Insanely Effective Advertising Strategies and Predictions for the Future of Advertising

Eric Eden: 1:00

All right, all right, all right. Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is Robert Brill. He is a CEO of Brill Media and he is a media buying expert. Welcome to the show.

Robert Brill: 1:13

Thanks for having me.

Eric Eden: 1:13

Eric, Appreciate you making time and I think you have a couple good stories for us today about some great work you've done with clients right.

Robert Brill: 1:25

Absolutely Want me to get right into it. Let's do it All right. So we'll start with healthcare. Our goal for a healthcare campaign was to acquire leads. Let me just take it a step back. We're a media buying firm, so what we really care about are numbers, data, optimizations, hitting lead cost goals and return on the ad spend goal. So I'll talk about a healthcare campaign. We started that campaign. We were part of the process of creating a media plan, but the challenge for us was that we had multiple executives giving their points of view on how to make the media plan effective and to try a bunch of different things. So we were in a position where we had to turn on media that we thought wouldn't perform as well, and our thesis was right. So the media plan for this healthcare campaign was Pandora and other digital audio. It was native advertising. It was display programmatic banners across the open web. It included some digital connected television. The goal for the campaign was customer acquisition, and what we found over the course of two months was that the best channels were meta and banners, and so not surprise we made aggressive recommendations to turn off everything else and only run meta and banners. Once we started to do that our lead cost dropped about by 50% and over the course of six to 12 months our lead cost dropped to 10% of the starting lead cost. So when we started at $700, $800 lead cost, we got it down to about $70 or $80. So that's a big win for us and then for multiple campaign renewals after that. Our goal was really to optimize the heck out of meta and banners and the way we did that was by developing new creative executions, turning them on, tracking which creative executions really resonated with customers, and we did that for years.

Eric Eden: 3:25

So meta makes sense to me. I understand why that would be low cost and a good optimization. Banners is curious to me. Why do you think in this case banners worked?

Robert Brill: 3:38

Yeah, banners are far less expensive. They have the ability to target people with a great deal of granularity. So we were targeting people all across the country in specific zip codes. So you get far more reach, far more frequency and really the ability to layer on tons of really great data to ensure that only the best people are seeing our ads. And our target audience was, like, hard to find in other places, and so banners was a nice compliment to the Facebook advertising.

Eric Eden: 4:09

Interesting, but I think that optimization of going from $700 plus per lead to $70 a lead is pretty remarkable because a lot of people who I talked to about online advertising broadly, let's say in B2B, for example is I'm like, if you can't afford $200 to $300 per lead, it's going to be too expensive for you. And when people start doing the math of $200 to $300 per lead and I'll close one out of 10 of them it's a very expensive channel is how the math ultimately work out if the cost per lead is really high like that. So getting the cost per lead down is pretty impressive because that's the precursor to winning within a campaign, and doing the continual optimization is really the key, like you said, because things are always evolving, right.

Robert Brill: 5:05

Absolutely and really. It's a matter of conducting testing. We're always looking at tests by creative, by platform, by data targeting, to really refine our campaign performance.

Eric Eden: 5:18

Okay, so you have one more example, right.

Robert Brill: 5:20

Yeah, so in another example we start. So you'd be surprised that music industry is exceptionally fragmented, with very low budgets. Our budgets can scale, but we're running campaigns for $500, $700, et cetera, but we're in aggregate spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. So the way that we ensure that our budgets are effective and that our team is not drowning in trying to manually run these campaigns is we use dynamic creative, again with banners. So we use tools like Autocado, flash, talking, jivebox and a few others, and the goal here is we want to understand for a concert, for a venue, which band or which entertainment acts Adele, kiss, hugh Jackman, whatever the case, is Cardi B, who are they going to be? Who is a user going to be interested in the most? So we use data to understand that and whether it could be prospecting data or it could be retargeting data. And once we have that insight about which type of artist a user is interested in, we deliver them a dynamic, creative banner ad. So the idea is you come to our site, you express interest in Cardi B because you visit the page. You don't buy tickets. You're going to get ads for Cardi B, but we are only creating one banner ad 1, 300 by 250 or 1, 970 by 250, et cetera. We're creating one ad and then the goal is dynamically insert the artist, the venue, the time that the user is interested in seeing, so that we can scale up ad delivery and drive dramatically outsize results for ticket sales.

Eric Eden: 7:11

Very interesting. And where are these banners running? Is this Google Display or is it some other display network? I'm just curious.

Robert Brill: 7:19

Yeah, the ROAS, by the way, is like 2, 3, 4, 4,000%. It's like ridiculous. Partially because, look at the end of the day, people know who Cardi B is and Adele and Hugh Jackman. These are big name acts. It's relative to other acts that people don't know, it's easy to sell. So I'm not taking full credit for the fact that our ROAS is astronomical, but so when we buy ads or buying through the trade desk there was a portion of time when we bought through Media Math, which has now gone and is now re the ads are being delivered on the top properties. You can think of ESPN. I don't know if you consider Yahoo a top property. I visit Yahoo every day, but I'm also in my 40s. That's a clear indicator there. ESPN, usa Today, all the top music publications. Wherever a user is, we're following the user around to ensure that they see messages that are relevant to them. And we know the ads are working because we track direct attribution. And, yeah, it's top apps, top websites that users are interested in, and minor ones too. Right, because if you're into like I don't know if it's still around, but remember SOH, it's a hip hop site. And if you're into hip hop and you're into Cardi B and you're on SOH because you're a hip hop head, like, you're going to see the ad. But then when you put on your corporate mom perspective and you're looking at soccer teams for your child, that ad will follow you there. And, by the way, when you look for career training, the ad will follow you there too, because we know that people have many different interests and our job is to ensure that we follow the person and get them to buy stuff from us.

Eric Eden: 8:55

Very interesting. So let me ask you, being a media buying expert, where do you think things are going with media buying in 2024?

Robert Brill: 9:09

Yeah, 45% of all ads are going to be, of all ad spending on digital will be Google and Meta. That's going to be hundreds of billions of dollars. That duopoly, that Google Meta duopoly, is down in 2022. It was like 49% of all digital ad buying was going to those two properties you have, from an ad spending perspective, you have competition from networks. Everything's a network Uber is an ad network, instacart is an ad network, walmart is an ad network, home Depot, et cetera. So the competition is coming from connected television Hulu, paramount Plus, disney Plus, netflix, et cetera, paroku, tubi, pluto. It's coming from digital out of home, even though that's a very small percentage of the overall landscape, but it does very well for us. Digital Audio, pandora and Spotify, and then these retail media networks that are becoming very important to consumer package goods products.

Eric Eden: 10:06

This is interesting because things are evolving to be very different than they were just a couple of years ago.

Robert Brill: 10:13

Oh yeah, you have the rise of the walled garden. We're squarely in there, so much so that there's antitrust tendencies by the US government to ensure that walled gardens don't get higher. So one of the things that's important for us is we focus in on the fundamentals of advertising. Like there are apps like Be Real Fine, some people are in Be Real and other apps. What we're really interested in is executing on the fundamentals, because when you have billions of people, or hundreds of millions of people in the United States and billions around the world on five different properties, it's really important to get really strong at Google and Metta and TikTok and LinkedIn and X, etc. So that's where we focus our efforts. The fundamentals always win. That's our general belief system.

Eric Eden: 11:05

So what kind of role do you think AI is going to have in advertising and media buying?

Robert Brill: 11:12

Yeah, it's helping creative people be more creative. It's helping relatively uncreative people because I'm a data and numbers guy be more creative. I have ideas, I just don't know how to express them, so I go to mid-journey and I find ways to express them. I think it creates. It's an accelerant tool Because, as Scott Galloway calls it, it's the ozempic for corporations you can get more work done with fewer people, and you're seeing that at large corporations, where you can replace customer service people with AI. I don't know how good that's going to be. That seems a little weird to me, but I think internally for our agency, what we're doing is we're able to retain more revenue by using like an AI copywriting bot, which sounds crazy. But let me also be very clear that copywriting and creative work is not our main work. Over 99% of our revenue comes from media buying, not creative development. But when we do creative development, our clients need volume, the big trend in advertising. The one thing that is relevant going back to one of your earlier questions and this also pertains to AI is the fact that the algorithms are becoming more opaque. It's harder to see into the algorithm. So when you buy ads on Meta, for example, you're doing broad targeting age, gender and location and we're seeing success for a few years now with a creative testing framework where you create five ads a month, you disassemble them so you have 15 different elements, and then you reassemble them as 125 possible ad variations, but you're not running ads on 125. What you're actually doing is doing control and variable testing, powered by Meta's algorithm to find which one ad out of the 125 is your best. So the goal here is you train Meta over time to find who your best customers are. So when you look at Google, you're uploading up to 15 different headlines and four descriptions and Google will dynamically assemble the paid search ad based on what it thinks will perform the best. When you look at TikTok, it has a similar function with its smart performance campaigns, where you give it broad targeting parameters and the algorithm does the work for you. So I think, with AI as a creativity tool, you have the ability to churn out and test and understand or accelerate the development of many different creative views and executions to power the algorithm. So the algorithm on these platforms becomes smarter about who your best customers are.

Eric Eden: 13:49

Yeah, makes sense. I have to ask about TikTok. How do you think about TikTok in terms of how it's evolving, how it's growing market share relative to the other players? Are people actually getting good results running campaigns on TikTok?

Robert Brill: 14:06

Yeah, we create a lot of content for TikTok organically. We take the best content and we pump it out as ads on Meta and TikTok. I think that's a really strong strategy In terms of running actual advertising campaigns on TikTok. We are seeing good results for the campaigns we're running. I think a lot of it depends on creativity and how good your creative ultimately is. Tiktok ads are very much a waterfall. At the top you do some awareness building. In the middle you do remarketing to the people who watched a certain volume of your video 50% of your video or followed your page, etc. Then at the bottom of the funnel you're remarketing to people who took action. At the top, in the middle, it's more of a traditional waterfall process. We are seeing good performance.

Eric Eden: 14:56

Do you think TikTok continues to grow and win more market share in terms of ad dollars?

Robert Brill: 15:01

Yes, I think TikTok is phenomenal. It's primed. I'll tell you why because consumers are there, because the TikTok algorithm is strong. It's not the best. I think Meta's algorithm is the absolute best With TikTok as a place to consume media. It's 24-7 prime time programming customized to every individual on the app. As a business, I want my messages to be delivered to the people who I want to reach. I see it working because I've been in the business for 20 years. I've seen people who I haven't talked to in 15 years reach out to me because they saw something that I put up on TikTok. It's working. I like it.

Eric Eden: 15:43

Does it also work for B2B?

Robert Brill: 15:46

Yes, when I talk about that, I'm talking about B2B. I'm talking about a marketing for ourselves. We do some B2C on it as well. Also selling tickets, getting people interested in niche content, programming outside of TikTok as an advertising campaign. I have a strong team of very senior people who are running those campaigns. I'm not as familiar with the intricacies of them. I just know that we keep renewing on TikTok. What I am paying attention to very closely is our advertising and our social content posting on TikTok. I see the leads that come in. These are people who I'm really happy to reconnect with because it's been so long. A lot of that is fueled through TikTok.

Eric Eden: 16:27

I thought you were going to say this because you were dancing and rapping 100%.

Robert Brill: 16:33

You should see what I do on Saturday nights on the hip hop scene in Los Angeles.

Eric Eden: 16:38

It's wild. It's wild, I'm sure, all right. Share this episode with all of your friends who should know about all these great trends and media buying and hear these great stories that Robert shared. Please rate, review and subscribe so we can continue to have great guests. Robert on the show. Robert, if people want to learn more, they can go to your website at Brill Media. I'll link it in the show notes so everyone can easily get there. Thanks so much, robert, for being on the show today and sharing all these great insights. We appreciate it. Thanks, eric.