Your Black Friday Facebook Ads Strategy Sucks

0:00Seems like every expert out there is telling you how to do Black Friday completely wrong. Plan your discounts, spin up a ton of ads, and get ready for the biggest day of the year. That is the worst advice you could ever follow. In this video, I'm going to show you the proven strategy to maximize profit on Black Friday in a way that also lets you scale two to three times faster next year. And I got the receipts to back it up. So, here's what's actually happening. You spent a few weeks building out your Black Friday offer, setting up discounts, and updating the website. Thursday night, you start

0:33pushing budgets. And by Friday morning, you're running hard, turning ads on and off, adjusting budgets, and chasing performance all weekend. And by Monday, you're feeling good. So, you extend it to Friday. And when you finally sit down and look at the numbers, it was your biggest revenue week of the year. And that feels like a win until you look at what it actually cost you. Nobody ever sat down and said, "This quarter, I'd like to make the least amount of money possible on every sale I can get." But that's exactly what indiscriminate broad discounting does. You take 35% off of everything. And that discount doesn't just go to new customers you couldn't

1:05reach before. It goes to everyone all at the same time. You're giving away margin indiscriminately. And then you count the extra transactions as a win because the scoreboard is how many times a credit card gets charged. The cost is much more than the margin you give away and all the ad spend. When your offer is built around price, you attract price conscious consumers. The LTV of somebody who buys because of your 35% discount is half of your average customer. Half. You spent more money to make less profit on customers who are worth half as much and called it a win. Then there's the other

1:40side of this. The CPMs on Black Friday. Even Cyber Monday, which is the cheaper of those two days, averages $17.70 on a CPM versus the annual average of $743. And that happens because you're in an auction with retailers protecting market share, brands clearing inventory, and companies buying against payback periods that measure in years. These are companies with larger budgets, lower costs, and objectives that have nothing to do with money at all. You can't out

2:09Walmart. Walmart. You can't out Amazon. Amazon, you're not competing against their products. You're competing against their access to capital. Across more than a billion dollars in ad spend, my own businesses, my clients, my students, this is the most expensive mistake I see anyone make. It's not the algorithm. It's not the creative. It's this. It's the Black Friday knife fight. Every year, businesses bring a discount to the most expensive auction of the year and walk away having spent the most money they'll spend all year to acquire the

2:39worst customers they'll get all year. And I know what you're thinking. Your competitors are discounting. Everyone posts record November numbers. Isn't that the point? And the answer is no. There's a very big difference between sales volume and business growth. Broad discounting during Black Friday buys you the worst customers at the highest possible price. The right move isn't to run bigger discounts. It isn't to outspend the biggest brands in the world. The right move is to play a completely different game. One that makes your customers more valuable so scaling gets easier and your brand grows faster than ever. And before I show you the whole system, I need to redefine

3:19what Black Friday is actually for. Because the businesses that get this right don't just win in November. They're the ones scaling faster than everyone else next year. Here's how it works. Most people think Black Friday is an opportunity to sell their products for less, but it's actually an opportunity to buy better customers for a lower cost. Those are completely different games. You can't compete on price. Jeff Bezos genuinely has you beat, and that's fine because

3:50price isn't the game worth winning. Black Friday is the single best AOV support window on the entire calendar. There's more purchase intent concentrated into this window than any other point in the year. Stop asking how to make a normal offer worth less and start asking how to make a better offer irresistible. That one shift changes everything because now instead of devaluing the brand and poisoning your funnel for months, you're actually elevating the value of your ideal customer. Before you can build for that customer, you need to be able to see them. So, pull up your ad account right now. This is how I look at every account

4:28I run. It's the 4PI plus2 dashboard. We're not just looking at cost per purchase. We're looking at gross profit per transaction and average order value. Because your cost per purchase can go down, your rorowaz can go up while you're actually making less money. Gross profit tells you how much money you made. A OOV tells you how good the customer is. Go line by line and you'll find plenty of cases where a higher rorowaz produced a worse customer and less profit. Set this up as a custom column and save it. We're going to come

4:59back to this later a couple of times. This is forensic accounting. You're not a marketer chasing a rorowaz number. You are an investment banker and your only job is to buy the best customer for the lowest possible price. We need to redefine Black Friday as the opportunity to buy the highest quality customers for the lowest possible price. And that's

5:19what this whole system is built around. There's a two-part process to building the right kind of offer that gets you those customers, gives you the leverage to scale, and makes next year the best you've ever had. Here's the two-part process to building your best Black Friday offer. We start with research and what we're looking for is not the product with the best rorowaz. We're looking for the customers who are the most valuable because once you know who they are, you can reverse engineer what they have in common. And that changes everything about how you build the offer. Specifically, we're looking for customer journeys that are replicatable with an LTV at least 30%

6:01above your average. When you identify those customers, break down their journeys, and group them, you're going to find that the vast majority fall into just a handful of cohorts. And of those cohorts, one is going to be significantly more valuable than all the others. That's the foundation for the offer. What they bought first, what they came back for second, and third, and what the journey looks like from day one. Now, it's easy to look at that and say, just cram all those products into a bundle to raise the AOV. But that's not what this is. What you're actually doing is letting your brand new customers enter the relationship at the same place

6:37or better than your best customers normally matured to after several transactions. By getting that on the first sale, you improve LTV on day one. And that does three things at once. The customer willing to make a larger initial commitment is not the price conscious consumer. So, they're immediately more likely to come back than those who buy on your indiscriminate broad discount for Black Friday. They've also gotten far more access to your ecosystem, more surface area to become emotionally attached to, more chances to find what they love, and that larger first transaction supports day one cash flow, so you're not waiting for 6 months for contribution margin to

7:18justify what you pay to acquire them. The research tells you who to build for. Part two is building something they actually want, and that is a completely different problem. When it comes to building your best offer, I always think about the showcase showdown on the Price is Right. The prizes belong together. It's the backyard package. It's the cruise to Rome that comes with luggage, the wardrobe, and the whole experience. You can see the entire life attached to each showcase. Every component makes the

7:54others feel more valuable and complete. And together they create a feeling that none of them alone could create. Vertically integrated around an outcome, an identity or an aspiration and greater than the sum of their parts. That is what we're building. To make this practical, here are two businesses I've been working with for several years and what this process actually produced. The first is a women's jewelry brand. It

8:18took them 5 years to get to $3 million. This is the move that took them to 8 million in 12 months. They were famous for their necklaces and earrings, and more than half of their revenue came in the window between Black Friday and the Christmas shipping deadline. Their hero product was a necklace that sold for

8:35$65, discounted 40% for Black Friday. They' done that for three years running and grown profit significantly yearover-year. They were ready to do it again for year four. Instead, we followed the research process. Their average LTV was around a h 100red bucks. But of the customers who had spent at least 130, over 3/4 of them were giftgivers, men buying for the women in their life. And that mattered because more than 2/3 of their overall sales by volume, were women buying for themselves. But those women rarely broke an LTV of 85 bucks, which is 15 below the store average. The gift givers were pulling the whole number up. Here's the

9:17leverage point that made the offer click. Four out of five of those giftgivers had bought the necklace during Black Friday the year before, then had come back to buy the earrings and a charm that had always been available on the site. The LTV of that journey was 137 bucks. So, we compressed it, offering all three together as a bundle. But a bundle alone isn't compelling enough because nobody cares about a bundle that makes sense for your business and has to make sense for the buyer. Selling gifts is about solving problems and creating convenience. So instead of just putting three pieces of jewelry together for $137, we added a

9:57jewelry cleaner, a personalized note, and a $50 gift card. We wrapped it and guaranteed overnight shipping. At retail, that package was over $270. But for Black Friday, we marked it down just over 40% to $159. If you're already looking at spending $137, for $22 more, you get guaranteed delivery, two accessories that make sense, and a $50 gift card. Nobody turns that down. And

10:22that gift card became its own engine. The women who received it came back and spent more than twice as much as the women who didn't, which raised the LTV of even the least valuable customers above what the best customers had been worth before this offer existed. That offer is now available year round and this year they're building a version where even marked down by 50% that sticker price is over 200 bucks. And I'm

10:46genuinely excited to see what happens. The other side of this is aspirational spending. People spend money either to solve problems or to get themselves the lives they want. Solving problems is what Amazon is for. That's a battle you can't win and you shouldn't even fight anyway. But selling somebody a better version of their life, giving them access to the showcase showdown, that's something that will get people to whip out their credit card in a way they

11:12wouldn't at any other time of the year. I've been working with a men's goods brand that started at the beginning of co and built themselves up to $18 million almost entirely on one hero product, but they got stuck. What got them from 15 million to $18 million was 3 million and extra ad spend. And when you account for the added operational cost, returns, customer service, and cost of goods, that added revenue made their profits less. Looking at the customer journey, the people who bought the hero product came back about 15% of the time. But they had another product, a travel wallet that cost $5 more to

11:46make and sold for $140 instead of 80. And the customers who bought that travel wallet came back and bought the hero product at nearly one in4, almost double the repeat rate. That was the leverage point. We spent a year building an aspirational package around that travel wallet. A carry-on piece of luggage, a checked bag, a backpack, a tech bag, toiletries, air tags, laser engraving, and a lifetime warranty, and a few accessories, including that wallet. A showcase showdown for the traveler. You bought the travel wallet, so you're

12:19traveling. Here's everything you need. Matching, personalized, guaranteed, and handled in a click. That offer increased the discount of their typical Black Friday from 30% to nearly 40, but the AOV went from just under 100 bucks to nearly 1,400. The CPA went up, sure, but on peak days, they were spending $250,000 in 24 hours, over a hundred grand more per day than they'd ever been able to spend before. They nearly doubled a business that had taken them half a decade to reach 18 million. and they did it in 18 months. What both of these offers have in common is they maximize operating capital on day one by changing

13:01the entire financial landscape of customer acquisition. The repeat purchase rate on both of those offers was more than double the average for each of those brands. Because you're not buying a transaction, you're buying a customer who's emotionally committed to the brand. You've made it easier for them to identify themselves as a fan. That's what the right offer does. So, now that we know what the right offer looks like, there's one more massive piece of leverage that we need to talk about. Something that's going to let you do something you thought was completely crazy. Until you understand why it works. And when you try it, you'll never

13:36run Black Friday the same way ever again. Hold on to your butts. The number one trick to maximizing profit volume on Black Friday is to not spend any money on ads on Black Friday. Not a single dime to start with. Remember that Cyber Monday stat? CPMs running at 138% above the annual average. And remember, we said there are companies spending millions of dollars where profit isn't even the goal. I've managed over a million dollars a day for some of those brands on engagement campaigns. There are levels to this game. And remember, the people who buy on Black Friday are the ones with intent looking for the

14:17best deal. If your offer is built and the people who need it already know who you are, let the channels you already own do their job. Email and SMS were built exactly for this. Send three or four blasts that day. So, if we're not playing the game on Friday because we're not participating in the knife fight where everybody's competing to pay the most money to make the least profit on the worst customers for the growth of the business, when are we spending? The answer is Saturday. For years, research has shown that by Saturday, 90% of somebody's shopping checklist has already been checked off. You're not asking for the hardest decision of their

14:53season. You might be solving the last gift or providing the final missing piece for someone who's been circling your ecosystem for weeks. And that 4PI dashboard we referenced earlier is what governs all of this. So, let's get practical again. Here is how to actually build your Black Friday campaign. We need a sales campaign with two broad retargeting audiences, a 7-day window and a 30-day window. And if you don't know how to build them, here's how to do it. Because we're working with warm traffic from people who already know who we are and are likely already offer aware within a sales period that is finite. It's a highintensity opportunity

15:32window, which means the creative strategy is very different from what you would run during evergreen efforts. We need an AB test across four creative formats. For each format, we're building 322 ads, and we want two different executions of each two sides of the same coin. That gives us a 322 ads across four formats. Those ads go into both ad sets, but we're not turning on the 30-day ad set right away. We'll get back to that in a minute. Here are the four

16:02formats. This is your creative strategy. First, a product demonstration video. This helps people fully understand the offer, whether they're buying a gift or making an aspirational purchase for themselves, and warms them up to the specific solution you are providing. These are upperfunnel efforts within that warm audience, reaching the people who've already been circling your ecosystem, but haven't made a decision yet. Second, a mini VSSL. This is systematic objection handling. And these can run long, five minutes, 10 minutes, even longer. I've seen some really long videos absolutely crush. You want people to go deep, sell themselves, and arrive at the purchase having already lived the outcome in their head. The goal is

16:46enthusiasm. These two video formats start the conversation. In our Olympic rings, this is one, two, and three, but we need ads to close the deal. So, four, and five come from the next two formats. Our third format is the customer review static. This is weaponized social proof. And it's not just about five stars. It's about customers saying the things about your product, your brand, and your offer that you couldn't say yourself. The joy of the gift recipient, the product quality and delivery speed, the loyalty, something like, "I've held off buying this for 6 months, and the second I did, the second it showed up, I knew I'd

17:24never buy from anybody else." That's the kind of review that closes way more sales. And fourth, a direct response, static, simple, aggressive, and clear. Show the full bundle front and center with the discount. Your headline might be as straightforward as Black Friday offer. This won't last. There is no cleverness required, just the offer and the urgency. The question I get asked most often about this build is, how different should the ads be? And the answer is they should arrive at the same point from different directions. Your two direct response executions might have one 322 focused on urgency and the other on the size of the savings. Two

18:07sides of the same coin. And that's the theology for every format. Once this is live, you're managing to daily frequency. We keep it above 2.5 and scale the budget to maintain that number for as long as the economics make sense. When the budget exceeds what the 7-day audience can support, that's when you turn on the 30-day audience and let it take over. The further you get from Black Friday and the closer you get to the Christmas shipping deadline, the more profit this campaign drives because these customers are spending more on a day than your average customer will in their entire lifetime. and they're far more likely to come back, which is going

18:45to matter tremendously for something we're about to get into. And remember, your performance is going to look astronomical according to platform attribution because the ads are going to take credit for sales that are also coming from email, search, and direct traffic. And that's totally fine. The scorecard isn't rorowaz. The scorecard is the volume of profit the business makes. Do what I just showed you, and you will have a better Black Friday than you've ever had before. But that is only the first part of the promise I made at the beginning of this video. Remember I said we're going to make scaling next year happen faster than you've ever seen

19:20before. And that brings us to the highest leverage opportunity we haven't talked about yet. And it's built on a false assumption. People don't wake up the morning after Thanksgiving with no desires, no preferences, no brand awareness, and no idea what they want to buy. They've been watching, comparing, saving posts, clicking ads, adding things to cart, building mental gift lists, and writing down physical ones, thinking about what they want for themselves and what they're going to give to others. That process started months ago. Last year, Shopify released an extremely in-depth report showing that for a considered purchase, the research started in June and July. Meta also dropped a postmortem

20:04on Black Friday that said the customer had essentially shaped their choice by mid August to early September and people were already buying a month before Black Friday hit. By the time Black Friday actually arrives, most people aren't deciding what they want. They're deciding where to buy it. wherever the offer is good enough and whether they trust you to deliver it. Which means on Black Friday, you're selling to somebody who's looking for the best deal, which by definition is a price conscious consumer. Those are the people we never want to deal with. Your better customer was available months ago at a fraction of the price. Historically, CPMs begin

20:43to creep up in late September as Q3 budgets get dumped by massive companies through huge agencies. By October, there's real competition for introducing ideas. And some of the bigger businesses are using the entire month of October as a Black Friday runway. And you're starting to see more and more of that. The earlier you introduce the idea, the cheaper it is. There's less competition for the same offer and that customer has the time to actually consider it. So, the question becomes, if the intent is already there and the attention is cheaper, why are we waiting until Black Friday? And here's where I want to bring it back to the campaign I just showed

21:24you. Because a few minutes ago, I walked you through how to set up your post Black Friday retargeting campaign. But the truth is, you should be running that campaign right now. Every creative you're thinking about running for Black Friday, launch it at Broad today. all the ads in a single ad set with no exclusions. Start at a budget that doesn't exceed 20% of your overall spend. As performance improves and the gross profit and AOV of this campaign begins to outperform everything else you're running, start shifting more of your budget towards it gradually, deliberately every week. If you do it right, by the time Black Friday arrives,

22:03you'll be spending over 90% of your daily budget on this offer. and your daily budget will exceed anything you've ever done before. On Black Friday, you turn that off. Then on Saturday, you turn on the 7-day audience adset. Your campaign should look exactly like this. One broad ad set, one 7-day ads set, and one 30-day. The same ads in each. The

22:27campaign is CBO. No exclusions at all. And every single ad drives the same offer. That is the blueprint. And these ads should go live as soon as possible. You are not waiting for Black Friday to run your Black Friday strategy. You are buying your best customers right now at the cheapest price before the knife fight even starts. But economic opportunity for unfair leverage doesn't

22:51end there. We're just getting started. Economic opportunity can be measured simply by supply and demand. And the scale of this opportunity is far bigger than just Black Friday. On one axis, the cost of attention, on the other, consumer intent. When we map these out, we can see that phase one of our Black Friday campaign lives in the quadrant where attention is cheap and consumer intent is high. And phase two, the broad retargeting lives where attention is expensive, but consumer intent is still high. So what about the rest of the year? Where attention is cheap and intent is high. We also have September and October and Q5 all the way through

23:37mid January. This is where the opportunity is the greatest and almost nobody is playing. Where attention is expensive and intent is high. That is November and December. And you've already been playing that game. where attention is cheap and intent is low. This is the quadrant everybody misreads and we're going to get to that shortly. And then there's February, the worst square on the board, the most expensive attention against the lowest buying intent. Somehow it's a month nobody complains about because everybody

24:07assumes a bad month is just a bad month. Here's the thing. The bad months you've had weren't because of bad luck or a bad algorithm. They were bad because you asked your ad account to do a job that it couldn't do. And what's crazy is that none of this is accidental. Somebody actually built this calendar on purpose

24:26and we know exactly who it is. Philadelphia 1876. This is John Waker. And he opened a store that didn't work the way every other store did. His store had one price on everything. Printed. no haggling and you could return things. It wasn't a counter with a man behind it. It was a space you walked into and moved around in. He didn't invent selling. He

24:54invented shopping as a place you go. Every store before this had a very specific boring problem. Some months nobody came in. In January Christmas was over and the money was spent and the store full of linens had no customers. Water maker invented a reason. He called it the white sale. It was an entire shopping event built from nothing for the sole purpose of moving inventory through a dead month. And it worked and it's still happening. There are people running white sales right now who have no idea they're executing a 19th century inventory problem solution strategy. In February, we had the same problem, but worse. So he invented another event,

25:38opportunity sales, to keep the inventory turnover up when the customer had no natural reason to walk into the store. This is the introduction of the weaponization of consumerism decades before the madmen defined it as the core element of American culture. In July, the Midsummer sale, same logic. It's hot, nobody's shopping, and everything they wanted, they already got. The store has rent to pay, so you manufacture a season. That's gone through many permutations, but today that's Prime Day. 24.1 billion dollars online in 4

26:12days, up 30.3% year-over-year. Amazon didn't discover that people wanted to buy in July. Amazon took Wanomakers 19th century strategy and unleashed it into a digital world. They looked at the deadest month in retail and announced it was now a shopping holiday. And everyone believed it, including you and me. There's 150 years of this. The same move over and over. Find a month where nobody wants to buy anything and give them a reason. The holiday window displays in the 1920s, the animated displays that drew crowds

26:49around the block. That's the same move. Nobody needed to see a mechanical Alice in Wonderland in a department store window. But once you've seen it, you're standing outside the store in the cold winter of December. Here's what I want you to take from this. Demand isn't like the weather. You don't wait for it. You don't forecast it like rain. And you definitely don't stand around explaining why this month was soft. Demand is

27:15architecture. Somebody built it. Somebody sat in a room and decided on purpose when you want something and the calendar was built. Every month has a job. Somebody assigned that role. And most of those jobs were defined over a century before the internet was invented. And one quick note I had to throw in because I couldn't find it anywhere else in the video, but I just had to share this. In 1939, retailers asked the president to move Thanksgiving a week earlier to lengthen the shopping season, and he did. Half the states refused. So, for 2 years, the country had two different Thanksgivings. Anyway,

27:55let's take a look at this calendar. Before I tell you what any month is for, I want you to take a look at the year. This is every dollar spent online in this country month by month measured against the average. Notice it's not a hill. It's not a slow climb to Christmas. There's a cliff early, a long flat middle that wobbles a little bit and then a huge wall at the end. The lowest point is February at 84.3 and the highest is December at 138.3, which I think makes sense. in the middle July sits at 97.2. It's basically average and we're going to come back to that in a

28:41minute. Now, let's lay over the five phases and the 12 jobs. Phase number one is buy. This is Q5. It's the last week of December into January. This is the cheapest inventory of the year because every large retailer has exhausted their Q4 budget. And remember, retailers sell products. you are selling solutions. This is when the highest value customers are available at a discount. But most people are discounting to acquire the lowest value customers instead. Phase two is absorbed. February breaks the January trend. Around week two, whether it's Valentine's Day or the Super Bowl, there's a ton of discretionary spending from big brands. And we knew 150 years

29:28ago that the general public just isn't buying at this time. Supply is down and demand is up, which means it's the least profitable time of the whole year to acquire new customers. There's a recovery into March. And by the end of the month, costs rise again as big retailers burn off their quarterly budgets. Your job in this phase is to survive it efficiently, not to scale into it. For everyone who's been around long enough, this is when every cost cap campaign completely breaks and a lot of people end up giving away all the profit they made in January just trying to maintain performance. The reality is

30:05they're thinking too micro and more on that to come. Phase three is harvest. It's a new quarter and costs drop. Winter inventory is cleared. Consumer intent rises alongside competition and there's far more money in the system. $179.5 billion in federal tax refunds have gone out by the 21st of March. And that's just a piece of it. May gets more expensive, but it's offset by manufactured holidays. Mother's Day

30:34alone is 34.1 billion in expected spend. Valentine's was 27.5. This is where you monetize the cash flow potential of the customers you bought in Q5. The volume of revenue from non-firsttime buyers should begin to spike. Phase four is retreat, research, and build. June is the end of Q2. And just like March and December, demand soarses as big brands dump their

31:04quarterly budgets while supply declines. By July, we're at the toughest stretch. And July is the hardest month of the year to acquire new customers efficiently. And Prime Day has only made that more difficult for everyone. But August is where it turns. Demand rises midmon while retail ad spend is still low. Back to school alone reallocates something like 128 billion into clothing and supplies. Clothing indexes at 104.3 on our graph. By the way, this is the

31:35phase where the real work gets done. Retention, LTV improvement, and offer construction. It's the foundation for phase five. And phase five is commit and convert. In September, consumer intent starts to really pick up and there's another manufactured shopping holiday around Labor Day. The attention here is the cheapest it will be for the rest of the year, except for Q5. Late September and October is the window where the game is won or lost. Brands that built offers over the summer and began to scale here start to pull away from the pack and the ones that didn't spend November paying for it. Then November and December,

32:17Black Friday and the holiday season. Extremely high intent. Every retailer is discounting to protect market share which gives direct to consumer brands who bundle and value stack an extreme unfair advantage. the ability to leverage that intent for people who want to spend a lot of money in a market where the customer journeys are being manufactured by everybody else. You just need to be a better choice when somebody's ready to buy. This is the cheapest season of the year to acquire genuinely high value customers who are far more likely to come back, which gives you a ton of operating capital to take advantage of Q5. So that come

32:54February, you don't need to fight the losing battle. And come next summer, your retention revenue alone could easily outpace your entire business from the year before. Five phases, 12 jobs, and one question that governs all of it. What is this month for? There's one stretch in here that breaks more accounts than the other 11 months combined, and almost everybody misdiagnoses it, including me, for a really long time. And it's not the one

33:21you think it is. Marketers love retroactive, subjective definitions for situations they think they understand. Every year around the middle of June, the same conversation starts. Everyone's on vacation. Meta changed something and attribution got worse. The best one, and I've said this myself, is the days are longer, the weather's better, people are outside more, so they're not on their phones as much. There's less attention available, so it costs more to reach them. Fallon feels right. It's intuitive. It's

33:55physical. And it feels obviously true. There's real evidence that people are more active in warmer months. Leisure time, energy expenditure runs 15 to 20% higher in spring and summer. That part is wellestablished fact. Here's the problem. Nobody's ever established the next part. Nobody has ever shown that longer days cause adults to spend less meaningful time on Facebook and Instagram. Nobody has shown that any reduction in attention is big enough to constrain the supply of impressions. And nobody has shown that summer CPA damage is caused by attention supply at all rather than by conversion rate, offer strength, product mix, and who you're reaching. It's a hypothesis that was

34:38repeated so many times it became general knowledge even though it was completely wrong. I want to correct it on camera because I'd rather give you something true than something comfortable. I've been wrong about this for a long time because here's what the numbers actually say. June CPMs average $14.88. July comes in at $12.90. September is

35:03$11.21. November is $21.96. Summer attention isn't expensive. It's some of the cheapest attention you'll buy all year. If the attention is cheaper and demand held up, why did your account get worse? Because the cost per acquisition isn't the cost per impression. Your CPA is CPM divided by a,000 times the click-through rate times the rate at which those clicks turn into purchases. So, watch what happens when only one of those moves. Say we have a $16 CPM and a 2% clickthrough rate and a 3% conversion rate. That's $26.67

35:40per customer. Now drop the CPM to 13. Cheaper, better, but keep the clickthrough rate the same and let the conversion rate fall to 1%. Now the CPA is $36.11. Your impressions got 19% cheaper and your customers got 35% more expensive. That's summer. It's not a supply problem. It's a conversion problem. People are still scrolling. The money is doing something else. and the willingness to stop and buy a considered product is lower. The truth is they've already made their purchases and the manufactured holidays that happened before summer. Here's how you tell the difference between a bad season and a broken account. And these are the three

36:24most useful lines in this whole video. If CPM is up, CPA is up, and AOV is flat, that's seasonal. That's the market. That is out of your control. If CPM is flat and CPA is up, that's you. You broke something. Go fix it. If CPM is down and CPA is up, that's the summer pattern we just walked through. And the answer is in your conversion rate and your offer, not your targeting, which reframes the whole season. Summer isn't a performance problem. It's a job assignment problem. June and July have a very specific job, and it isn't acquisition. It's when Black Friday research begins for your customers. And

37:05it's when you begin to model the offer you're going to build in August. Summer isn't dead time for Q4. Summer is the research and development phase of Q4. So what does this mean for Black Friday? Most people build their Black Friday plan starting with the promotion and working outward from it. You should be building it backwards, starting with the business. What is the revenue target for Q4 and how much of that needs to be profit? Black Friday season is a mechanical solution to that math problem. Once you've done that, you get a number that reframes the entire quarter. Let's say a business needs $1 million by the end of the year. The

37:52ideal outcome isn't that you make it by December 31st, the last day of the year. The ideal outcome is that you make it by the week before Black Friday. From there, the work is done. The remaining five weeks of the year after Black Friday are purely for fulfillment and customer service and profit stacking. There are plenty of brands that effectively finished their gear in the first week of December because everything they needed was already collected, and they'd much rather run ads and get sales from higher quality people in Q5 when CPMs dropped by nearly 50%. Here's the sequence. August is off for construction. You test at the

38:31cheapest attention of the back half of the year. And the input for that research is everything from the whole year before. All the analysis you ran in June and July and every customer you acquired last Black Friday. And that's exactly what summer was actually for. What do those repeat customers actually look like? September is the month most people waste. You're not testing the promotion in September. You're testing the concepts. What marketing messages best sell your best offer? You're doing market testing for all of that. Let Meta find the best expression of each idea rather than asking it to choose between five or 500 ideas at once when the

39:10advertising is most expensive. Labor Day gives you a live reason to be in market so you can scale the upper funnel. Rings one, two, and three of our Olympic ring system because the audience you build in September is the audience Black Friday season converts. You're buying next month's customer at $11 instead of 22. Late September into October is the window when the game is won or lost. If the funnel isn't built by the end of October, then November is defined by you engaging in handtohand combat with businesses that can buy and sell you 10 times over. And that's a fight you can't win. By the time you get to November,

39:46you should know your best ads. You should know your best offers. You should have already drained a lot of your funnel of your best customers, getting all of that cash up front when it was cheap to acquire. And as soon as the sun sets on Black Friday, the next morning you launch the broad retargeting 7-day window ads set. We don't launch unproven ads and unproven offers into the most competitive auction of the year. A high AOV package asks for bigger commitment, which means the ads have to carry more trust, more proof, more explanation, and a more vivid picture of the outcome. The bundle doesn't remove the customer

40:21journey. The bundle raises the bar of the beginning of it. And scaling in this phase can be fully automated. And here's what that automated rule looks like. Set the marginal scaling rule to fire Monday, Wednesday, and Friday so the account doesn't compound interest against itself. and run it against the concept test structure you built in that campaign I showed you earlier with your broad ads set. But before any of that can work, there's one rule that is

40:47completely non-negotiable. Define success before you start playing the game. What's your required revenue? What's your required gross profit? What's your minimum acceptable AOV? What's your maximum allowable CPA? What are your inventory and fulfillment limits? and what does your customer quality actually look like? What are the customer journeys you're trying to compress? And what should those customers buy next if that offer actually works? Start collecting that data in October. Because in January, as Q5 rolls in, that definition of success is the only thing that matters. Did you win the game or not? That's when scaling gets faster and easier than you've ever seen it before. So, how do we weaponize

41:33Q5? I don't just want to win. I want to keep winning and compound it into the best year this business has ever had. The last week of December into the first week of January functions as a second Black Friday and Cyber Monday period. It's the highest discretionary spending period of the year for things people buy for themselves. Gift cards are getting spent, returns are getting exchanged for something better, and aspirational buying peaks because this is the week where people decide who they're going to be next year. January runs roughly 15% below October because the big retailers aren't playing this game. They've already exhausted their budgets and

42:16they're moving whatever cash they have left into inventory and planning instead of advertising. Intent stays really high and the price of reaching that intent collapses. 41% of shoppers keep buying after the holidays. Now, think about what you're sitting on. You just spent the most expensive money of your entire year building the largest warm audience you will ever have. Everybody who touched your site during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Everybody who engaged with your content. And everybody who's in your ecosystem but hasn't made a decision. You paid peak prices to earn that trust, build that authority, and fill that pool. The opportunity to leverage it isn't gone. It just got a

42:56lot cheaper. The dominant emotional mode in this window is aspiration, which is exactly what the compressed journey package was built for. The offer you constructed in August has a second life here. It's the same package, the same construction aimed at the person buying for themselves instead of somebody buying a gift. You don't have to build anything new. January has the lowest CPMs of the year. It's the best window all year to push your high AOV, high retention offers at customers who are ready to spend money on who they want to become. They're the cheapest high-value customers you will buy all year. And they're available for nearly a month

43:34before the brands with millions in marketing budgets start playing again. This isn't a hack, it's just a calendar. And you can leverage this opportunity because direct to consumer exclusively exists as a better for me option to retail. You're not discounting disposable inventory. You're offering somebody something more meaningful than anything they can get from a store that doesn't know who they are and doesn't care about them. And we can see if this

44:03is working directly in the ad account. Back towards the beginning of this video, I showed you the 4PI analysis. That dashboard was spend, frequency, CPM, efficiency, GPT, and AOV. And I told you we were going to keep coming back to it. That is the scorecard we're going to use for this whole effort. We're going to compare it to actual store performance. What happened to the AOV? What happened to the GPT? What

44:30percentage of the customers were new? And what did those new customers actually buy? And for the customers that actually bought your Black Friday offers, how did that compare to everything else? And did those customers come back? How quickly? And what did they buy when they did? And there are three false positives that trip people up constantly. So, let's lay out the vanity metrics that agencies and marketers will use to lie to you. And I know because I had to write these reports for a decade. The first is a lower CPA. It's exciting when the cost per acquisition drops. But if that means a much lower AOV and a much lower gross

45:09profit, that lower CPA didn't create a better result. It amplified the volume of customers who are now polluting the entire pool you've just paid so much money to build. They're going to be stuck in your emails for months and they're the reason next summer is going to be so painful. The second is transaction volume. The number of times you run a credit card is not a success metric. Volume is an input, not a result. More transactions with less cash is a loss. More transactions with a

45:36lower volume of profit is a bigger loss. Which brings us to the biggest lie in advertising, return on ad spend. Before you tell me you use me instead, me is just a more elaborate way to lie to yourself. I see people justifying me reports thinking they're being clever, but the discipline is identical and the blind spot is identical. Here's the truth. Most of your revenue either came from new customers who, unless you weaponize this strategy, are actually worse for your business or it came from existing customers who got hammered with email, search campaigns, and organic efforts. Anyway, the incremental results of your advertising is the depreciation

46:13of your growth trajectory. The better your rorowaz and me look, the worse your business and your next year will probably be. I've said this before and I'll say it again. you need to be less profitable so you can make way more money. Anybody selling you on percentages is trying to lie to you. The discipline underneath all three of these metrics is the same. You measure

46:35customer quality months after the event. You're mapping journeys to build better offers, acquire more operating capital, and amplify cash flow. That's how you scale a business. A report card on Monday morning doesn't matter. How do your Black Friday offer customers compared to everybody else 90 days after you started advertising? What about 180? Map that every 30 days. If those numbers don't look dramatically different, the offer didn't do its job. If they do look dramatically different, I'd argue you should never be promoting what you normally promote ever again. Those two offers I mentioned in the case study earlier, both of them are now available on those sites year round. And I want to

47:19throw in one more example here because it's one of the biggest wins I've ever been a part of. I was working with a shapewear business called Underout. We built an offer that was buy three get one free because the average customer bought two and a half times. That offer works so well in email that we built a landing page and ran ads to it. It works so well on the ads that we made it a permanent offer across the website. If you go to that website right now, you will see that offer available on every single product because we just built a better business. That brand went from

47:4850,000 a month to a million dollars a week in a year and a half. And one more because nobody else is going to tell you this. We sold a $200 gift card for 150 bucks. Over 30% of gift card value goes unclaimed. So every one of those we sold was profit in the bank before anybody spent a dollar. There's no dashboard that nags you about this. There's no software platform built to hold you accountable to it. But the best brands in the world are doing this consistently. It's a standard operating procedure. If you want to copy the best in the world, copy the way they do the

48:21work, not the work they do. That's the only on a scoreboard you have. Q5 in January by the cohort that late spring monetizes into cash flow. Summer measures that cohort and build your next offer around what that measurement said. August through October weaponizes that offer and fills your funnel. In November, we're converting everybody who has left and the next Q5 buys the next cohort. better than the last one because now you know the customers that you should be buying and your cash flow is exponentially higher than it was the year before. Black Friday isn't a moment. It isn't the destination. It's one node in a system that runs

49:01continuously. And most operators are essentially running the same 12 months over and over again. They're comparing today's performance against yesterday's. They have some definition of success about what they can see that's right in front of them. And if any of it is successful, they keep moving forward. But their definition of success is a fraction of what it could be. You should

49:21be asking, "What is this month for?" That's the question that nobody asks. And it forces us to rethink what a winning Black Friday really is. It isn't your November revenue. It isn't your BFCM rorowaz. It's not your discount rate. It's not your order count. It's not how loud you are in the space. The winner isn't the loudest brand or the biggest discount or the most transactions or the most reported ad spend or the most reported return on ad spend. The winner is the business that used the season to acquire the most valuable customer cash flow at economics

49:55that improve the future of the company. That might mean fewer transactions, a much higher average order value, selling a package instead of a product, starting 8 weeks earlier than everyone else, hitting your numbers before Thanksgiving. Most people never do this, and it isn't because it's hard. It's because nobody ever showed them the whole year in one place. And I'll be

50:15honest with you about something. Watching this video is the easy part. Running the cohort analysis on your data, constructing the package, sequencing the ramp, and knowing what to do each step of the way when something goes sideways or it goes really well. That's where people get stuck. Not on the idea, but on the execution. And that's what the premium tier of Disruptor Academy was built for. My help in your business. And you're going to hear back from me on every question you have. And there's a link in the description. Whether you click it or not, take this with you. You're not trying to sell cheaper products. You're

50:47trying to buy better customers for less.