Running Digital Ads :: Chris Franco x Wendy Day
Chris Franco breaks down how independent musicians run digital ad campaigns across Google, Meta, TikTok, and Reddit. He emphasizes starting with one platform, testing with small budgets, and measuring what matters: conversions and cost-per-acquisition, not vanity metrics. Use your own ad account, test hypotheses, and scale what works.
Chapters
Chris Franco, how are you?
Doing fantastic. It's awesome to be with you, Wendy Day.
I'm so happy to have you here. You look like you're— you look like you're fly fishing.
I know, I— it's funny you say that. That's actually— this is real behind me. Um, these are real. That's a real mosquito that just got me. So, um, but other than that, I'm doing great. I'm probably gonna get some sort of, uh, some sort of disease from that malaria. Very exotic place right now. I can't say where, but it's exotic, as you can see from the water, how it's perfectly still.
But no, um, better to attract the mosquitoes.
No, it's great. Yeah, and I don't— I definitely have the, yeah, the dome for it. They just, they come, they know there's a blood source nearby. Yeah, they come right to me.
Um, but no, I gotta say, if I'm the only one in a room and there's mosquitoes, they come, they come for me.
Yeah, yeah, it just seems like it's always— I have the same issue, the same issue. Um, but yeah, no, everything's good and excited to, uh, to talk to you and, and hopefully be useful and helpful to your, to your community.
Well, you're, you're absolutely going to be incredibly useful to my community because they really want to understand digital ads better. And because I don't do it for a living, I can't really help them with what it is or how to do it or why they should do it. But I have access to people like yourself that do know. So thank you for agreeing to do this. 'Cause you've been doing this for a long time now and you're great at it. Like you've built a really wonderful career in digital ads.
No, for sure. I don't know if it's helpful to kind of talk a little bit about my background as far as like just getting it in context. I think for just to keep it kind of shorter and sweeter, I started in 2016 here in New York City. I started what you would call a growth marketing agency. It was the leader, the leading one here. And I quickly went out and got clients like FanDuel, Jet.com. Those are two of the fastest companies to reach what they call unicorn status, which is like a billion-dollar valuation. And then went on to work with a host of companies across industries. Clarity Money ended up being acquired by Goldman Sachs. My services were needed under the Goldman Sachs umbrella for about 2 or 3 years. So I've seen a lot and I also can relate to your audience because I learned how to do this stuff starting from the very ground floor where you don't have a lot of money, but you're trying to get results and figure out if you can justify spending more money. And I think people like to hear this stuff about Goldman or the Jets, the FanDuel, and doing ads on that side, but it's not as realistic for someone who doesn't have millions of dollars to spend. In the case of the Goldman situation, really without Clarity Money, we started at the very ground floor. So it was like justifying increasing the spend and, and, uh, and yeah, I think there's, there's definitely lots of parallels, you know, that work or would work for someone who's focused on doing this in the music industry.
And you understand the music industry. I met you in Atlanta when you were fascinated with music. So, and that was like, how long ago was that? Was like 15 or 20 years? I've been in Atlanta for 20 years now.
That's wild to think about. I was right out of college. This was probably 2011. We met at that Starbucks on Peachtree.
Yes, we did. Right by the Barnes Noble.
Yes. I had a music blog that had become very popular, a hip-hop-focused blog that got very popular.
It was excellent.
Thank you. My senior year of college. And then that led me to try to pursue that full-time. And I got a chance to really see what the music industry was all about, which makes me respect you that much more.
And you ran like the intelligent man that you are.
But I also—
Said fuck no.
I'm going to find this. But I also made some— I met some great people such as yourself that I feel lucky that we're still in touch and probably closer now than we've ever been, which is— Yes.
So ChatGPT brought us together.
Yes. Well, you know, I'd say we don't have to get into this, but I think it's even a little bit before ChatGPT. It was some of this stuff on like the self-wellness kind of stuff that you've been posting a lot of content about.
Because, you know, I'm trying to be the best person I can be.
Yeah. Yeah. Be more well, you know, being so work-focused, trying to be a little more well-rounded about like, how do I feel about why I'm working so hard. Um, love your stories, by the way, on Instagram. I'm a— thanks. Well, I don't have to plug it because it's your audience. I was gonna shout out your IG.
Yeah, they probably know.
They probably follow it. Yeah, it's a good chance.
Or maybe they don't. Maybe they're like, fuck the wellness shit, right? How to make money and become famous.
We're trying to grind.
Exactly.
But yeah, no, so, and I've worked with— I think, you know, I've kept my— I'm up to date, you know. I've worked with, you know, even in currently I have some advisory clients that are in the entertainment space. So I understand some of the challenges and opportunities that exist there. 'Cause I think I look at music now, it's content. And I think anyone who's in any sort of an entertainment, it's like you're in the content game. And everyone's competing for people's attention and their time. And so leveraging—
It's getting harder.
It's not gonna get easier. It's not gonna get easier. But I think there's room for those that take it, invest in the right, learning the right things, can find opportunities and pockets to get alpha, as they say in the finance world.
I love that. I love that. So could you talk a little bit about digital advertising and even Meta, Google? I did a webinar yesterday with Reddit. I wanna start using Reddit to advertise for some of my clients. So could you talk a little bit about digital ads and how to— I'm gonna just hit you with a bunch of shit and whatever you want is great. Um, but how to, how to find your market, how to know who to advertise, what to, to advertise, what A/B testing is like.
Just dump everything you— no, I will not hold back. And, and I can— let me say this for the audience, which is at this stage of my, my business, I'm focused a lot more on the advisory side, but also we're building our own stuff that we're using our proprietary marketing stuff to market. So I'm able to share a lot more now, given that I'm outside of like the core client services stuff that I was so much like, I didn't do anything but that for 7 years. So I feel like I can really kind of let loose here.
I love that. And thank you so much because you're always so forthcoming with info, even just like in our, in our friendship, like You follow up with emails about all the stuff that we discuss and, and exactly, you know, exactly like what I should be focusing on. Like, you're amazing.
No, thank you. You're so nice. You always make me feel like my emails are worthwhile.
Oh my God, are they? Yes, they are. I saved them just so you know.
No, it makes me like, I should send more emails. Um, I'll get— so yeah, to get right into it, I should— I think like, um, just to, just to like jump off here First and foremost, I'm also having my first cup of coffee, so just be ready for this. Digital advertising, the name of the game, and this is something I do a lecture or have done a lecture at Columbia Business School about this. And I kind of fall on this one point that I think is one of the best lessons I've learned, which is most people never get one distribution channel to work. I've seen this firsthand in this exists in the music industry that parallels this. You could have all the talent, all the, you could have a great song, But if you don't get a channel where it's going to be able to get out to the people, if you can't get one to work, it doesn't matter. You're dead. And there's so many great products, and I focus so much on consumer tech products and apps and things that are in this digital space where digital advertising is a great jumping off point. But if you don't have— most people never get one distribution channel. So I think one of the biggest mistakes, and this will be a great lead-off point, one of the biggest mistakes is getting spread in on where do I put the money or where do I even explore spending the money? And so currently, if we look at the existing landscape, of course, the biggest players, Google or Alphabet, but then we have Meta, which encompasses Instagram. There's a lot more to that as well. You mentioned Reddit, which is really important. Reddit's not, you shouldn't sleep on Reddit. Snap, you go down the list, but—
TikTok.
TikTok.. But what I think matters the most is you need to be able to find one that's gonna work and be able to really scale. If I'm starting off fresh, I'm gonna go where I'm gonna narrow it down to Google and I'm in Meta. And we have to think of these as two separate things. Google is demand aggregation. So people search things on Google. You know, this is generally their ad network is from search intent. So people, if I find something on Google, it's because I already, I already had an idea in my mind of what I was looking for. And I've shown that by typing in, hey, I'm looking for like whatever it is, and then the ads are reflecting that. But that demand that I have, it had to start somewhere. So Google just aggregates all that demand. The demand is generated somewhere else. I could have seen that, maybe I saw an ad on TV. Maybe you and I were talking and you said, hey, you gotta check out this new fly fishing tent. For someone like me, a fly fisher, clearly as we can see, you're gonna love it, it's the best, no mosquito bites. And it also comes with like a, ointment for your head. I'm like, that's amazing. I Google it. For, I would think for someone in your audience, particularly, I would want to be where you generate demand. So I would Google, you can worry about later. I would focus on, and I don't think in terms of discovery, that's discovery is gonna happen on social. So I'd want to be the biggest place to play on social where my audience is guaranteed to exist or I'm able to find them and they have the targeting to do that. And that's Meta. It's not rocket science. I think the TikToks, the Snaps, the Reddits are important to consider, but first get one to work. And then when you go and explore on those platforms, which are not as proven, or you could end up— there's more nuance to like figuring it out. You have something that you know will work, whether that's like your creative asset, whether whatever it is you're trying to get out to more people. I think what you can do with just Instagram alone, like I think I look at Instagram as sort of like the blue chip of all blue chips and digital advertising. If you can find some, if you can make Instagram work and it's, you know, you can scale it, there's a, there's much more scale to be had. And not necessarily than like TikTok, but just the point is that you can, if it works, it really, you can take it to the next level. Whereas like Reddit and Snap, you might hit a ceiling. But the bigger point is you gotta figure out how to get Instagram to work. And if you can't, then maybe try something else, but figure out one at a time. There's so much nuance to each of these channels. They require a certain amount of attention and to get something to work that not just work and meaning like, okay, now we're getting more, you know, whatever the metric you're going for, we're getting more of that. That's an, you'll be able to do that. Like these systems are designed to make that happen. But the question is how cost efficient is it? Because if it's not profitable for you, you know, you might as well just light your money on fire, right? Like, okay, I have more fans, but like now I can't, I have to like eat 2 meals a day instead of 3. And I mean, it's like, I sound like I'm trying to be funny, but like literally, like, you're lighting money on fire.
Yes.
The key, I think, with these channels trying to get like an Instagram to work is you need to know right off the bat, like, what is it that's gonna be my measurement of success? There are a lot of metrics that we look at in any marketing advertising. I call them vanity metrics. You know, they make people feel good. They sound good in board meetings, but they really don't move the business.
Move the needle.
Exactly. Like an example, and this is not as pertinent maybe right now, but there was a period of time where having an app was like, if you have an app, we have a million downloads and people were like, wow, a million downloads. That's great. Cause it says, hey, we have this thing. We made it outta thin air.
Yeah.
And people put it on their phone. But what really matters is are those people active? What is our, so then it was like, what's my MAU, monthly active users? Or even if you read Meta's 10-K or 10-Qs, that's the metrics they look at is how What is the percentage of their audience that's actually active? And then beyond that is what, you know, as a ratio of total people. So, and are we seeing that grow? So if it's awesome, if you're like, okay, we have, you know, 50,000 monthly active users, we acquired another 50,000 people and now we have 60,000 monthly active users. It's that growth is what you're trying to pay attention to, the change. 'Cause metrics can be deceiving in that sense where we look at volume when really what matters is the kind of what's changing on a weekly or a monthly basis. Right, and it tells you if like, am I doing the things that matter to move the needle? And if not, then you have to diagnose, well, why is that not happening? What have I been doing? What's not working? What is working? And you just do more of what works and less of what doesn't and try to understand why or why it doesn't. Why it does or why it does not. With that being said, I think if you're starting off on something like you wanna use Instagram as a starting point, Anything you're gonna do, it's gotta work on a small scale. Something I would talk about with clients all the time is, you gotta be able to test an idea with, let's say it's like a $250 test. So there is a risk you're taking in putting up money to say, okay, I'm gonna, I have this idea, here's my situation, I need this to happen, whatever my outcome is. I think if I do this, which is, I'm gonna put an ad on Instagram, it's gonna have whatever, it's gonna have me performing or a clip of my song, If I get this out through these ads, I can get X number more, whatever it is I need. And then look at the results and figure out, okay, did it achieve what I wanted to? And if so, like, what can I continue on? Can I do it at a greater scale? You know, can I spend $2,500 now? And if it didn't work, figuring out, okay, what was the bottleneck that was causing it to not do what I needed it to do? And if we get down to like the nitty-gritty, I'll use an example from like a just a digital advertising campaign for a made-up product, a widget that we're advertising through Instagram.
Okay.
Like initially, if I need to figure out, there's a few things that are going to matter the most, which is like the clicks. Like, are people tapping on this ad to go to wherever? Because we're sending them somewhere else most likely. Um, correct. If we send them somewhere else, when they get there, do they convert or do the thing that I actually want them to do that's valuable to my business? Whether maybe they're buying your concert tickets, buying your merch. I worked with actually a really prominent, I never mentioned this to you. I did, I helped the team that bought YRN, which is Amigos clothing brand. I came in and fixed up all their, figured out their Facebook stuff. So I saw that firsthand. This is, I don't think it's even on my website, but it was a very short thing, but we cracked that code. Merch is an example of something that could be, maybe it's, I wouldn't say get more like plays of a song, but just whatever that transactional event that you're trying to advertise for, you're trying to get more of that. So that conversion rate is the next thing that's gonna matter the most. So, okay, how many clicks am I getting or taps? What's the cost per? And then of those people, how many of them do the thing that I want them to do? And what percentage of those clicks did it? So it's like, am I getting, It's, I have a, if I have 200 clicks and what is it like? Well, these are 100, 100 clicks, 5 people buy my t-shirt. I have a 5% conversion rate. And then the cost to do that, which is based on a CPM, which is a cost per mil or 1,000 impressions. That's what you're kind of being charged based on, you know, that's gonna determine basically the economics of that event. So if I'm paying, you know, whatever it is, the CPMs, I won't try to turn this into a math problem, but If I find out, hey, I have a $30 t-shirt, I sold 5 of them at a cost of like $20 per through here, you know, then factoring in shipping, my unit economics and everything else, like, is this cost efficient? And whether it is or it isn't, you always want to try to make it work better. So the question then becomes, well, what could, what could make this more cost efficient for me? A lot of times it's your creative. It's, you know, what are you showing and putting in front of people to make them first of all, get their attention, and second of all, you know, to put their thumb on their phone screen. Um, you know, and a lot of times, and this is, I think, should be helpful, is a lot of times it's the most simple thing. Like, I'm a big believer in, I call it cognitive congruence, which is whatever's on, whatever I'm selling you on the other end, it should be visually congruent on the end that you're seeing on the ad. So if I have, it's something like the t-shirt, well, just show the t-shirt laid out on like a nice simple background, like You know, and you can A/B test someone wearing it or whatever the case is, but like they need to see what's gonna be on my body. Like I use that first impression, like this is what it is. And then the people who are clicking through, they're more qualified. You know, you might run an ad creative that's not as like, you know, it doesn't have the like pizzazz that makes everyone do this, but a lot of times you're getting better people to click because they're actually clicking for what it is you're selling. And I'll use, again, my mind is just racing with things right now, so just slow me down if you need to.
No, you're, you're being super clear. Um, I do want to ask you, you mentioned A/B testing. If you could just quickly explain what that is.
Sure. And I apologize if I just chewed ice right into the microphone, so sorry for the—
you didn't, but I'm counting on you doing it next time.
Okay, I'll do it really loud next time. Um, yeah, an A/B test is just you're trying to compare one thing to another to see how performance changes.
Oh, okay. So I might test an ad with me wearing the shirt against an ad with me holding it up, for example.
Exactly. Like you're trying to isolate one element of it and see, okay, like if I put these head to head, like think of it like a rap battle. If I put two rappers, and this I feel like very relevant to you with the Rap Olympics. In a way it's like a head to head competition. Everyone gets a beat for the same amount of time. And whoever's gonna like say the best stuff is gonna be the one that advances to the next. Think of it like that, but just with individual elements of an advertisement.
Got it.
And the reason you do it like that is, you know, there's so much randomness in the data that you're getting back from, you know, a social network like Facebook or Meta in this case, or, you know, just using Meta more broadly. But it's a complex social system where everything is interacting with everything else. Sometimes you could read your data and say like, "Oh, I did this and I got this result," but it might not be because of that thing you think you did. It's for reasons that we can't even see. And frankly—
We don't even know.
And the people that come up with this stuff don't even know. That's the amazing thing with deep learning is sometimes the outcome, no one can explain it. It's this emergent effect. Emergent effect. In the case of why as advertisers or marketers you want to isolate and test one versus the other with a hypothesis, I'll get to that in a second. Is so you have a better chance of having, you know, getting real signal in the noise. Something that I call it hypothesis-driven marketing. And by no means do you have to be like a science nerd to do this. It's just the scientific approach to this is really useful. Advertising is not science, you know, contrary to what people want to believe. It's not physics. You don't get total precision. You know, we're really just looking for direction. Not perfection. So if you test two things against each other and one's a little bit better, one's a little bit worse, it might not be— if you test it 100 times, you might get different results every time. It's like flipping a coin. What you're looking for is big differences. Um, and so when you think about how can I go about doing that in a way that's going to make sense and not be overwhelming, is have an idea of what you think is going to happen. And a lot of people are really resistant to doing this, is say like, I'm going to try the version of the ad with Wendy holding the t-shirt because I think people know Wendy Day, they trust her, and if they see her holding the shirt, it creates like a certain familiarity and people will be more likely who click will convert at higher rates. Let's say that's my hypothesis and I run the two against each other and I find the conversion rates actually the version with you holding it gets like an 8% versus like the standard 3% with the one that was I'm testing it against. Well, that tells me something. So it doesn't mean that every, we should, you know, take that to the bank forever, but maybe says, hey, for our next creative campaign, let's try a few more variations with Wendy in it because we see it, things do better when she's in it. Now it might turn out that that's not, it's just noise, but at least we're going off of something that's very clearly like we had an idea, we tried it out, we saw clear differences, and we're moving in that direction. You know, that's what this is all about. A lot of people get way too in the nuances of A/B testing, and this is at all levels, by the way. I've seen this at the highest of high levels and the lowest of low levels where, you know, hey, we'll do like an ad with a blue background versus a light blue. And like, it becomes this thing, it's like, stop. Like, we're trying to get, first of all, get results. And second of all, like, you're missing the point. Like, it's not— we like look for the big nuggets of gold, don't drown in the minutia. And a lot of times people don't think about their tests that way. Like, if you're setting up an A/B test, if I'm doing the A, assuming the A is like what's working or like working consistently at a certain level and you're like, gotta do better than that. Well, the B, do it like, damn it, I want a home run. I'm not looking at, hope it gets a little bit, just a little bit better. Like, no, I'm looking for what would knock this out of the park? Because at least you're using your brain and like, if it doesn't work, you're learning something that you can then find the next thing that'll be more likely to work. You're essentially like calibrating your brain on what works with your audience and doing that hypothesis-driven testing, not only can you sleep better at night, 'cause you're like, I did this like methodically, but you end up learning it better. I've had to manage so many of this, like these campaigns across in like high pressure. Like I didn't do anything for like 5 years. I had like a golden gun to my head. It's like, hey, if you don't get this right, you're gone. So it's like I'm operating in this level of just anxiety and I never dropped the ball. And in part I was able to juggle it cause I had like, I had a process that worked and it made sense and allowed me to figure out what worked, have an idea of what doesn't work. And then I was really rational about doing more of what did. And less of what didn't. And I think when you early on in your A/B testing or just advertising period, you're gonna have losers. You're gonna have stuff that's gonna shit the bed, pardon my expression. No, that's real. And you should embrace that. Like if you're not having that, then you're not trying anything. The key is that you can make mistakes, just don't do them twice. Right. You know, and the thing is too, like all of this is an education and education's really expensive. So we don't wanna just test to learn. We wanna test to get results. But as we're learning things, we're getting smarter about what we test next. And then here's the magical point. You're gonna reach a point where something's working really well, and it's like anything, there's just, you can only optimize it so much. So at a certain point, then you have to commit to it. And what I see people mess up, you know, again, across everything, is you'll have something that's really killing it for you. And that doesn't mean you don't try anything else or you just get complacent. But I had a person I used to, um, he was the CEO of a company that I worked with, and he had this expression, harvest when the sun's out. And so if you get something, which is great, by the way, totally on brand with this, 'cause after I get off this call, I'll be harvesting whatever. But in all seriousness, if you get something that works, most, first of all, most people don't, don't try to like spread your dollars thin, concentrate on that and just scale that to the moon. 'Cause you might, that window can close up. 'Cause advertising, like anything, people copy each other. Yeah, that too. You have copycats and then the advantage that you found for yourself begins to shrink because someone out there who is in your space or competes with you is like, hey, did you see that so-and-so's got this going on? Maybe we should try that. And then suddenly that thing that you figured out isn't working as well. There's one other side of that coin, which is some of everything in advertising has already been figured out. There's nothing new to learn in advertising. And there are certain books and I can throw a couple out right off the top of my head. Scientific Advertising, I think it's called. Claude Hopkins wrote it. It's like 1923. If I, if that, by the way, if I'm right about that, if I'm right about that year, then I'm, I'm an idiot savant because that's like incredible if I could pull that. 1923, I think. Another one is like Cialdini's Influence. You know, you just need to know these big ideas, like to pull a couple out. Social proof works. Testimonials have worked since the beginning of advertising.
Yes.
To see someone else say, hey, I did such and such and it gave us this. And it's authentic and it's a person, that does better.
And if you're an influencer, even better.
Even better. It's like we wonder, we act like influencer marketing's new. It's all it is is testimonials come to life with a hybrid of celebrity endorsement on top of it. Going back to authority works well. So if you get some press, that's not a bad thing to try out. As seen in such and such. Point is you don't have to do those exactly, but there are things you can do as tests or experiments or ways to make your advertising more persuasive. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. What I would recommend is be direct. Say what's on the other end of the offer. Say what they're getting. Don't try to, you know, again, I've probably done more A/B testing than any human being, at least in New York for like a, probably a 5-year period. I would argue I did more than anyone on the planet, which is not a brag, by the way. It's kind of low-key sad. It was lucrative, I learned a lot and I enjoyed it, but it was like, you know, I didn't have a life.
It was your life.
It was my life, right? My whole life is an A/B test. I had a twin. My parents chose me. I was the winner of the A/B test. You were the A. Yeah, no, exactly. But when you're— where am I going with this? Your audience is like, this guy is— does he make sense? Do we understand him?
Can we trust him? Yeah, you're making a really complex issue really clear. Like, I don't realize how helpful this is.
No, I'm so glad.
And this could be like my best video ever, and I'm doing nothing.
Oh, perfect.
I'm just sitting back going, talk, Chris.
You know, I'll keep, I'll keep riffing. Um, I could talk about this all day. Um, where was I? Where did we jump off? So I just get right back.
Yeah, we were, we were talking about, um, not overdoing the A/B testing, like not going too crazy with it. There's a point where you actually have to stop. And, and I would love to interject in here. So when you set up a, um, when you set up an ad campaign, there should be a distinctive call to action. It shouldn't just be like, oh, I made this new song, here it is, boom, okay, thank you for listening. There should be some reason behind the ad. Yeah, like a goal.
Totally. And I think it's a good point to kind of get into. So, you know, if you're running an ad through, like, say, Meta ad platforms a call to action, it has to be there because there has to be a button they tap. And so when they tap whatever button, whatever your ad goal is, there's gonna be a couple options for what you can choose for your call to action. It could be sign up, it could be purchase, depending on what it is.
Go to Spotify, go to Apple Music, or there's something else.
Yeah, I don't think those are, but if you think of an ad you see on Instagram, you know how that thing, that little bar hovers over it?
The bar at the bottom, yeah, learn more, whatever it is.
Exactly, you can choose from the options from that. But I think from a more like holistically speaking, if you don't have a goal that you're looking to drive through advertising, then you're probably not ready to advertise, or I wouldn't, don't just advertise to advertise. But if you have something, you're like, hey, we have something that's profitable for us, we wanna get more traction for.
Like merch.
Merch, yeah, exactly. Then by all means, let them know. And it could be something where it's just a matter of people who are already your fans finding out. Not everything's for everybody. And I think that's an important distinction. Is understand the product you're advertising and what the potential scale is of that product. Because there's some things like, I might just use advertising to accelerate the fact that my audience finding out about it. And that's not a bad thing, 'cause it might not cost that much, but it'll actually get its, you call it like if you have something new, there was a term, it's called like growing your payload. Like when I hit that button, remember the email blast days, which is a terrible, I hate email blasts, but you know, it's like the bigger, It's more potential for it to spread. You know, if I can hit more people, like even if it just, it could be random, but there's a bigger audience of people that have intent or interest in what I'm doing. If I can reach more of them at once with a new thing. Yeah. And it can accelerate your progress. And there are, there's simple idea that really works is like the advantages of scale. I've done this for personal experiments with like, I had an Instagram page where I was getting a lot of traction for it organically, and I was measuring something like the reach to share rate and seeing that, hey, like certain posts that I'd see a distinction between, you know, the percentage of people that would see it that would actually share it. And to me, that's a good indication that, hey, if more people saw this, they will also share it. Like, they—
more people will share it.
Yeah, exactly. And there's a— at the time, and this is a few years ago, there was a relationship with like sharing and following. And so I was able to say, okay, I could wait at the rate that I'm going organically. If let's say my goal is, and this is not a good example in terms of just the business side, but let's say my goal is I wanna reach 100,000 followers. I don't wanna pay for my followers and just be done with it. Or sorry, not pay for, 'cause you're not paying for followers on if you're advertising, if you're boosting, it's not, you're getting people who are like, ooh, I didn't know about this account, looks cool, I'm gonna follow. So it's different than like the days of people getting,, you know, fake followers. I would never suggest that in a million years. Yeah, you're fooling yourself, not just your audience, and you're fucking up your algorithm.
That's going to all bots.
Exactly. And when people look at your engagement rates, they're like, ooh. Like, I know people that have much smaller followings but incredibly high engagement rates, and they get all sorts of offers because people look at their engagement rates. But side note, or aside of that, um, if we get into like when you have a larger, um, Basically, I figured out, okay, if I'm keep acquiring this many new followers per month doing whatever I'm doing, great. But if I can get in front of more people faster by spending a very small amount of money relative, well, what's my time worth? Like how, what's the value of getting there faster? Because in fact, if the money that I'm imagining coming from like once I reach this, then this kicks in and then I have like a revenue engine. Well, why not put a little money up to get there a little bit quicker? Because it's just a matter of having more scale or more reach with something that already works. I think you can learn a lot from your organic things that can help influence what you use as creative in your advertising. You know, the things you're still trying to get someone to do the same thing, which is engage with or interact with your content. That's what the ad— it's no different than organic, paid, it's all the same. I think some of the best sources of like Facebook's data is the advertisers because they're putting new things in front of an audience and the audience is either choosing to interact or not.
Or not.
Exactly. We talked about incentives earlier. You know, Facebook's incentive, or Meta's incentive, is to get people to interact with the content. And because what they want is for when you load up your feed, you're seeing something that is relevant to you that you're like, oh, and you keep going. If you see random stuff that doesn't have any value to you, that's a bad experience, and then you go spend your time in a different app. That's not good for their business. So they really want to show people the stuff that they're going to like But you can help yourself along because you, if you have enough of an organic presence, you can look at all your content and say, well, what did people like the most? What did people actually interact with the most? And use that as a jumping off point. You know, I think a lot of people don't realize you're sitting on the best source of data, which is your own data. Or the best knowledge is the proprietary data that's yours, which is how people have responded to all of your 100+ Instagram posts.
And can I interject here that if you're going to hire somebody to run digital ads for you, they need to run them in your Meta account, because if they're running the ads in their Meta account, they're getting all that data and you're not.
So, yeah, and there's two ways— I'll just sign a little bit of a side note just to go on that, make a distinction there. There's two ways you can kind of like use advertising which is you could boost something, which is still yours, and you— but it's not using the— you don't have as much control over kind of what you're doing. But there is value in doing it for certain things. Um, I think if you have like a great organic post that's getting like tons of shares, it's going viral, boosting with a, you know, a small amount of money can actually make a lot of sense. Um, and you don't need to like set up ad campaigns within Meta ad platform. But if you're doing something like you're, you're trying to sell your merch, you know, if you're seriously like starting to put, like, meaningful, a budget behind it, I think you should be building in your own, uh, in most cases using Meta ad platform. You know, it's not— it takes some, you know, time to tinker with, but you'll have a much better, uh, kind of corpus of knowledge from that than you would by trying to go through all your boosted posts and see, like, okay, like, how many shares did I have before I boosted it? How many did I get after? There's just a lot more you can do with that data. You can export it, you can play with it. Not that you can't, Facebook's getting better about everything, but I think, you know, there's a, you could, if you boost something that works well, then maybe that's your signal. Hey, I should really start taking this advertising thing seriously. Going back, is your audience, like you mentioned merch, like what are they looking to advertise the most or just a couple things maybe?
Most people seem to be doing awareness campaigns.
Okay.
Why I asked you like, should they have a specific call to action so they can measure it? Tell them to stop doing that.
I say that because the, Facebook. Yeah, uh, let them know for me. Um, send a memo. If you go into ad platform, uh, the ads platform, you, you choose your ad based on the objective you have. And there's like, I, I maybe 12 different options. You know, there's, you know, there's traffic, there's clicks, there's, uh, landing page views, there's conversions, purchases, um, there's email leads. Like, there's all sorts of stuff. Each one of those things What it actually is, is a different algorithm. And certain algorithms are more sophisticated and better at certain things. So if you're looking to create awareness, I would argue that, well, I don't— you're not going to drive transactions through awareness because the people that are— it will create awareness without a doubt, but that awareness will likely not translate to anything that's of value to you. If I drive a traffic campaign to a landing page where you can add your email, the percentage of those people that will sign up for my email versus if I use a higher-intent conversion algorithm or, sorry, objective. If my objective is, let's say it's a landing page lead or something like that, I'll get a much higher percentage using that objective. Now, what's the trade-off? It's more expensive. The traffic is more expensive and it's not because Facebook says, well, this algorithm, we're charging you more. It's because the people that are seeing it are of higher value and more people want to be in front of them because they, in some, they mean business. People that are much more probable to do the thing that you want them to do, they're going to cost more to get in front of than someone who's just valuable to this, that someone that's going to make your web traffic spike. It's as simple as that. So I think for the purpose of Meta, I think it's best if you're in the ad platform to be optimizing for something that's much higher intent because you're still gonna get the awareness. You're still get all those impressions you get, that reach you get. That's all, those are real people.
They still see you. Yeah.
But they're better people. So you're gonna get more awareness among people that might actually be your customer one day. That's not something you hear. That's, I think, probably a little bit, a lot of the stuff I say is not gonna show up in like the Facebook Ads 101. But I, you know, 'cause it's not, it's, I don't wanna say it's not complicated, but it just, it's like, it's an inconvenient truth, you know? Like, 'cause people like to have, if I'm Facebook, I have traffic campaigns 'cause people, there are businesses that are like, hey, how much traffic we have going to the website this month?
Great.
And they get their bonuses. Nah, I shouldn't say their bonuses, but they get patted on the back. Hey, our web traffic's up 30% this month, you know? And we only spent this much on Facebook ads. It's like, great, but that didn't really do anything. Growth marketing is results marketing. I'm coming from the standpoint of what's gonna drive business results, what's gonna drive business growth, and the algorithms or the conversion objectives that will do that are high intent. So conversion is the best one. If you're selling merch, you're optimizing for conversions or purchases. It's the same idea. It's gonna be more expensive. And I'll say this too, when you're testing, you need to test with the best algorithm. Because what you learn, if I say, hey, I figured out my, you know, click-through rates are this when I optimize for traffic, well, they're going to be a lot lower when you optimize for something that's more high, higher intense. You don't really, you want to learn on the same, like the same, same field or the same backdrop. Now let me just get a little complicated, but I'll just, I want to make sure I say it then rather than not say that people can figure out if it's worth hanging on to. If you're starting from scratch, If I have, um, you mentioned they're, they're looking to get like merch was one. What were the other, uh, like situations they want to drive?
Um, they, they want, they want to drive people to Spotify and get more streams or smart URL, which has Spotify, Apple, SoundCloud, Deezer, Amazon.
Okay. Here's what I would do.
And then once they get there, they click on whichever platform the, the consumer clicks on whichever platform they subscribe to.
For sure. I would have, I don't know what those, if that allows you to have a pixel. But I would be— I'd want to optimize for people who are going to play my songs. I want to know if they play my songs. Now I know we can't know what's going on on, let's say, you Spotify. I— that's Spotify's information. We can't train a, a model based on that. And that— this is what's going to get a little complicated, but I'm going to zoom out. Every Facebook ad that you run, or ad set, it's a machine learning model. And really, in simple terms, what a model is is it's a question answering system. It's technology, obviously, but it's learning from data so they can be better at doing what it's supposed to do. So if the objective of my little like mod, I'm gonna use like a robot, I'm a little robot. If my objective is, okay, I have to go get people who will, I have to show your ad to people who will listen to your songs. I don't know what those people are like. Who are the, I have no indication.
Correct.
What's the difference between Wendy Day, me, and the person that listens? I have no idea. I just know they all have Meta or they all use Instagram.
What—
when you put your ad out in the universe, the model's learning like, okay, this person clicked. Did they listen to the song? No, they did not. Uh, and it's learning from, okay, what are the features of— what's this person like? What's their behavior like? Okay, they're trying to recalibrate to find the person that's going to do the thing you want, not just for you so that you come back, but because they don't want to have people leaving their platform to then go and be disappointed. Um, so you have to give it time to learn. And something that's a little bit more high intent, like a purchase, like a transactional event, or even something a little bit more time intensive, they're spending time listening to something on your site, that data, you need a certain amount of examples for it to learn from to get better at who it's gonna show your ad to. So sometimes you have to kind of work your way down funnel with what you're training for. 'Cause if let's say I've never sold a single t-shirt on my website and now I'm—
Right.
Which is real. Yeah. I mean, this happens. I've scaled a lot.
You are.
Well, you know, I've seen this like with major retail brands that are just trying to figure out their digital. I've launched brands like that where, you know, they have enormous retail presence, but they have zero online presence, or is zero like commerce presence. And so initially when we start, you know, they have no, they have no examples of who converts and who doesn't that Facebook is registering. So you have to train the model, and the training is just simply like giving it time to learn. And you need a certain number of examples and probably like a 7-day period for it to understand, okay, like I have an idea of kind of like who to find to show this ad to. So this, I guess, leads to a couple things. One is don't get discouraged initially by the results because the worst results you have should be the earliest results. It should kind of find a way to find a stable point, and that's what you're going to A/B test and then try to improve from. But the other thing is, if you're trying to drive— if I'm trying to drive streams, I want as much control over do I know the person did the thing that I want them to do. 'Cause I'd be willing to bet that a lot of the traffic campaigns don't translate into streaming numbers. Now you might need to create your own attribution system where you look at like every day you type in how many streams did I get yesterday? Okay. How many clicks did I get from Facebook? It could be something that, you know, basic archaic. Yeah. But attribution is very complicated. So sometimes like that's good enough. Going back to my point earlier, direction, not perfection. There's some quote, it's, I'd rather be roughly right than precisely wrong. So don't, don't overdo it, but if you can find a way to say, okay, well, like, here's how much we spent on advertising yesterday, here's how many streams we got, assuming that we— our thesis is that people, they see it, then they go and check it out. Um, and then just being aware, I mean, there's going to be other things that contribute to that, but if I know that I've never advertised and then all of a sudden I'm advertising and I see my stream numbers jump up, well, then maybe that traffic campaign is doing the job. So that traffic that's, you know, is leaving and going is actually streaming, and that could be good enough. That could be fine. But I think what I would try to do is have people go to, like, have the streaming players embedded on my own website, have a pixel, and then optimize for a down funnel event. It's not in front of me right now. I don't know what I would choose. I don't wanna give the wrong advice, but, and probably optimize for something that's beyond traffic. And actually be able to know, did the person click on the song or play the song? That would seem to me to be the ideal situation. But if not, then I would just want to measure the lift. And you got to remember too, if you're already getting a certain number of streams, you know, the point where like you're ready to advertise, you know, I assume they have, you know, some, some people in this community have good followings who are into their music. If, if you're not paying, if you're spending so little, if you're spending $10 in ads a day or something, there's no way for you to even know if it worked. So I wouldn't, you know, you could end up having this drip of $10 a day that's really going to nothing because you're just not willing to find out if it's actually doing anything. So, you know, I'd want to choose an amount that's going to move the needle, at least that I could tell. Um, and but I would say that would be more like, do you know, it's so hard to say without knowing what their numbers are and like getting— and I, it's a— I wish I could answer. I— this comes up a lot, like people always ask me, well, what would you spend?
Budget? Yeah.
Yeah, it's really, it's, it's, I'd be dishonest to say anything, uh, because it's so, it's so, you know, catered to the person or the situation. Um, but I think generally speaking, like, it should be, it comes back to this business argument. Like, am I doing this because I feel better to get, I get more streams, or to getting more streams, is that, is it proven to me that drives my business? Um, you know, I think it's the same problem that is in all industries. I'm sure with the music industry it's no different. People get excited about how many streams do we get this month, but without saying, okay, are we booking more shows? Are we selling more merch? You know, does— is that— is that audience— is that increased audience or the metrics of that increased audience turning into something that's transactional? And not to say that you're trying to squeeze every dollar out of your audience, but just the fact that you have an audience that you're creating value for and they're engaging with it, it's only natural that they're going to want to, you know, transact. The next thing they're doing is transacting with you in some capacity. So I think making sure you're able to establish that before you start advertising, and I think it sounds very obvious and I'm sure it is for a lot of your audience, but for a lot of people, they need to be that reminder because we kind of all are on this autopilot of I need to show that I'm growing or I'm getting, you know, look how many streams I got. And, but if it's not, who cares if it doesn't lead to any, if you don't have a system in place to get anything out of it. Yeah. You and I were talking about Suno, making Suno songs. I mean, I could throw a couple of my Suno jams up on Spotify and hey, I got X number of streams, but I have no business mechanism around that. So it's just, it's vanity.
It's vanity metrics. Exactly.
Yeah. So yeah.
So there's something that I've noticed inside of Meta and I'm hoping you could give a little explanation of it. Um, when you're running ads, it sometimes gives you the choice that says— and this is a direct quote— "and people like them." Okay.
Um, what does that mean? So I assume that's the targeting option.
It is.
Is that when you boost, or is that when you're actually in the ad platform?
It's when you're actually in the ad platform. So if I'm able to reach, like, let's say I go in and I target, um, men 18 to 35 and I want to target just in the Southeast because I'm based in Atlanta. And, um, maybe they're college educated or maybe they're fans of— and sometimes they give you a choice of bigger artists, like fans of DJ Khaled or fans of Future. You can't get too specific. Like, I can't be like fans of, you know, LaRussell or, or something really specific. But let's say it's and fans of Future, and then it gives me the choice of and people like them. And that just sounds really attractive to me because I feel like they're gonna, they're gonna go and find more people like exactly what I'm looking for. And I get excited.
So it's funny because back in the day you could get, you could get so crazy with like the interest targeting and stuff. And there was what I would— this is again a little bit of a contrary, not contrary, and this is proven, but like a bit of my proprietary stuff is I'm a big— I would not click on that. And the reason why is The algorithm is going to try to find those people anyway. Um, and then when you're going back and trying to fit— you're trying to figure out why something worked. Um, if you do that, you don't know what it did. So I can't really say if I'm trying to isolate something, I'm like, hey, when I— and I wouldn't even recommend targeting like DJ Khaled or Future or whatever the artist would be, only because there's two types of data. Um, there's declarative and there's inferred. Declarative is like I say, hey, I'm a fan of such and such. Inferred is like, hey, I think this person likes so-and-so because they, you know, I know they went to like the Ticketmaster site and, you know, there's different ways for it to know, but like the declarative data, those days of people were like really saying, remember on Facebook you'd put like actually write who your favorite artists were?
Yes.
Or like you'd like pages, follow, and then like that was part of your profile. They can still figure that stuff out, but really all this comes down to is your behavior. The behavior, you're looking for people that behave like your fans and that behavior, there's too many variables to even name or even think about, but that's where this amazing deep learning stuff comes into play. It's finding these neural nets of really nuanced behavior, things that involve your device usage, things that we don't even think about. And I would rather leave it broad and open and let it find. I don't even like doing age targeting. Because age targeting, I'm thinking in terms of like what the results are.
The—
if the people— I'm gonna make sure I say this right because it's in my head. But if let's say I get the results I want, and then I— you can then look and see how old were the people that did it, right? You can look at that. That's like something you can see after the fact. The reason they did the thing I wanted wasn't because they were of those ages. It just so happens that the people that behave the way that I wanted them to behave happened to be those ages. So it's like, and that's in my mind is how the model thinks. It's not like, oh, you know, let me narrow in on these people of certain age range, even though, by the way, that makes total sense from a traditional, like, demographic, geographic, like the traditional targeting. Um, this, think of this as like behavioral-based targeting. And when you're advertising this way, the behavior you're looking for, uh, don't put any restrictions on it. Let the, let the model figure it out because it's then you're not giving it— you're not like— imagine like a kid that grows up with like racist parents. So maybe they go to college and they realize, hey, like racism is stupid and I can't believe I used to think like this. But for a long period of their life, they made like shitty— just sorry, bad decisions, bad choices. They had bad friend groups because they like were like very ignorant and like single-minded. Like, you're putting something in, it's like a baby's brain. You're putting like, oh yeah, I think this is the audience, this is who we like. Like, let it go figure it out. And trust that it—
I love that.
Like a kid's immune system, it learns from getting sick. So if I— oh, we don't like it over here, this we don't see. So let it like kind of find its way.
Find its, find its way.
Yeah. And then what you have is something that it's, it's a, it's all but like probabilities. It's like a probabilistic engine. So it's like, it's gonna show ads to people that have a higher percentage likelihood in its mind of doing the thing that you want them to do. And that is something that no other platform can replicate. This is why Meta stock just keeps doing this because advertisers, you're there and you're, it's like, there's nothing else like it. You can't do it better than that. I mean, there are people use the same behavioral based stuff, but I mean, in terms of at scale globally and everyone's there. So it's incredibly, incredibly powerful, which we all know, but I think it's because of the ability to target based on people's behaviors and make essentially decisions based on trying to create patterns of people's behaviors to help figure out who they should show it to. And if you think like some of the ways that we think about advertising, it's not that they're irrelevant. It's good to know, hey, my audience is in these ranges, 'cause that can change the things you're even making songs about. If I know my audience is of a certain age, I'm probably not gonna talk about things if they're 65 and older, like, which probably not as relevant as an example to bring up, but I'm just— I don't want to dismiss each thing.
It actually is. I love that you just said that because we tested a pop artist music and her biggest market were people that were 45 and older and she's 21. And that's huge. I'm like, oh my God, we should have narrowed— we should have told the algorithm, we should have told the ad platform. No, we want people between 18 and 36. But the reality is, what I'm learning from what you're saying right now, is her music was attractive to 55-year-olds.
Yes, you got my mind. Something that—
this is super—
that's super helpful because like, if you're figuring out— if you're trying to show your songs or a certain song or as the advertisement, you— to that artist point, they might have a song that just happens to resonate with older people. They didn't even realize it. And that's a great thing to figure out. And then you say, okay, well, how— like, what songs do we have that we, that we think are going to fit better with our real audience, or who we think is our real audience, or who, you know, people that are going to go to concerts on a Saturday.
And now that I'm thinking about this, Chris, like, when I played it for like my friend circle, just because I was proud of the music, so many of my friends said, oh my God, this reminds me of Fleetwood Mac. Well, who listens to Fleetwood Mac? My age, right? So that would make sense that if I put a budget behind it and put it out into the world. If it reminds people of Fleetwood Mac, of course people my age would vibe to it.
Yeah, it touches something that, again, I think such a cool second order effect. It provides an insight you never would have had. Correct. And also sometimes too, I will say with the age thing, you can choose to advertise your same ad on Instagram, Facebook, whatever. Facebook tends to skew older. That's a lot of the demo there. That's something just a general— another reason I like Instagram is I think it's the best representation of the core attractive demographics that you wanna go after. So just 'cause if you do it on Facebook, you're gonna see things skew older, doesn't mean that that means your audience is older. It could just be 'cause you're on Facebook. So understanding when you're analyzing that data to consider the platform. And I think similarly, and this is a really good insight, Facebook will often give you these options to also target third-party stuff and, you know, beyond like Messenger. And, you know, not to say anything that's bad, but I don't think the value of those impressions is anywhere near the same. I think if you're getting— I like to go for the blue chip stuff. I want to be on your Instagram feed. I want to be on, you know, if it's Facebook, the Facebook feed, you know, Instagram Reels. There was a time I remember when Stories was brand new. I was— I remember, I think I was one of the first advertisers to be able to put ads on Stories. And initially you get— just because I was there, it wasn't because I— it was just like, hey, you spend a lot of money for clients, like, we're rolling this out now to see if we can monetize.
You're a beta tester for us.
Exactly. No, exactly. And, but it was a really unique opportunity for brands that were advertising then because you could get really cheap impressions.
But, and you were the first to the market, so people be like, yo, what's this?
Exactly. But like, what we found is like, I'm, and I'm, this is going off memory, but Facebook was still figuring out how to find the people on, on that behavioral intent or behavioral like I said, you're having a different experience when you're doing this on stories versus like, yeah, there's, there's almost like flipping pages of a magazine versus like channel surfing. And it's a little bit more like, I think, thoughtfulness. And, you know, there's various reasons, but, you know, stories tend not to convert as well as something that's on the feed. Um, it doesn't mean it's bad, doesn't mean they're not paying attention, but I think if, if people are advertising it on multi-platforms within Meta, which they almost certainly will,— to make sure you consider that when you look at that data to not over-index because again, the platform or the placement, I should say, impacts the results because it's behavior. So people are behaving differently, like the people on Facebook interact with Facebook, people who are going through reels interact with reels differently, you know, it's, and it's gonna be different for every audience. I could tell you like what I usually see, but it's important just to pay attention how your audience responds, you know, given the placement that the messages is being communicated to them. Um, you know, I see this with some stuff I do organically. You know, if I put like a link in Instagram Stories, I get— I can see what percentage of people will click on it. But if I do something that's in like a feed post, I'll see a higher uptick in the actual traffic that comes as a result. So I'll get more people who go to my profile and tap the link. Uh, it's actually more effective than just having that direct link in Stories. You would think the opposite would be true because it's less steps. I see the link, I click it. But like, they're just— people are just flying through Stories. So you have to really consider that as you're analyzing that data. But that's something that's really interesting. And I would think too, for your audience, putting their faces and having a visual of themselves in it is really important. Because I think when you're spending money on advertising, you're building brand equity, whether you think of it that way or not. I like to say in marketing, the end goal of all marketing is to build a strong brand.. And I think one of the reasons, you know, and this is a reminder for me, like doing more video. And Wendy, you've done a great job at doing this. It's like, people might know you, they could read your stuff. They, they, your name has some, you know, people have heard of it or whatever. I'm talking about anybody, but when they see your face, it's just building that trust.
It's my face.
Yep. And it's like, they hear your voice. And so it's like the same thing with, um, with just anyone's content, I think thinking video first. And so, yes, you have like your songs,, but whether it's, you know, you're, you're in the video where the song is playing, I think you're getting more bang for your buck. Um, and it, and I also think that people, don't get me wrong, if you're a certain level of pedigree artist or established, like, you know, you know, Beyoncé's gonna do a whole lot of, uh, there's gonna be a lot of production value in like every piece of content she puts out. But I think for a lot of artists, they don't need to do that for everything. I think there's a time and a place for that. But if, One of the beauties of this is you're getting data directly from the source to understand how can I better find my market and grow and anything that's in the way of that. And a lot of times I think high production value and time to produce content is masking seeking perfectionism or fear of putting yourself out there. When you just get out there, the least famous you'll ever be is right now.
Correct. Progress over perfection.
Yeah. Direction over perfection. Progress. Yeah. Progress too. But it's, yeah, just keep making forward progress. And then like, I don't know, the fee, it's like, it's all a system. It's feedback loops. Like the quicker I can get an audience telling me something about if something sucks or not, the better I can do, you know, faster. Cause I know something works or doesn't. What I would say before, I'm sure you have other, I can answer anything, but I wanna just drill one more point, which is when you're going, I mentioned this earlier, but like really know what you're trying to figure out. There should be, you know, to approach this like a critical thinker, not just like, hey, we're spending money on ads now and say, okay, like, here's what I need to have happen. I think I'm gonna run ads because I think they will allow this to happen. And I'm gonna— and then what happened? And what does that tell me that I'm gonna do differently and do the same? Um, and initially I think it helps to write it out. Like, it's almost like builds metacognition. Like, Here's what I'm observing. Yeah, when I first— I taught myself Facebook ads back in the day. I had, similarly to your audience, I was under pressure to get results with it. So it wasn't like I just had, here's a check and have fun with this money. It was like, hey, we need to find a way to get traction for a certain company. But what helped me a lot is I had a Pages document, Mac Pages, whatever the app is. And I would go through and I'd write like, here's what I'm observing. And here's what I, if I do this, I think this will happen. Okay. Now I'm going to run this test. Here's what happened. I would update it. And it was, you know, it was basic stuff. I wasn't spending a lot of money. So it wasn't like, you know, I was, I was trying to figure out basic things that, you know, I think will just, it helps you build that knowledge foundation that then as you are really out there, you can move faster than most people and you have a better, a better inference on what's going to work or what's not going to work or what makes sense to try. Like I would tell clients all the time. I can't guarantee any results because that's dishonest to say I'm coming. If you had 10 agencies in New York City and none of them have cracked the code for you, I'm not going to say, well, I know I can do it.
I can.
I think I can. But what I can guarantee is that if I can't do it, I can tell you exactly what's holding it back.
Right.
And there's always going to be bottlenecks in any sort of marketing. And this is for organic too. If you're not getting follower growth, if you're whatever the case is, there's something that's a bottleneck. Bottleneck. And it's a matter of identifying what's the bottleneck at that time, like categorically. And then what are my options to address it? You know, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, like going down the list of what makes the most sense to try to address this, and then choosing the thing that's most likely going to work. And again, it's probabilities. Again, there's nothing that's— there's no certainties, only probabilities. But if you have a better calibrated brain, because you've gone through this way in like a, you know, as a, you thought critically about what you're doing, those ideas of what to do next will come a lot faster. That's what I mean. I'm proof of that. And I think you'll feel a lot better as a result because you're gonna have times when you're running ads where things aren't working and you're gonna like, it's like in the stock market. If suddenly you buy a great stock that you think is gonna do great and then suddenly it's tanking, you start to doubt why you're doing it in the first place. And you say like, oh my God, I've made a huge mistake. I can't believe like I listened to this guy, this handsome bald man who was fly fishing tell me like why Facebook ads are great. And then I followed his advice and now I'm like, I've lost money. Like, I can't believe I'm such an idiot. I should just— maybe I shouldn't be in the music industry. Like, you know, you're— that's how our minds kind of work, or at least mine does.
Yes.
And so when you know, yeah, and I think it's, it's like a conscientiousness. But if you can go back and say like, I did this because of this, and you're following it that way, you basically not only help yourself with the anxiety, but you're you're never gonna do anything that makes you have to start over again, like where you, you know, you're, everything's controlled. And so small-scale tests are the friend of anyone doing ads. So, you know, with everything you need, and I'll, this is, I should have just started with this. You need to know if you wanna learn something, you need to have enough examples to say like, this happened and it happened because of this or didn't happen. So I need to have at least like 200 clicks for whatever it is that I'm doing. So if I wanna try like a new creative or if I just wanna try advertising, how much does 200 clicks cost me? Because that gives me enough of like a sample to start with. I've given it a shot, or taps in this case. So if the cost per click is whatever it is, well then that's my starting point now. That's your budget. Yeah, now my next test is not only just like what my next test is to address that, but if I'm trying to figure out what my future budget is going to be or how many things I want to test, at least you have a cost of your error. So if I test something and it's a total dud, like I just totally horrible, worst decision ever. The most it's gonna cost me is, let's, you know, $300, right? Which in the scheme of your— if artists are serious in building a business, you know, money is money. And especially when you're growing, like, $300, $300, don't get me wrong, but at least like it's contained. And moving forward, if you're really thinking about it in this way that I've been describing, you know, having a hypothesis, you know, just taking notes of what you're doing and why you're doing it, The next test isn't going— the likelihood of it being a total dud has diminished because at least now you know what a total dud is and you know that it was a total dud because you gave it enough of a chance to find out. But you also cut it off. A big mistake people make all the time is they'll have a set budget and it's, it's not working and it's gone past the point of like needing to get more data, but they're like, well, we got to spend the money. Like, cut it off.
Yeah, cut it off.
Yeah. So little things like that will help, will go a long way. Like And B, failure is good, and failure leads to growth, so long as you're learning from it and not making the same mistake twice.
Correct.
A success metric I would use is how many mistakes do you make twice in a 30-day period? And that number should be zero. And if it goes up, like, pay attention to that. And you're— if you don't have it be over zero, um, you're good money, because it means then you're almost guaranteed to do better over time anyway.
Yeah, because you're trying different things, and sometimes you need to know what doesn't work before you figure out what does.
A million percent. It's so simple, but it's in practice, it becomes— there's so many other things that kind of distract us from that simple fact.
And we think it's too simple. It can't be that easy. It can't be that simple.
Yeah.
And then we want to read into it. We want it to be more difficult when it doesn't have to be.
Yeah. You know what's helped me a ton is I have no attachment to any of my ideas. So, you know, I would run into this all the time with internal teams at clients, companies. You have a lot of really— I've worked with so many smart, like awesome people who are so professionally impressive. And, you know, sometimes like I have to make the point, like, guys, like someone will have an idea. Let's say I'm not afraid to have someone put their idea up against mine because if it works, that's great. Like, let's do the thing that works.
We're all heroes. Yes.
Yeah. Like, and my thing is if one of my ideas doesn't work, I'm okay with that. Like, I'm, if you have to have that, you have to be at that mentality. Like, do not fall in love with your ideas. Don't be like, I think sometimes internally in teams, if you're working, let's say they're working even just with one other person, if it becomes a thing of like, I just wanna show that I've made fewer mistakes, 'cause this, what this approach that I'm describing requires you kind of keep score, but it's not to keep score. Like, it's okay. Like I said, it's okay to have failures. We just don't wanna have them twice. So if you're doing the same thing twice, that means you're not learning. Yeah, you should be, you know, slap on the wrist for that. But the failure part, like, Don't fall in love with the idea, just fall in love with what's gonna work and why, and understand why it works. And I think you can go really far that way without having to get, you know, start hiring a bunch of people or doing anything like that.
I love that. I've taken a whole page of notes. Thank you very much.
Oh, good.
And I hope you're recording.
No, well, I hope that, like I said, it's funny when I talk about this stuff, sometimes I'm like, I feel like I'm like, my mind is like, like the money machine, just like— yeah, because I don't— when I— with someone like— I always would joke, like, I'm like, as you can tell, I'm not very passionate about this subject.
Yeah, not at all.
Not at all. Yeah, yeah, you're bored.
I can tell you're about to fall asleep.
Right, exactly. No, exactly.
Is there— is there anything that I haven't asked you that I should? Like, because this is not what I do all day, every day. So is there anything that we haven't talked about that's a glaring omission?
I don't think— we didn't talk about some of the other platforms, but I think I addressed that with the idea that most people never find one that works. So I would— before you're worried about like, let's test a little bit, because the same way you would approach like doing Instagram, you'd approach Reddit, you know, it's try it on a small scale. Um, you know, can I get numbers?
And I would, I would do TikTok before I would do Reddit because it's just a better platform for music. But I also wouldn't I also wouldn't— and again, this is not my profession, right? I wouldn't go for TikTok unless I already had an audience there. Like, I wouldn't start a TikTok account on Monday and start advertising on Wednesday. I would make sure that I had a real base there and that it was working for me, and then I would turn around and advertise like months and months and months and months down the road.
A million percent. I think that's a great point with you know, I have a social media page that I— not my own, but like, it's my own, but it's for, um, the investing stuff we talked about. And something on that page that I like to, you know, it's growing really well, or get— now that I've put any attention to it, it's applying all the same stuff that we're talking about, and it's growing, you know, it's, it's a, it's a niche of a niche, but it's growing like it's, you know, a lot bigger than that. And, you know, that information, like, if I choose to start running some sort of, you know, ad to help drive traffic to somewhere where there's like an email signup or something like that or something transactional. I know my audience so much better and kind of what resonates. And I think when the insights you're getting from organic as you're building that audience, whether it's on, you know, you going to this kind of point about TikTok or even on your own Instagram, you know, those insights can inform all elements of your marketing mix. So something like going back to what I said earlier about the creative that you're using, something you're learning from. I think treating organic, if you getting the organic code cracked for your brand, your artist's page, whatever the case is, I think is to your point, fundamental before you start advertising. There's no, if you have something that's good, it'll find more people. A lot of times that's a result of choosing the right format that it's gonna lead to the thing that Meta is trying to push at that time, whether it's reels or carousels or,, you know, you can see the difference if you just look at your insights and your— just something as simple as your Instagram Insights. Um, but from that, I think, you know, when you start to put, um, when you get the ad piece going, you're going to see organic growth regardless because some people that don't go and, and, you know, do the thing that you're advertising for are going to check out your page. It's more— it's going to bring more traffic. So I think another thing to keep tabs on, and there's so much— I don't want to overwhelm people, but I like to look at how many people— if we're using Instagram, and this would apply to TikTok too— is like, how many people have gone to your profile, um, in a given, you know, let's say that week, or, you know, in tracking that week over week to understand, um, you know, because with Reels, for example, a lot of people can see your Reels and they can follow you from your Reels, but, you know, I think it's a much higher intent person who's getting to know you better if they go to your page and then they read your bio, they, they look at what your pinned posts like, the two Just think of like what you do as a consumer that when you, with brands that you're more invested in. 'Cause I follow stuff all the time that just like, oh, this is hilarious and I wanna see more of this stuff, but I don't, I couldn't tell you the name of the person I followed. But if I actually go to their page, that says more. So like I like to keep tabs on stuff like that and then pay attention to, well, what content was I doing that week that led that to a higher investment from that person? 'Cause sometimes, there's nuances there. Like the most viral piece of content you have might not be as congruent with what it is you're actually offering to the market. Right. We all have those one-off where it's like, yeah, this just hit, but it's really not. It's 75% calibrated to what my brand's all about versus the thing that doesn't go as viral, but it's like totally aligned with my audience and actually leads to the transactions that I want. Like the bit, it helps me build the business I'm building. Right. This reminds me of something a friend of mine in private equity told me. We were driving to a wedding. I was— my business was like maybe a year old, 2 years old at this point. And I had some clients where I was doing some search engine optimization for, because I had that skillset from some of my earlier days, even back when the Atlanta days, I was really helpful building my hip-hop blog was like optimizing for search. I found good people that way. But I was telling him kind of the, what the monthly revenue was looking like, what it was coming from. And he said something, I tell him I had a couple one-off SEO projects and he is like, yeah, yeah, but that's not your business. And the point being like, yeah, you have that, great, but it's not really what you're building.
It's not your core.
Yeah. It's like, it's there, you cool, but it's not really, it's not part of your, you're not scaling that. It's not part of your system. It's not really what you're, it's just there versus, and I think if you think of content in that regards, there's certain content that yeah, people love it cause it's funny or whatever the case is, but if it's not aligned with what it is you're actually building, It's not, it's not useless, but it's important to make that distinction. So looking at what's driving people to your page.
Exactly. I've been, I've been focusing a lot lately, um, as you know, on building like relationships, you know. And I might post something interesting that I've seen about like avoidant behavior, but it has nothing to do with my business. It was just something that attracted me. So I don't care how well or how poorly it did, it's not my business. It's just something I saw that for some reason hit me at that exact moment. I had either repost it or retype it or whatever. No, you're right, like, it absolutely—
and even it doesn't mean like to never do it because I think it's your point, like, it adds authenticity. It's true to you. That's who I am.
Um, you certainly know that better than anybody because we share memes every now and again, right? So you know where my head is at, but my followers don't because I don't show them that side of me. I don't show them the full, well-rounded— they never see the woo-woo Wendy Day, you know. They see the business Wendy, right? They don't see the Wendy that goes and, you know, has psychic readings and visits with shamans, right?
Right. Who can, who can, who can, uh, levitate.
Exactly. Lay on nail beds and shit.
They don't see that. The female David Blaine. Um, the, uh, no, no, someone's gonna watch this like, did you know that about Wendy?
I know, right? Wendy sleeps on a nail bed.
That's crazy. Maybe I should try that. And horrifying results ensue. Um, but yeah, no, that's, it's a, it's interesting from like the standpoint going back to just advertising and like, should you choose, you know, get to build that audience for, not just the audience, but like have a base established first. Because again, having the followers or whatever that number is, it's really Yes, on the surface it's followers, but to you it's actually awareness of your market and awareness of what you're offering to the market. So like, I need to have that established because how are you gonna come up with an ad that's, you know, don't get me wrong, you can come up with an ad without having that 'cause your product is what you're advertising. But I think if I'm starting at a small scale level, I wanna make sure I have something that's like validated on a small scale. And it kind of makes me— Absolutely. A term that is a startup-y term, product market fit. Benefit. Like, are there people that if they could no longer, if my, whatever I'm offering ceases to exist tomorrow, if they give them a survey, would a certain percentage of them say they'd be like very upset? Would they miss it? Yeah, exactly. Like if I, that's a concept, that same idea. Yeah. It's like, I've got, there's something here. I'm not just, cause we all like to, I've seen so many people put a lot of money in products. Like what was that?
Tubi?
No, no, not Tubi. Quibi. Quibi. Quibi was making sounds.
It was short. Yeah, it was short videos on, uh, I don't remember the channel it was, but it failed miserably. Yeah, they had 30-second movies, for lack of a better—
yeah, they, they had a, uh, they raised— I'm looking this up right now— they raised $1.75 billion in venture capital, um, or in capital.
They lost that money.
Yeah. And they And they had, it was like ran by the former like head of Disney and, and, uh, Meg Whitman of eBay, I think it was.
Yeah.
Um, so like incredibly talented people, like you can have all the money in the world, but if you don't find that product market fit initially, yes. You know, it doesn't, popularity is paid for, but it, it works when you have something that is capable of being popular cuz people are gonna like it.
Yes. Yeah.
And, uh, and I think that organic stuff is so important from that standpoint. And then going back to my point about the incentives, like You know, the Metas of the world, they want to help organic stuff get out there. Um, yes, and it does. And if you treat the organic stuff the same way you treat the paid— I mean, if I'm, if I'm doing— if you can get organic to work, it's the same stuff works for advertising. It's, it's, it's just difference in how it's getting to people. It's whether you're spending money or not. Um, but you know, like, if you find— if I'm like, hey, I'm— certain posts are get more reach than others, or whatever you're looking at organically Same thing. Why do I think this is happening? Or what's happening? Why do I think it's happening? What I'm gonna do. Here's what happened when I did that. Was my hypothesis— did the results align with my hypothesis? Why or why not? And just repeating that process. Um, it really works.
And less of what doesn't.
It's a scientific method. It's, it's not, like I said, not science, but it's the scientific method of observation. Come up with a— what do I think? What's happening? Why do I think that's happening? What should we try? I think if we do more like this, we'll get more people because of this, more people will like it. Okay, let's try that. Did it get a higher reach than the average reach that I'm getting across the last 10 posts I did? Or whatever you're using. And I think if people run into the, the new— like, what I'm saying is like, well, you know, should I look at the last 10 posts, or what's the right number? If at the end of the day, ask ChatGPT. Like, just have it give you one. Like, don't let— because I think sometimes people get— it seems like a lot of, um, there's like a lot of resistance to doing it because, oh, I gotta do all this stuff, or I think about it so like perfectly. It's— none of this stuff is science. It's, it's not physics. It's, it's a messy, complicated social system. Everything's interacting with everything else. You're just trying to find some signal for yourself, signal for yourself. And, and I think have an understanding of what works and what doesn't from, from looking at your data and then trying new things and trying to see if the things that are working, do they work at scale? Like if I have this one post that does really well and I can kind of like I'll give you an example for the audience. Charlie Munger Quotes is my Instagram page that I made during the pandemic. I've kind of reactivated it. Well, I have re— I post on it every day. Lots of Charlie Munger was super helpful to me in starting my business in terms of some of the things I was thinking about. He helped me really simplify my thinking. For those who don't know, he was Warren Buffett's silent partner. Really quirky guy. He passed away at 99, like 2 years ago. But Warren Buffett says Berkshire Hathaway would not have become what it became without Charlie Munger's influence. You know how 50 Cent says, "I'm going to tell you what banks told me, cuz go ahead, switch the style up, and if they hate them, let them hate and watch the money pile up." Charlie Munger was the Lloyd Banks equivalent in that song to Warren Buffett. So Warren Buffett had learned to invest a certain way, made a ton of money buying companies that were really that looked like they were on their last legs, but he'd get them really cheap and he was protected from the downside because even if they were liquidated, the value of their assets was more than the value of the market. Yeah, exactly. And so he was able to call them cigar butts. And this was before everyone was in the stock market. There was— so you could find these opportunities and if you had the capital and you had the— it was very analytical and mathematical, whatever. And that worked really well. But then he had so much money because he bought insurance companies that brought in money from float. So suddenly that approach, not only weren't those— those opportunities were few and far between, but they didn't work with enormous amounts, billions of dollars. There aren't companies like that where you could at the time or now where you can just find them. First of all, they have not been seen by everybody else and then are meaningful enough to actually use that money because he might be able to buy them, but then he still has billions of dollars. He's got to do something. With. So anyway, Charlie Munger had a different approach and was like, what you should do is stop worrying about everything being so cheap. It's just find like awesome businesses that are great for reasons, not just because the balance sheet, but they have great brands, they've got amazing management, things that are like—
they're well run.
Yeah, exactly. And they're, they're more pleasurable to own. You don't have— you have to do all this. You don't have to like fire people, you know, you can just kind of like let it go on and keep growing. Then you can buy big chunks of them and then they grow and grow and grow. It's like buying a fair— paying a fair price for a wonderful business. Anyway, long story short, Charlie Munger Quotes is a page of all his quotes and it's very simple. I post— he's got so many quotes that I thought would go viral and would be helpful to someone to discover earlier. I think I discovered him when I was 28, but if I was 18, I feel like I would've I would've started my business. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, without making this so long-winded, with the Charlie Munger Quotes page, I came across one of my aha moments was some of the quotes that work best, I call them instructive wisdom because people are almost looking for someone to tell me what to do. And so there's some awesome quotes there, but the ones that tend to be of that theme, instructive wisdom, I saw as doing better. And that was my insight that I use as a hypothesis for now when I'm filtering through what quotes I'm going to post. I think, is there something instructive in this? Does it tell someone what to do? And not to say that works every time, but it gives, it's a, it was a strong example of direction over perfection and allowed me to continue optimizing the effort that I was putting into the content to make content that was gonna have a better chance of reaching more people and thus leading to more people following. And if I have my Substack, which I link through there, more people discover that. So on and so forth.
Oh, this is awesome. You're at 141,000 followers.
Yes, yes.
Uh, very impressive.
Yeah. And it's, you know, it's a, it's a essentially an old man's quotes. So it's not like, you know, it's not a fitness model or, you know, I think of things that can get reach a certain level.
Yeah. I love it though because you're, you're curating. It's like you're a curator of his wisdom.
For sure. And it helps. And honestly, and when I started it, it helps me, um, because it keeps it top of mind. And there are times when I wasn't— I went through a couple years where I stopped really, I was just busy with other stuff. And, uh, as I've gotten back to do it, it has that effect of keeping the, the thought process, which really his whole mentality is like, be rational. Um, easier said than done, but like, there are, uh, ways you're said than done, ways you're said than done. But when you have kind of that little voice in your head all the time, um, you know, and have examples of someone who's lived, who lived 99 years and lived a pretty remarkable life um, you know, it's, it's no different than reading a biography and, and, you know, suddenly you have Benjamin Franklin and you walk around, or Malcolm X, or, you know, someone, some historical figure that was, um, you know, inspiring at certain things. So I love that.
Wow, this was incredible.
Oh, that's awesome. I, uh, I feel it flew by.
It did fly by, and it was an hour and 20 minutes.
Solid.
Seriously.
Oh, it's solid.
Seriously, I think we're on this. This is incredible. You just made something that's been so hard for artists to understand easy, and I love that.
I appreciate saying that. Yeah, that's— I, like I said, I just wanted to be helpful, useful, and, uh, very—
and you did it without being, um, you did it with being authentic and without like any overstatements. Like, you— I asked you, you know, what's a good budget, and you're like, I can't answer that. Like, you've been really authentic and honest, and I really appreciate it. And the whole fly fishing thing is just funny as fuck.
That'll be the, uh, it's not our business thing where like we go viral, but it's like, people like, oh, I thought it was a comedy channel, right? Uh, no, it's a lot of— I appreciate you having me, and I'm glad. Like I said, um, and your feedback means a lot, and I— it's it's coincided. I'm— my directional stuff right now that I'm building is I've got to make— be making more kind of authentic videos like this. So this is the—
please do. This is so like— this is your calling. This is really phenomenal. Yeah, this was really helpful.
I really appreciate it. And again, thanks for the opportunity to, you know, to, uh, to talk about this, to hopefully be, uh, be helpful and, and, and just share, share what I know because I'm Sometimes I, like you, I wanna make a contribution with what I know. And sometimes I think it's easy to be like, ah, no one wants to hear this. And then when you get some feedback—
No, they need it and they want it. They've been asking me for this.
Awesome.
They've been asking me for this since July.
Okay. Oh, well, I'm so glad that I came to— I remember one time I was like, you had an advertising question. I was like, Wendy, why didn't you ask me about this? And this is probably like a year or two ago. And so—
Came back to you.
No, I appreciate— I'm— thanks for thinking of me.
And, uh, no, absolutely, because when I had that advertising question, like, you, you, you reproached me. You're like, why didn't you ask me? I would have answered. And I'm like, I didn't want to bother you.
You're so— it was all good.
No, you run a major fucking corporation and you're like, Wendy Day, I always have time for you.
I'm like, oh, I love that. We know this is awesome, and, uh, we'll have to catch up more soon and just talk on the more personal stuff, but, um, We could talk all day on that. But, um, but yeah, look, if you need anything else from me on this, if I can, um, clarify anything that is you're going through, like, you know, hey, can you re-explain this or anything, just I'm happy.
That'd be awesome too, in case somebody has a question or— excellent.
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