropractic decompression and you can say that, and that, that matches like the education that you provided of like, Here's your issue, here's how we solve it. And then before we give any kind of offer or pitch, we want to tie in some social proof. So whether that's reviews, case studies, something compliant there, there's a few different forms of storytelling formulas and frameworks. But I would say those are kind of going to be the bigger components from a broad perspective. So does that match up?

Well, the one that I was thinking of that you always kind of have to guide me on, and I'm sure you have to do this as well with all the docs inside the program. Is the amount of jargon that we use, the chiropractic jargon and the big words. You know, we come out with this big education that costs us a lot of money, and we want to use words that most people don't know the definitions of. And so I think another kind of big piece to this puzzle is making sure that you're speaking at a 5th grade reading level. And I'm sure you've heard it several times by people smarter than us, but it is something that we've seen provide a direct correlation to outcomes on the backend, you know, for the return or the data that we see inside the Ads Manager. So like if you're using large words inside your ads, well, you want to take that down to a 5th grade reading level and say it as simply as possible. Use words that, that I don't know, it kind of hurts me sometimes. You're like, all right, hey, that big word that you just said, how, how can you make that one level simpler? Okay, a little simpler. Okay, a little simpler. Okay, a little simpler. Like, in, in, at first it's kind of annoying, but over time you kind of understand that, like, that's exactly how people speak about the condition that they're experiencing. And so that, that's one big thing that I would say, you know, is just to make sure that you as a chiropractor, if you are the face and you are scripting the ads, that you're saying it in as simple terminology as possible and you're speaking to the layperson.

Yeah, that's probably one of the bigger takeaways of 2025, this like dichotomy of like talking about what makes you different and everything and just matching that on the other end of the pole with just what is the simplest way to get that across, which I'd like your point of, you know, you, if you're listening to this, have a lot of data from your day ones and day twos. People describe their pains and when you can use the words they use, locked up, jammed tight, it hurts. Like, that performs significantly better than us going into intervertebral disc, trying to dissect ligaments and trying to talk about the vertebrae. And like, they have a problem, they want to hear you can turn— you can, you can help them with their problem and you can help them with their problem relatively quickly. And if you can dumb it down to like, hey, I can turn off your pain and we do some fancy things here, this is how we do it, no one else does it this way. And we can get you better results faster. That's ultimately what they want to hear. And then you can save the deeper level educations for the day 1, day 2 process.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, instead of saying like, do you have a limitation in range of motion whenever you move your head into lateral flexion and right rotation? It's like, do you got a crick in your neck after waking up from a poor night's sleep? You know, like, how do you, how do you make it as simple as possible and say it in the exact same words that they would use to describe it in your consultation? And you're right, you got a lot of data. And this is one of those— this is one of those markets where like we don't have to go out and study our clients, you know, like we don't have to go out and try to get like, I don't know, just like information on our market. Like they literally come in front of us, they use the language, they describe exactly what they're feeling and what they're looking for inside our office every day. So if you can make a habit of making notes at the bottom of your consultation form, or something that is, is being repeated continuously inside your office for different conditions. Like, I think that's what you leverage. You know, if you got this wave of people, and it typically happens in our office where like we have a wave of people with headaches that, that come in for like 3 months. It's like, where all these people with headaches come from? And it's not always even correlated to the ads that we're running. And so if you can kinda start to see those trends in the population and then use a lot of the language they're using to describe them to you, then you can take that and you can actually craft an ad that performs relatively well right off the bat.

Absolutely. I think though, the one, the one pattern I see, just to like close the loop here, is the nervous system element. And I will say I got, I got to see your evolution of pretty much fresh out of school. Like you had the green books right then, like there, I think you were still reading them at the time. And the Chiropractic Is So Much More Than Pain. And I realized that. And, you know, as somebody who's like, I'm passionate about what I do because, I mean, there's, there's multiple layers. I like to see the chiropractors make more money. There's like a surface level, you know, superficialness to where my ego gets lifted, but also like my personal health story like came to like I had a lot of nervous system deficiencies and chiropractic was a huge catalyst for me to like get back to where I needed to be on a lot of different levels, you know, physically, emotionally, spiritually, etc. So I know a chiropractic is so much more than pain. And sometimes people join the ChiroArt Academy and it's like, I want the wellness patients. I want, I want all these, or can we tie in the nervous system so they get it? And I mean, it's just extremely crystal clear at this point that that doesn't perform nearly as well as meeting people where they're at with the pain points. So anytime somebody's like, can I tie the nervous system in? Like my short answer is like, no, save it for the day one. Day too, because trying to bridge that gap in and out of like, we also help with nervous system and the nervous system helps turn off the pain this way, it's just too much. It's not as simple as it can be or needs to be for like an A+ ad. So that would be me closing the loop there. Something I saw a lot in 2025 that I still encounter today, and I think there's an evolution of a doctor that's fresher out of school versus maybe the people I'm working with now that are making $1, $2, $3, $4 million a year, where that evolution and that arc is an acceptance around like, hey, I gotta meet people where they're at. It's through pain. And I will say there are some outliers that have nervous system practices that are super successful, but most of the people running ads are crushing with ads. That's not them. So that would just be something I picked up on, uh, in 2025 as well.

That's good. I mean, and it's, it's not to say that you can't have a nervous system-focused practice It's just that the ads that you're creating need to be condition-specific.

Yeah.

And you need to be targeting pain points with your advertising because we've tried it all. And I mean, being condition-specific and targeting specific pain points outperforms nervous system-based advertising all day, every day. So you can get them onto your home turf and you can give them education on the nervous system. Just make sure you don't confuse them in that process. They're there to solve a single problem, and then once you prove that you can solve that problem, now we can start to educate them more thoroughly on what chiropractic actually can provide them long term. Well, I know we're running out of time here. I'm just glad that we got this first one recorded, and I'm excited to have more of these conversations. And that's what I want it to be. I want it to be a place where people can come and use it as a resource and start to get some behind-the-scenes insight from you and I on what it takes to, to build a big business. You know, we've been fortunate to be a part of building two big businesses now, and, and we've done it mostly using advertising. And I would say that that is one thing that I'm becoming more and more convicted around, is the fact that, like, we walk the walk. You know, all the things that we preach and all the things that we tell people to do are the things that we do every single day. And, you know, I see a a lot of people— I saw some today that were promoting a program that they're starting on teaching people how to bring their ads in-house. And what did I do right away? Well, I went and looked at their practice to see what ads they were running, and guess what? They weren't. And they hadn't ran ads in 2 years. So there's a lot of people out there that are trying to, trying to take advantage of this money grab because they see that marketing is a big angle here. But it's just important to realize that there are inferior products out there, and there are people that are saying that you should do things that they're not actually doing themselves. And that's one thing that I'm really proud of us for doing is for doing what we say that you should do. And we're continuing to do that day in and day out. And that's how we're able to build these big businesses and have awesome team members that we're able to compensate well and take care of our beautiful families. And we're looking to share that love with you guys. So I appreciate you guys tuning in today. Ryan, do you have anything before we wrap up?

Big tactical guys. So like, if I'm going to do these podcasts with you, I always want to leave you with something that you can do right away. So based on at least the conversation today, there's so much more we didn't get to talk to, which is, you know, leveraging video after the ads in a couple of different places. But today, if you're going to take anything away, it's once again that condition-specific approach. Choose a condition where you can make some money on the back end, like higher ticket prices. Create an ad crafted, you know, with those specifics on the intro in terms of those 3 layers of the, you know, relevancy there, and then create a couple different hooks. Those are the questions, splice them on the video. If you were able to throw that in Meta and just have a 10-mile radius around your office, that's near enough for you to generate some leads. Obviously, there's a lot to us, you know, more to it than a system, but I would say takeaway from today would be focus on the ads, review the ads. Are you in front of the camera? What are you saying? How can you be better? How can you be more specific? Throw those in Meta and see where it takes you. Yep.

And start accumulating data. Yep. Awesome, man. Well, I appreciate you being here. I know you got another call to hop on right now, 1:00, so I'll let you get over to that. But thanks for taking the time here and we will see you in the next episode.

Till next time.