Lies That eCommerce Marketers Tell Themselves Part 1

Welcome to the E commerce growth stories podcast. If you worry about your growth, if the business model isn't working anymore, if you're running out of ways to optimize your e commerce, or if you're looking to get the e commerce fundamentals right, then that's the show for you. Hello everyone and welcome to a new episode of the E commerce growth story. So today I'm here, of course, with Dennis Yu. Hey, Dennis.

Hello, Valentin. And hello everybody.

We have an exciting topic about people that lie to themselves. And I think we are all doing this. Marketers do that. E commerce leaders do that. So the topic for today is around lies that e commerce marketers tell themselves and how these lies are affecting their performance, their lives and so on.

So, so let's take telling lies.

Yeah, let's tell the truth about the lies. Yeah. One aspect that I want to share with the audience today, Dennis, is that I've been doing this self deception for years now. And I think it's not about the marketers and the e commerce marketers, it's about everyone. We tend to neglect certain aspects because we have this approach where we think that we know and then we just want to confirm that we knew how to do it. And I've been doing this for years. And this is really impactful. When you're an entrepreneur, when you have a company, these lies that you tell to yourself are really impactful because it affects not only yourself but also your colleagues, the culture and the performance of the company. Why I think is this happening is that we are falling into this trap of the status quo. So we are not asking ourselves the right questions. And I think the habit of being curious about am I doing the right thing? Is this real? Is this approach proven? These type of questions are helping you to go further. What do you think, Dennis, about this? Why do we human beings, we lie to ourselves? What's your take on this?

I think that's because we're humans and humans want a shortcut and humans are so good at rationalizing even obvious sorts of things that are happening. Because sometimes we just want to believe something and we don't want to look at the ugly truth of what we have. That's why the self help profession is, I think, even bigger than most of the other industries.

Yeah, that's right. So I'll start with let's do one and one and comment on each of those. Right. The first lie that I think the e commerce marketers tell themselves is that they know what ROAS is and they know if their marketing works And I think that's the first lie and that's happening. That's a lie because first of all, if you don't have an attribution model which is proven, you lie to yourself. And now the attribution is really, I don't know, far away from the reality. So you need to be really cautious about it and to use different ways to validate that the channels that you think you are using are really effective. And another reason why this is happening is because of the inertia. Many ecommerce marketers still think that it's 2020 and that you can look at Facebook ad campaigns manager and you can rely on those even though not even then it wasn't a good idea rely on that type of reporting. And another reason why you don't know exactly if a certain channel is bringing you a positive roas is because you need to put in not only the cpa, you don't have to rely on the CPA even though the attribution is perfect. You need to add there the costs that you have like the wages, the tools, the other things than the media. So you need to rely on the customer acquisition cost, not only on the cpa. What do you think, Dennis?

Attribution is a sticky ball of wax because a lot of consultants and a lot of bad marketers hide behind it. They either say you can't do it because Facebook and iOS 14 and Google Chrome are hiding all data and it's not accurate. Then there are the people that consider themselves data experts and they sell a lot of tools and a lot of analysis and a lot of data warehousing that we see in the big e commerce providers. But really they don't take into account the most basic things like the pass along effect where a friend has this. They like the object and like it so much they tell their friends about it the minute it crosses to somebody else that's not tracked by a cookie or pixel. So good old fashioned word of mouth and unattributed where you run direct marketing like TV and radio or things that will result in direct none also pollute. So the better your product is, the more word of mouth you have, the more touches that are required to drive a sale like considered sale instead of an impulse purchase, the more difficult it is to do attribute. So attribution is something that I think is people over rely upon because it gives you a false sense of precision that's not really there.

Yeah, a false sense of control as well. How to stop lying to yourself if you're guilty of that from my perspective is you either use different attribution models so you take into account other things than tracking the looking at what the ad network is showing you. And also use things like to validate. You can use things like post purchase surveys to understand from the intentionally shared data from the customers what happens, I mean where they've heard about you, what sticks to their head so that you can validate if the channels are there. And of course you need to monitor what matters like looking at the overall marketing efforts and tracking things like customer acquisition cost versus the investment and versus the total customer lifetime value.

A simple way that I find to bust the lie of attribution is to apply marketing lift. So marketing lift is calculating how much incremental sales your marketing is doing. And of course this marketing is broken into all the different channels. And then beyond that is if you kill all marketing, let's say you know, you're, you're plotting your sales and then all of a sudden you stop all marketing. Your sales should drop down something, right? But it's not going to drop to zero. So whatever you, whatever your sales drops down to is because of a great product, right? You have to give credit to the product and the customer and the word of mouth and everything from that above is the actual incremental lift that comes from marketing. So if your attribution and analytics are good, you should be able to look at the sales that are driven by each of the channels, add those up and they should not exceed the total amount of sales. A lot of marketers that lie to themselves, they take the total amount of sales from zero all the way up and they take credit for the whole thing. And I think that's cheating because we know if you take away all marketing, there's still some, it still settles to some level of sales. So marketing, you can only take credit for that incremental component. You know what I mean?

Yeah, that's right. I think it's a fantastic angle as well. Because what's already there without you, your marketing efforts shouldn't be quantified as a marketing uplift. And I think that's a great approach.

Let me tell you a story, okay? I can't get fired over this because I did it a long time ago. So we were spending over a million dollars a day for Rosetta Stone, the language software. And this was my fault, but I can say it now because the CMO is a good friend of mine, so he can't get mad at me. But for some reason we messed up and we accidentally turned off all of our Google and Facebook campaigns for, right. And we saw our sales went down and nobody was watching because we were busy on a launch of some other product that we had. And we saw that the sales actually dropped for a bit, but it only dropped maybe a third of the way. But a lot of it was because Rosetta Stone had placement inside Barnes and Noble and Costco. We had a lot of TV campaigns, we had a lot of other channels. And it was a wake up call because we saw the digital wasn't as powerful as we thought. And of course we were spending so much money that Facebook would come and visit us. Google would fly in and visit us with the very best people and they would have all these stats and all this analysis and give us all these gifts and take us out to nice meals and sports games. But we said, hey, look, you know, we turned off the marketing for a bit and we saw that the sales went down. So what is the true incremental list? So we spent a lot of time at Facebook and headquarter and Google headquarters as well talking about attribution. And 20 years ago I spent a bunch of time on that because I built the internal analytics at Yahoo search engine. So we ran over 100 different attribution models. I had two PhDs and all they did was run attribution models. They said first click, last click, average weighted click, zero credit for email, half credit for display, different sorts of weighting averages, distributed clicks. And we found that there was no single attribution model that worked for every single property we had at Yahoo. We had sports and finance and shopping and travel and personals and small business and all of mail and service. We had all these different things under the Yahoo umbrella and they all operated differently because the user journey was different. So there is no one size fits all for attribution. Anyway, I don't think anybody had more data than me at least 20 years ago. Nobody had more data than me on the planet to be able to talk about attribution. Right. I had all the data from the search engine. This is before Google became a big thing.

Fantastic. Yeah. I think another trap if you don't pay attention to that is that if you give credit religiously to a certain channel by looking at whatever attribution model you're using, you can be wrong because there are top of the funnel activities that you are not taking into account. And one story that I want to share about it is one of our customers, they were looking at this type of attribution models last year they had a ROAS of 8x. When they, when the year started they realized that some channels are not working. Like their social, social paid media was not working. They plugged it out and they realized that at the end of the year their ROAS was the total ROAS for their marketing spend was only 2.5x. At the beginning of the year they've started to do top of the funnel activities. The ROAS is not at 7.8x but is at 4.5. So that's clear that those channels are sustaining each other and people are not looking at not touching a brand, only through a channel.

Yeah. Another lie, probably my favorite lie of people to do SEO and PPC is blending in branded search terms. So when people are coming in, they're typing the name of your company and typing the name of your product. I believe this pisses off a lot of people that do SEO and ppc. But if you're the business owner or if you're in charge of marketing, you'll agree with me. You should never give credit to branded search terms because those are navigational and those aren't actually search. Because if you strip out the branded campaigns and put them in their own branded terms and put them in their own campaign, all of a sudden the ROAS or the LTV or the CAC or the performance of those non branded terms can be bad. And I've seen it where branded can often be more than half of the conversions for a well known brand depending on what you're selling. So it's really correlated to brand strength on how much comes through branded. We're not saying don't spend money on bidding on your name or bidding on your product names or bidding on the name the founder or bidding on names of other people that are your spokespeople. Definitely protect those terms. And we did some research together with Google and Google, their numbers were slightly different than ours, but they said that when you bid on brand terms that there is cannibalization because you're showing up organically anyway. So why would you pay? Well, you have about a 25% cannibalization. So whatever result you get from branded, if you did want to give credit to it, you'd have to discount that by 25% because you're cannibalizing some amount of organic traffic you would have gotten.

Yeah, that's true. And it was a research from a large furniture retailer, I think it was in 2018 or so. They've analyzed all their spending and they realized that 97% of their sales they were coming from branded Search and however, all the other terms were not contributing as they think they were, even though 92% of the spending was on broad search terms.

So made the PPC agency look bad or whoever ran ppc. So they never want you to split it apart. Right. They always want to try to take credit because their blended numbers are better.

Yeah. And I think that the lesson here and how to stop doing this, Dennis, is to understand the power of your own brand and to consciously invest in those terms knowing that you're actually protecting your brand and you're amplifying your brand. And one technique that I've been using a lot of years before was to tap into non commercial queries with our brand because people weren't clicking on that anyways. You know, you don't click if you're looking for, I don't know, just in Bieber or whatever term. You're not clicking on the ad, but you are seeing that brand over and over again and the CPC was pretty low. So you can do a lot of crazy things, but this is branding is not search. So as you've said, is not a good idea to give credit to the search agency or internal team.

A few years ago we were doing the PPC for Quiznos, which is a major sandwich chain in the United States and some other countries, not as big as Subway, but right behind Subway. And we were bidding. Well, we took it over from the other consultant that was there. He got kicked out because the COO is a friend of mine and they were bidding on the term Quiznos and different variations and misspellings. And like you were saying, that was 80 plus percent of our traffic and our sales. So when we separated that out, all of a sudden all of our campaigns were negative. So I told the coo, hey, you know Bill, what we need to do is turn off all the branded campaigns. In fact, let's just turn off all ppc, which of course pissed off Google because we were spending a lot of money and let's see how much we have in terms of sales and does that really affect it? So this is what we were talking about before on calculating marketing lift and Valentin. What do you think we found when we turned off the ppc?

It's clear.

Yeah. So the sales fell down only a little bit. So the other agency, the consultant, was trying to take credit for all the sales that Quiznos was generating, but when we turned out the ppc, it was very little because they were bidding on terms that we were already getting anyway.

Yeah.

So I think it's very important in A complex marketing mix. If you're playing with two or three channels, you actually have to turn things on and off. So you could take. You could randomize your keywords into bucket A and bucket B and then day part like odd even hours just to see what the impact is when you turn something on and off because you don't know the lift. The incremental that a particular channel provides, like email could be incremental or you know, PPC or social media ads could be incremental. You don't know the incremental unless you turn it off because otherwise you can't calculate what it would have been with nothing. There's no other way except to turn it off.

We have been doing back in the. I don't know, it was 2011, I was running my E commerce online car insurance company and we were investing a lot of money for us at that moment we were putting something like 20k a day in Google AdWords. And we were looking at that. We were struggling to break even on total. And at some point my partner said, you know what, let's turn it off, let's make some money. Because we were short on cash flow and we couldn't spend it anymore because at that moment you are supposed to pay in advance to Google AdWords to put credit. And we couldn't afford it anymore. And we said, okay, okay, let's put it off and see what happens. And the surprise was that we were thinking that the third of our revenue was coming from Google AdWords. But in three weeks we've been affected by only by 15%. Then we've said, okay, let's shut it off because it's not okay. Three months after we realized that this was affecting, I mean the effect was basically the performance on the other channels was decaying as well. So you can't neglect certain channels down the line. And I don't think you need to be channel centric. You need to put your eggs in many baskets.

Yeah, absolutely. Want to move on to another lie?

Yeah, let's move on. The other lie is that E commerce marketers think they know why the customers bought from them. And it was that same from Peter Drucker, you know, that companies don't know why their customers are buying and what they are actually selling, which is fantastic, you know, to realize that many companies don't know what they are actually selling because people are, we think we are marketers think they are selling products and certain features while at the end of the day they sell the perspective of a better future. That a customer has at a certain point, right, we are selling desired outcomes. Even though we are looking for certain aspects, we aspire to get to a certain place or to get certain emotions. Either we are struggling with some negative emotions. And I think this is happening because the whole part of the customer research is neglected. We are jumping directly to, okay, do some ads and let's create some things, let's do some creative campaigns without knowing why the customers are buying. What's your take on this?

So you know the Jack Daniels brand? It's a whiskey, right? Tennessee whiskey. So we did some research for them and they know that we're very good at data and they had what they thought was strong research because they brought in these focus groups and they asked them, why do you like Jack Daniels? What else would you drink? What is your lifestyle? What other brands do you have? What do you think of the different flavors that we have? And so this is what they built into Personas, right? So they had this one Persona they called Bubba. And Bubba likes to drink Jack Daniels on Saturday afternoon with his friends and he lives in the country and he likes to watch car racing on tv. And they built this whole Persona, right? And then this is Sarah. And Sarah is Bubba's wife. This is what she believes. And she's a conservative and she drives a pickup truck and they paint this whole, whole story. And it's great. Everyone loves telling the story, right? We did the same thing for wwe, right? The wrestling, right? We said this, this. We had a name, I think his name like Jimmy and you know, Jamie tunes in the WrestleMania and he really likes John Cena and you know, he used to like the Rock. But now since you know all these stories and they have these detailed stories and they build these Personas, right? But Personas are a lie because it assumes that you have a, a mono customer that's just one kind of customer. But really you have a whole range. So we grabbed all their data for Jack Daniels. Brown Forman's a parent company and Jack Daniels is one of their brands. So grabbed all their data and we said, okay, well this one you call bubble. That's this segment over here, it's a medium sized bubble. But you have all these other bubbles of these other people. So you have people who are church pastors that will drink Jack Daniels. You have people that are completely opposite on the political spectrum that like Jack Daniels because they go to a party or because you have all these different situations that people will drink alcohol. Except for the one story that everyone's like, oh yes, I really like this one story. So usually it's the CMO who says, yeah, I really like the Persona modeling because they love the idea anecdotally means it's one story that they heard from somebody. But if you're willing to look at the data and you actually do the bucketing, you find it's not as simple as this. One thing I told you last time. One of our friends runs the United States Concealed Carry Association. We help them go from 6 million to 60 million by better targeting and better ads. And they said, the people who are buying gun insurance, it's a male, he's 40 years old, he wants to protect a family. Tell the whole story about this guy. When we were running ads, we were targeting only men because of course it's the men who have the guns that protect the family. So we told this whole story that we zeroed in on exactly who we thought the demographic was. Then I said, you know what, Just for fun, let's run some campaigns with no targeting, only optimized to a conversion. What do you think happened?

Better performance. Right.

Because we were hurting ourselves by over targeting. Because we'd.

Oh no, we know.

We know exactly who the customer is. We know why they buy. We know how they're thinking and feeling. And you're almost dead wrong every single time.

Yeah. One fantastic change that transformed my company was the realization that we do have some ideal customer profiles, but we need to understand not who they are, but why they are buying and what's the triggering, what's the struggling moment that makes them start buying. And I've been then meeting with Bob Mesta from the CVO Academy, actually, basically it's my all time favorite because he was actually transforming my company with his input. And I've understood the power of the jobs to be done methodology. I've applied it over and over again. And I realized that because I'm 41, it doesn't make me buy a certain thing. Not all the people which are 41 are buying the same things. And it's crazy how many marketeers are falling into this trap of building fictional buyer Persona in their meeting rooms with those sticky notes and naming them X, Y or Z. What I think it should be done, if you're lying to yourself about this thing is to do this customer research and ask real persons, you know, ask real persons. And not on the shallow, you know, you need to interrogate that person. You need to get to the nitty gritty of it. We were doing jobs to be done methodology for a company called the Hush Blankets. They were selling these weighted blankets and they thought that they are selling the cuddling feeling. You know, all their ads were around feeling better in your homey environment. After doing the jobs to be done research, we realized that people were having medical conditions and they weren't buying the weighted blankets because of the cuddling feeling, but because they could sleep without getting knocked out by the pills. And the side effects of the sleeping pills were the thing that were triggering them towards trying the weighted blanket. So all this marketing can be transformed based on the truth about why the customers are buying your products.

So targeting Personas. A lot of people use that thinking that it's going to help them drive better keyword targets or better targeting inside social systems or display ads. But it's not the targeting. It's that affects our creative. It affects the landing pages and what's in the ad and what we say and that kind of messaging. My friend Todd Herman has created something called the five questions. And these are five questions that he recommends that we implement immediately upon purchase as part of our operations. So when somebody buys, provided it's an item that's over a couple hundred dollars, so it's worth actually calling these people. Or you can sample and call 1 out of every 20 or whatever it might be, and you ask them these five questions. What was it that made you buy? Would you recommend us to another friend? What would you say about our product? It's just a few of these kinds of questions and then listening very carefully, recording it through auto AI or whatever your favorite transcription is, and then using the exact words that those customers said about why they buy in your ad copy. So your customers are actually writing your ad copy. So you're not doing it for customer service. You're doing it because your customers are an extension of your marketing. And that's way better than whatever the CEO heard from their friend. So the worst market research is you ask your friends what they think about the product, and of course they tell you all the things that you want to hear that is not your customer.

Yeah, you lie to yourself, they lie to you, and eventually you don't nail the truth towards your customers. Dennis, Ellen, your food is so good.

You should start, you know, you and your wife, you should start a bakery. And of course, everyone lies. Yeah, you should start a bakery. You're so good. We're just all lying to you. Oh, your baby is beautiful. Oh, you're such a. You know, I'm so glad you came over to spend time with me. You should come over often, Valentine.

Yeah, you have such A great hair, Dennis.

Oh, thank you. Yes. Right to each other. Yes.

What's the, what's the next lie? It's your turn.

You don't need to have all these humans involved. There's technology that will automate everything for you, right? All this new tool, you know, the old website you have, there's a new technology for this website. This other email tool that you have, here's a better tool, is way better. It'll not only do your email way better, it'll do your laundry. It will also, you know, make you extra money while you're sleeping, right? Because it's all driven by AI. And Elon Musk said that AI is the most powerful thing. That's the biggest fear of the planet. More than like nuclear bombs, you know, he said that AI is the most powerful, dangerous thing. And, you know, we're an AI company and we also are built on the blockchain and other sorts of buzzwords that I'm going to try to bring in to try to puff up the stuff that I have. I'm old fashioned. I believe that someone who really understands the product and understands the customer and can actually write some creative or actually film some video is going to beat the AI. So two weeks ago I was in Orlando with a friend who sells their e commerce is the Magnolia farm. So they sell magnolia trees, magnolia reeds, all these different things that they have on the farm and on my phone I collected them in the field while the husband, wife team said, this is our Magnolia farm. It's 180 acres. I had it from my father. And here's one part of it. We have a lake and it's shaped like a heart. And our family spends time here. This is how we plant our trees. And meet Maria. Maria runs our operations. She's been working here 27 years and she just interviewing them along. Oh, now we're planting new trees here. Now these ones were damaged by the frost. And here's what we're doing. Here's our greenhouse, here's our seeds. Here's where we pack everything. Here's where we handle customer service. And just me with no technology except an iPhone making videos will outperform all the social media monitoring tools, all of the cool ways that you can set up ads, all the cool analytics, all the cool whatever. Just, just me on a phone collecting stories and then writing copy about why this is such a special moment when you plant a tree, when a loved one dies, you know, you want to honor a loved one and then take it from the family at The Magnolia Company to your family and how much they care about their people and how this means so much. When you plant a tree in your grandmother's name when she dies. Right?

Yeah.

Way more powerful. That creative part. The automation will never get there.

There.

All the tools, all the salespeople will try to tell you their technology is so good. I love technology, I'm a software engineer. But the lie is that people think.

You can do everything that's right. I think the right dosage is the answer here. There are things that you can put on autopilot and there are things that you shouldn't and you can't. As long as the human beings are driven by their emotions and 95% of our decisions are coming from the unconscious mind, that means we can't rely on something so rational and those type of AI tools to make it happen for us. And an aspect that I think it's a neighbor of this light, they sit right next to each other is the light that the tools are the answers. And the tools are as good as the user is. Right. So you need someone to activate the power of the tool. Of course, there are some fantastic tools. You can build this type of automations. You can do this if then that scenarios. You can do a lot of things with the right tools, but the talent behind the tool is what you're after. So as a company, you still need talented people to run the show and you can't make it happen with the same level of thinking that you had as a founder. So you need to always put in your agenda. The first thing is build a fantastic team to run the show.

People all the time. Imagine if you were a carpenter and you're building a bookshelf and then you messed up the bookshelf. Are you going to blame the hammer? You're going to say, oh, but if you gave me the $50 gold hammer, it'd be way better than the $10 normal hammer.

Right.

That was clearly the reason that the bookshelf is all crooked. It's not me, it's not my fault fault. It's the tool. I would ask you, Valentin, in the last week, just an average, how many new tools are you exposed to that all promise and all promise everything, right? Promise you can do everything.

Yeah, a lot of them. And there is this plethora of tools which are coming into the market. And pretty much that's why we decided as a tool vendor to focus on education and on how to use the tool. Because the shortages in the education part is not in the tools. You can search for the right tools at this moment. And there are some small differences between them, if we are being honest. But the difference is being made by the user of the tool.

Yeah. Amen all day. And this is from someone who builds tools. It's funny that you and I are building tools to manage these other tools, but we're still saying it's the people that are employees important.

Yeah, that's right. All right, so let's move onwards to the next slide which is that the E commerce marketers say that they know their customer journey. They understood the customer journey and the buying process. And that's. I think 99% of the marketers are falling into this distress because if you are not consciously analyzing, it's not like you dictate, it's not like you craft the journey. And they need to go through these paths. That's what you think the customer journey is. In order to understand the customer journey, you need to ask your customers and to understand their buying process. And they have all sorts of touch points that you're not aware of of. However, there are certain parts of the whole buyer's journey that are there. But how they get from a step to another, what are, what is the emotion at each of those steps? You know, this is something which is really important. And I've been doing this emotional mapping. I think I told this story, but I'm going to repeat it because it makes so much sense. We were having something like 12 people in our customer service service. We were calling our customers to renew their insurance. But nobody's happy when, when they hear that. So our, our emotional state, you know, the, the, our, the, the girls there in that department, they were saying, hello, Mr. Anderson, your insurance. And mainly we were, we weren't empathizing with the, with, with our customers. So we understood that we need to change the game. And we were always starting with the low voice. Hello, Mr. Anderson, we do know that this is not the greatest news, but we have great news. We have found a better price than you had last year with this company and so on. So mainly that's what matters. To empathize and not to realize that you have a journey as a company and customers have their journeys. Unless you understand the desired outcome, what your customers are after, you are just throwing spaghetti on the wall.

Amen. So we were doing some social media ads for the world's largest furniture company, which is Ashley Home Store, and through their corporate office, they gave us all of these materials and ads and they said this is what we want to use because it's all branded and it's shot professionally and perfectly. Clearly. They spent a lot of money on this whole folder of creatives. They said, we can use these in our ads on Google and Facebook. And we tried using them and they didn't do very well because they clearly looked like ads. And they were promoting all the new things that this company was coming out with. And they were changing their name from Ashley Furniture to Ashley Home Store. But still, everybody that I know, including me, we still call it Ashley Furniture because that's what we've known for many, many years. Right? Is the world's largest furniture company, largest manufacturer of furniture, largest retailer furniture. Way bigger than Ikea because they have more stores. IKEA only has whatever, 30 stores. These guys have 700 stores. So we kind of decided to go rogue and ask for forgiveness instead of permission. So we said, you know what, I know corporate told us to say this, but just for some of the stores, we're going to run other ads and we're going to take cell phones and we're going to record our own little videos. And we had some videos that were made of people who were. We ran some videos that were from a guy in Arkansas and we showed him in a store in Seattle and we even showed furniture that was out of stock that they didn't even carry anymore. So our number one, we had hundreds of ads. Our number one highest ROI generating ad was of a $197 or the $297 sofa. One of the cheapest sofas you can buy, but it came in multiple colors. If you're a poor student, you could use it in your dormitory and at least have a sofa. It's either have a sofa or you can't even have a sofa. It's a cheap sofa, but it's nice. It wasn't even in stock, but that's what drove people into the store. And so because we looked at the data, because we were willing to look at the data instead of deciding what we thought the customer journey was. Because the typical answer is, well, it's a mid price furniture store, so you have Sally, who's the mother, and they have a new kid, so they need to buy some furniture or they move from their apartment to a house and now it's time to buy furniture. So they tell these stories which are true because people do move and this kind of thing. But when we zeroed in on what actually was resonating and then we used the dollar a day strategy to be able to test each of these creatives. So we literally just spent $7 for each creative. But we had hundreds of creatives we quickly found, like if I gave you a map, Valentin, of 200 creatives, like a big grid of 200 different creatives, do you think you would like, what probability could you pick out which of them would perform the best? You wouldn't know, right? Yeah, I wouldn't know. So we made all these ads you.

Need to test and the ads that.

I thought, you know what? I think this one, this one's really clever. This one's going to do the best. This one features a pretty well woman. It's going to do better. Or this one, this one's not going to do very well because it looks very plain. And you know, I don't like the background and I don't like what they're saying and I don't like what the products in there. But I was completely wrong. The ones I thought were going to be the. I was, you know, the ones I thought were the worst were the best and vice versa. And that's how we found that the number one item was this old sofa that was not even in stock anymore. My friend runs data mining at Capital One. Capital One, I think is the largest mailer on the planet. They send more direct mail because credit cards, right? They're one of the largest credit card companies and they do the exact same thing. They have in this one room, they have hundreds of design of designs. I think they have like 50 designers, full time designers and all they're doing is designing new backgrounds for the credit cards, right. And so my friend who ran data mining, he gave me a sheet and he said, hey, look, look at all of these designs. Which of them, what do you think? Which of them do you think is winning? Which of them do you think is doing the best? I'm like, I think this is, I bet you these ones did really well. And which ones did the worst? Probably these ones over here. And then he said, you know, which one won? So he had all these different designs of like backgrounds and animals and the favorite sports team and like all your family and you know, sunset. You know, you can imagine like all the different credit card backgrounds. The one that did the best was just, it looked just like this. It was just a plain bluish kind of greenish square. It was just this, you would never guess.

Yeah.

So people tell these journeys about old. This guy's a sports fan so he wants to have one that has like lots of sports and he's really tough and you know, lifts weights and so all of this customer journey stuff, I mean, I agree with the concept of customer journey, but most people never get beyond the storytelling to get to the actual data, the validation by putting it out there and spending a few dollars to validate it.

Yeah. And another thing which I think it should be addressed is that in terms of the customer journey, what happens after the customer has placed the order is crucially important so that you can bond with the. Create a relationship with the customer while all the marketing things that does not our job, but whose job it is, you know, to. To take care about how the customers are feeling afterwards. And this is a blurry zone where while this is the most important thing because you can have this buyer's remorse, you can have this anxiety towards have I done the right thing buying this? Is this going to arrive, whatever. But nobody's taking care about how they treat that on the thank you page. The company is pushing other things to upsell while the customer is reluctant if they've made the right choice. And they have this stupid even. I've seen this on the thank you page of even on Nike that they had this standard. Your order 1x08709 has been placed. Thank you for your order. But there is a place that you can leverage because that's a place where you can diminish the anxiety and increase the willingness of the customer to buy again from you. You can plant the seeds for a future purchase by how you position yourself and how well you play your game over there.

Retention LTV all day long over acquisition.

Yeah. All right, next, what's the next lie that you want to address?

I think it's the biggest lie of them all. And that is the lie that is the words that come out of what your colleagues and other people in the industry say about their stats. You know, everybody seems to lie because they don't want to say that they're struggling. So you feel like you're struggling. And everyone I talked to so and so, and they said they did $2 million last month at a six roas, right. And then that gets spread around like gossip. And then at the conferences, whatever all of a sudden is they did $4 million, you know, at a 12 ROAS. And so people circulate all these. The people that give the presentations and the consultants and the tool vendors, all of them lie about how good their performance is. Right. So then you think I must be an idiot because everyone else, they're all succeeding. I never hear about anybody failing. It seems like every campaign they run is always successful. Why are my campaigns Failing. So the biggest lie is from people who make money by selling consulting or by taking a fee from you when they are not financially accountable to the end result. So this also includes employees that work for you or vendors or contractors where they're charging a retainer or whatnot. The only one who's, I believe, truly going to be honest is whoever their money is accountable for the sale. If they're have, if it's their money that they're spending on the ads and spending on the people and spending on the operations, that's the person who has an incentive to care. The other people have an incentive to lie to you. You, because they want to keep their job, because they want to sell you more Google Ads, they want to sell you more tools, they want to sell you more of their services.

Yeah. And an interesting aspect on this topic, Dennis, is that we are also being trapped on how we interpret the data. We are looking at the data and we manipulate it so that it makes sense. I mean, we are discounting certain factors, like you've said with the brand protect campaigns. But this is happening on, on other aspects as well. Like when you are doing AB testing and you, you, you, you let it run or you stop it thinking that, yeah, this is a winner. But you don't, you, you have reached the statistical significance, but only for two days and the buying cycle is 14 days. And all these, all these ways to, to actually you, you, you want to make it so much that you end up lying to yourself and not making real progress. And I think this is really dangerous for people which are trying to get further in their, in their careers.

You've heard lies, damn lies and statistics. And I'm an expert at using charts to lie. You know, I changed the axis to make it look steeper. Right. Change the pie chart. There's different ways to manipulate, but you're right. Whether it's the emotional side where you're just blind and you want to believe something, or you lie to yourself with this false sense of precision with data.

Yeah. And it was that thing that if you squeeze data, it can confess anything.

Absolutely.

All right, so Dennis, I think that's a wrap. That was the last slide that we think marketers are telling to themselves. We reached the end of this session. Do we want to go further in?

I want to hear about the lies for you guys. You know, what lies are you hearing about that we can add to this because we're taking this and building articles against it and social media snippets and we love to feature the stories that you have, especially the horror stories, which are the things that you typically don't hear. You only hear, like all the success. Right. But let's talk about things that have gone wrong. And I've shared some of these things that have gone wrong in other situations. And I'll tell you that I think probably 90 plus percent of the projects that I do fail. So we have to do lots of experiments and I'm curious to see, like, you know, what do you see? You know, Valentin, what do you see? And other people in the audience, like, realistically, how often do you fail? Can you admit that? I fail 90% of the time, at least.

I think the same. The beauty of my life as an entrepreneur is that I got myself into a position where I can afford to fail without critical damage, let's say. And the whole idea, it's your money.

Yeah. You can do it instead of someone else's money.

Exactly. All right, so thanks everyone for being with us today. Thanks, Dennis, for today's session. And we'll see each other in the next episode.

See you guys in the next episode.

Alrighty.

Okay. Good job. I think that was very good. I like that. I like the topic and the back and forth. I think we should go back and forth with tips like that.

Yeah. And, man, I want to, I want to publish this. I mean, let's do another five or even ten lies.

Yeah.

Get an editor because we're hiring a new content writer.

Yeah. Next week or whatever. Whenever our next one is. Let's. Let's do another five lies.

Yeah, let's do it.

I have more right here ready to go. But you know.

Perfect.

Don't have enough energy to go for another hour, but yeah, this is good.

Excellent. So we'll see each other in two weeks. Any. I'll let you know about the progress with the, with the grader. We, we have made some progress. We have made some ui. I will run it by you when we have it ready. Next Wednesday. Yeah. I'll send over some mock ups to you.

Okay. And then we could maybe just hop on a 15 minute Zoom or whatever, go through it, something like that.

Yeah. What is crucially important is to brainstorm together about the recommendations because that's going to be the. That's the elephant in the room, you know.

Yeah.

Very well.

No one has it. So even if it's not very good, it's better than what anyone else has.

Yeah. In many ways we will. We will afford to fail at the beginning. Great.

Fantastic.

Have a nice trip tomorrow. It was great doing this and all the best from Buchanan.

Thank you, Valentin. You're awesome.

See you.

All right, bye.