What I Learned from One of Meta’s Top 100 Global Advertisers - Charley Tichenor IV - E65 [English]

0:01Now we are officially uh live on our podcast with Charles teaching her the fourth, right? Yeah, that's right. And I got number five over here playing around. She's having a hoot with one of her puppies right now. Amazing. We have the whole family. Hey Charlie disruptor, you have spent thousands and thousands of millions in advertising. You have also created billions in revenue for your clients, for yourself and um you're one of the most soughtafter expert in Facebook in the earth probably. So um when you are in a party and you present yourself, what do you say to people like what do you do? I that's a hard question. I I honestly I

0:47think if I the best I can do is in a simple way if people understand things I say that I help folks who run ads build brands and scale. Um if people don't understand what I do I quote my wife which is basically I yell at people on the internet and that makes them money. Uh so those whichever way you want to take that is is probably the most

1:12appropriate uh definition of things. Love love the jelling style. So Charlie uh here at Ciendella we work with a lot of people and I think I most of the folks uh don't have like a couple millie or a couple grand 100 grand to spend on Facebook and so the most uh I guess is the one of the most um pressing questions you get all the time is like how do we structure Facebook ads like if we have maybe a $10, a $50, a $100 $100

1:47budget. How How should we rent it? Yeah. No, that's a great question. I mean, and when I got started, I was helping people. I was getting paid 10 bucks an hour to help folks that were spending a hundred bucks a month. Um, so I I've absolutely been there. Um, and I've gotten those questions on my YouTube channel, inside my disruptor academy, and and and all my education over the years. So, it's a really common question. Um, so I want to start off by saying first off, if you're in that space, um, I want to congratulate you because you're making the investment in yourself and trying to do something that

2:23is uncomfortable. And if I were to give you the best advice, it's just stop now. Uh, because odds are it's not going to work. No, you should ignore all of that and move on because you're set to make it work. And if that's your mindset, awesome. Let's move forward with that and how we can be more successful. What I really want to start with when talking about how ads work is that I think we need to understand the foundation of what we're trying to do. Most people that I talk to at small budgets are saying, "Well, I want to spend money on ads to make money

2:57by selling things or whatever the case is." But I want to shift that perspective a little bit and say the purpose of the ad is actually to amplify your business model. I want you to have a clear understanding of how you make money and then you run ads to do that at a higher volume. Um, if you can't currently generate revenue, uh, running ads is a very expensive way of trying to get sales and generally um, is very difficult to make work if you don't already have something that works because 80 90% of businesses fail and running ads, especially on Facebook, is one of the most expensive ways of trying

3:47to make that work. So, let's start by saying I would like to have my starting place for my ads. I want to have a business that can make money. Even if it's 5, 10 bucks a day, whatever it is, I need to be able to create revenue some way. I need to be good enough to get anybody to spend money with me. Then, the budget that I use for my ads will be a percentage of that revenue that I start with. So, if I have a business that is making $1,000 a month, maybe I'm comfortable with spending $100 a month running ads to see if I can get it to $1,200 or $1,500 a

4:27month. But the purpose of those ads isn't to generate the first dollar or euro or rand or lra or peso or whatever it is that you're running. The purpose of the ad is to amplify what already works. Um, so I want to start there. Now, let's say you've got that going. My number one recommendation for people that have the ability to generate revenue and can invest some of that revenue in ads is to start with the people who are most ready to buy and start with the

5:02people who are most likely to convert. And what I do here most often is I tell people to focus on what we call broad retargeting. Um, now I love broad. I I was one of the people that brought broad targeting or open targeting to Facebook ads back in 2018. But there's this concept of broad

5:22retargeting that I want to talk about. Broad is age, gender, and location. Your optimal, most efficient way to meet people and to show your ads is to only restrict by age, gender, and location. But that also means that your ads are being asked to make people aware, being asked to introduce your brand to other folks, and being asked to make sales, all parts of the customer journey, all parts of the salesunnel, all sorts of everything, which is a lot of work to ask any one thing to do. So instead, if we can focus our initial campaigns, like if I have 10 bucks a day, a hundred

5:58bucks a week, whatever it is, I'm going to start by focusing my ads on the people who are already problem and brand and solution aware. If we just focus on folks that have been to the website in the last 30 days or engaged with or followed our Instagram account in that same amount of time, those folks are already problem solution and product or service aware. But unlike traditional retargeting where we're hitting people that have abandoned cart or something like that, the majority of the people in our broad retargeting haven't made the choice to not buy. However, if you just hit abandoned carts, honestly, nine out of 10, 99 out of a hundred of the people

6:39that abandoned cart will never buy from you. So, if you're focusing on an audience or people who have already made the decision to not buy, it's going to be very difficult for you to actually scale the business. And half the people who abandon cart are going to buy anyway, uh, don't need an ad to get them there. So, we're going to hit this economy of scale of an audience large enough. Perhaps it's site traffic from the last 30 days or 6 months and people have engaged with our social media in the same amount of time. Let's start there. We've earned their attention some way with our emails, with our YouTube

7:13content, with our Instagram reels, with our Tik Tok, something. Now, all we're trying to do is say, how do we get that person who's already in our store to pick something up and buy knowing that there might be a thousand or 10,000 people there and we can spend our money on them and those adsarts that we talked about earlier that might only be nine or 10 of those people. They're going to be in that audience, but because they're not interested, the

7:42machine's not going to show ads to them. But if you can't make that work, greater success is far more difficult. And for the record, this broad retargeting strategy, I also do this on very big brands. I'm doing that with a business right now that spends between 50 and $100,000 a day, and we spend 10 to 30,000 of that on just broad retargeting. I also know a few people that I've worked with. London artist who's has a little school community and uh they did $70,000 last month in profit on uh $150 a day in ad spend because they were able to turn the people that enjoyed their Instagram content and

8:28their newsletter into buyers. And it really allows you to leverage that opportunity that is the lowest hanging fruit. And I would start there until I get to five or six figures a month in sales because you probably don't need to go any further than that. So Charlie, you're uh suggesting like making a campaign for your more warm

8:52audiences. Yeah. Like people who are in your Instagram, in your newsletter. Um you're suggesting that in the like in the very But if the if the people they have like nothing and they have to like uh If you have nothing, don't run ads. Don't run ads. If you don't have anything, what you don't have is a business model that you

9:15can invest in growing. You don't pour gasoline on nothing. You pour gasoline on a fire. Yeah. If you can't earn attention and make sales, what you don't have is cash flow to invest in the growth of your business. And I will say this, there are obviously exceptions to the rule, but over 90% of people that can't make a sale without

9:44ads aren't in business next year. Yeah. And what my focus here is giving you something sustainable that works. If you can't get sales, get better at your organic content. Get better at earning attention. Get better at figuring out what you can sell. I I work with a brand right now that has an Instagram following of 180,000 people and they're really great at getting attention and events and all of that kind of stuff and they're trying to turn these oneoff events. They do this like really long table thing. They basically set up a bunch of temporary tables in city streets across the country. And it's a really fun event across the world

10:24and it feeds people and a lot of great stuff, but they're never able to get profitable and go above and beyond donations because they haven't figured out how to turn that into a business other than just donations. They have a massive audience. They are worldwide, but they haven't figured out how to make money. And so every time they've taken donations and invested that into more ads, they've never seen a

10:48return. And that's an extreme example, but I mean, I'm working with them right now on how do we figure out a way to profitably invest your money to create more opportunity because otherwise you're just playing an expensive game where you're more or less guaranteed to lose. And in that case, ads are no different than going to the casino. you're probably going to lose eventually and I'd rather you not sit in that

11:15situation. Yeah. So, Charlie, uh you are one of the first as pops out in the internet with the Ross is a lie. It's all it's it's full of vanity metrics. So if you want to like take away all the the smoke there like let's focus on stuff that on the conversation that we need to have in terms of unit economics in in terms of uh the profitable scaling margin in terms of I I was checking your ads uh in the in Charlie Charlie's uh Facebook ads library like all these guys you were interviewing and there was this one that says okay you told me to add to my

11:56columns the um gross profit per transaction. Yeah. So this is beautiful when we start to see like unit economics profit and beyond all the vanity things we start to see like positive cash flow in the in the ads manager. So what can we can we lay like a foundation here like in all these that are the really hardcore

12:20metrics that can move the needle? Yeah. So let's lay this out. think and setting the table one. Yeah, I I mean I sell merchandise that you know has profanity on it with my position around rorowaz. Um the concept of rorowaz itself is intellectually dishonest and a corrupt idea. Let me put it to you this way. Rorowaz as we know it is the amount of money you make divided by how much money you spent. The problem is the money you spent isn't the reason that money happened. and the amount of money

12:55isn't inclusive of all of your revenue. So if you look at the rorowaz on an ad today, the people who clicked on that ad and purchased where that ad gets credit for the sale, that ad is not that impression is not the only touch point you've had with that business. And in fact, if you were to stop spending money today and you make you'll probably get some sales tomorrow from somebody who saw an ad

13:20yesterday. So, if we know the revenue number is false because it's not inclusive of all the revenue that you have because there are multiple ads that are all adding things up and even all the attribution isn't inclusive of all the money you made. And we know the spend isn't tied to why you made that money, then ultimately we're dividing something inaccurate by a number that isn't the reason it happened. And that's a

13:45terrible way to run any business. What I suggest people do is what I call GPT or gross profit per transaction which is a outside of digital marketing actually an extraordinarily common way of measuring things. It's a fairly standard unit of finance. And really what we're trying to do is say what is the average order value and how much did it cost to make a sale and the these are blended averages, right? So in short, if I have a $50 item and according to

14:19attribution, I made a sale for 10 bucks. Well, that means that we have a rorowaz of five and a profit of 40, which is great, but we also know that that sale is not necessarily just because of that ad and there's a whole bunch of other stuff. The profit volume or the profit margin is 500%, but the amount of money we made is 40 bucks. Conversely, if I have a $100 item and it cost me 30 to make that sale, so it's twice as expensive and it cost me three times as much to sell. My rorowaz isn't a five,

14:56it's like a three, but I made $70. That sale is almost twice as profitable. And the question is, do you want to have a good margin? Well, if the answer is yes, great. But the problem is margins don't pay bills. Money does. If you want the most money, stop worrying about margins and start focusing on profit. One of those sales looks a lot better on paper, but makes

15:23you almost half as much money. And the more people I've taught this to, the more folks have been focusing on trying to really make a better business instead of trying to chase old vanity metrics of high rorowaz or low CPA. And generally what that means is you're getting more people to buy a second time, which if you can't build if you aren't getting people to buy from you a second time, you are a salesperson. You do not have a business. And that's a

15:54whole other issue. But more importantly, the way you win the game, according to Dan Kennedy and a bunch of other really, really smart folks out there, Russell Brunson quotes him all the time and everybody else, but whoever can spend the most to acquire the customer wins. Now, I often see that as a justification for cost caps and bid caps and testing a lot of ads to get the CPA low, which is a bastardization of the concept. The real thing is how do I sell the $100 thing even if it costs me three times as much because the amount of money I make is almost double. And my buddy Ben who I

16:35think that was referring to Latico Leathers uh one of the guys from uh Ecom Founders and great family business he has seen his cost per sale go up basically every month since I sent him that text. and the amount of profit they've made has gone up three to four times every month. Um, I I've seen the same thing with Original Grain. I see the same thing with Portland Leather

17:01Goods. I see the same thing with Obi. I've seen the same thing with brands around the world in almost every vertical. Make your customer more valuable to you and you can afford more ad spend to acquire them. The other side of that that's really important is that when you can afford to spend more to make the sale, you also can afford to spend more in general. And the beauty of being able to

17:45The beauty of being able to spend more to acquire the customer is that ultimately your spend volume goes up. When your spend volume goes up, that means that your search volume also goes up. Your email revenue goes up. Your site traffic goes up because you're able to afford more money on one sale. you're getting exponentially more people to know about what you're doing and that really starts to grow a business. And if you want to try to sell the things for the lowest price, stop playing the game now because Jeff Bezos already beat you

18:21and you'll never beat him at that game. Side note, people who spend more money with you are more likely to spend money with you again. Average order value is a direct indication of LTV. Now I know that makes sense. Higher AOV first greater LTV later. But more importantly, the second purchase rate of a customer is almost directly correlated with the average order value on the first sale. That person that spent 50 bucks is way less likely to buy from a brand a second time than the

18:58person who spent a hundred. So you're spending three times as much to make a sale that is more profitable on day one to acquire a customer who's way more likely to spend money with you a second and a third and a fourth time. And that's really the difference between focusing on performance marketer vanity metrics and building a business. I wanna I want to two takes in there like uh do you know Savi Suvi this Australian marketing is very I'm very aware of of him and his media buyers and uh their strategy and

19:33I think I love them. Yeah. Uh the ads are phenomenal. His message is I don't agree with almost anything he says. Okay. He is not the only person who sells get-richqu stuff on the internet that teaches how to do it, but uses somebody that I'll put it this way. His ad account isn't run in the way that he

20:00tells you to do it. His ad account is run in a way that builds a business. The way he tells you to do things is the way that is easiest to get you to get an easy win so that he can sell you. And those are two very different things. Yeah. But in the in the end, um it was one of of of Savage's videos that I said like we're always trying to, you know, minimize the CPA, but that's like a flawed way of thinking because in the long term like LTV eats CPA like every day at breakfast. So um with this um you saw the new or Mossy

20:37launch on 100 million money models. Yeah. So I do you have like a rule of thumb because this guy uh like shared it like he started with this um I I think it was great because like this formula like your 30 great day gross profit should be like more or less two time two times your cack plus Do you do you do you subscribe to something like that? Do you have like some I will say this, I appreciate that um Alex has evolved past his LTV divided by CAC, which is for the record absolutely the right thing for gym launch for a membership to a physical location

21:19or a subscription business, LTV to CAC is perfect. The problem is if you run a DTOC business, yeah, that has nothing to do with how your business operates. Now, um I I launched a video a couple years ago, three days before his hundred million dollar leads v uh event and um after that event uh and that video, the guy that was running ads for him no longer ran ads for him and he tried to come to one of my students to get them to run ads, but he didn't want to move from Canada to Vegas. Uh so he never got the job and now he works with another

21:53one of my students. But I like the idea here. What Alex is trying to make simple is the idea that we're not looking at LTV. We're not looking at the total lifetime value. No, we're just looking at how much money does the customer pay you in 30 days. And if that is in a healthy way more money than what it cost you to make and sell the product and a 2:1 ratio,

22:22fantastic. You have a healthy business. the context that that is missing. And to be fair, Alex is reaching millions and millions of people where he's never able to have a rebuttal. So, he's trying to be as simple as possible. And that's the only way he gets big. And who am I to he made 100 100 million in a day. So, clearly, it's working for him. But what works for him and what he teaches aren't

22:47necessarily the same things. Um, because you have to know your market. So instead, first off, we didn't get to it, but yeah, average order value is AOV minus CPA. What I recommend people look at is what we call what we call second purchase rate and the what we call profitable scaling margin. And really the idea is instead of saying how much money does the average customer give me in 30 days, can that be twice what my cost of goods in my sale is, which is again very simple, great direction. If that's as far deep as you want to get, which is essentially, you know, uh like

23:27a fortune and a fortune cookie at the Chinese restaurant, awesome. That's great. If you want to dive in deeper and feel way more uh confident and and know what the right action should be, I'll give it to you this way and that he's what he has simplified is what I've taught them. Um look at the second purchase rate. Meaning how often is somebody who buys this product likely to buy a second time? How often is that going to happen? And so like if I'm selling these AirPod cases, I might say 10% of people to buy this case buy again. Okay? If this case is worth 50

24:09bucks, if 10% of people are likely to buy again, that means the LTV is 55. Awesome. Now, if that person is likely to buy three or four more times, that LTV number rises. What matters is what is the value of the second transaction? Because customers who buy from you twice are far more likely to buy a third or fourth than anybody who buys once. And that kind of makes sense. But when we're trying to grow a business, you're trying to acquire folks who spend money with you more than one time. And so the deeper meaning behind all of this is find the items that give you the best lift

24:51and lifetime value between first and second sale. and understand the percentage of customers who are likely to buy a second time and what the timeline is. And the reason this really matters is again, let's say this is 50 bucks. I don't know what this cost, but let's say it's 50 bucks. Let's say 100% of people buy a second time, but it takes them 9 months to do so. Well, in the course of a year, I bought this customer, let's say, for $10. Let's say the second sale is five bucks. Um, so it

25:23cost me 15 bucks to make a hundred. That's great, but it means I have to wait nine months to reinvest that additional revenue in the growth of my business. If, for instance, 10% of people bought a second time and that second purchase rate and the LTV, if the second purchase rate was 10% instead of 100 and the LTV was 55 instead of 100, but I got that money again in a week. It takes me seven days to reinvest in the growth of my business. And by the time nine months goes by, I will have made far more money on reinvesting that additional five or 10% over and over and over and over and

26:04over again. So, if you want to grow a business, one of the things that I highly recommend people do is take a look at all the products you sell. If you go into your receipts and simply say just download every receipt, every transaction from your Shopify or whatever, and what you need to know is the person's name, uh what they bought, whether that transaction was a new or returning transaction, the date, and the and and the and the money. And then you can simply sort this by show me all of the customers who were a repeat buyer. Show me everything they bought when they were

26:41a new customer. And you're going to find all of the items that most directly translate to somebody buying more than once. And a real world example of this because I know it's kind of hard to wrap your head around stuff. So, let's do a real world example that I love. And uh we'll we'll pick a uh Ben is one of my friends from Manhattan. I usually live in LA, but I have an apartment in New York City. We

27:04both live in Chelsea in New York City. There's a place called the Chelsea living room. Now, the Chelsea living room has a wedge salad that probably cost them a dollar to make. And I think they charge like 40 bucks. I mean, it's middle of Manhattan, but it's it's lettuce with like some cheese. Okay? Very expensive lettuce. Here's the thing. They probably Let's say it cost them $10 to get me to walk in that store. $10 CPA plus a dollar COGS. $40 AOV. They're making 30 bucks when I buy that. The problem is I'm never going to

27:43go back. However, if I got in there and got what my wife got, which was this great steak that was, let's say it cost them $70 to sell me that steak and they charged 80. They only made 10, but she's been back five times. The point is you want to look at your ability to reinvest future cash flow. If you only ever make one sale, that sale has to be hyperefficient. And as platforms get more expensive every year, your ability to arbitrage CPA to AOV will eventually

28:20go away. But if you can look at your cash flow cadence, which means time between the two purchases and what items most often get people to buy more than once, you're going to be able to set yourself up and know what is the only product I should be promoting with my ads. And to tie this back to one of your early questions, if I only have a hundred bucks a day, I'm not promoting anything other than the steak. In my example, I would never promote anything other than the item that is most likely to get somebody to come back and spend money with me again and to do so as fast

28:55as possible. If I can be profitable on that transaction, whether it's 2 to one or 5%. That means that I'm generating more sales that are not dependent on my ads. That money is going to go up every single month because as I invest in spending more of that money to acquire more new people. Let's say day one it's 10 people. Well, if it takes 45 days to buy a second time and 10% of people buy, I'm making 10 sales every day. But on day 46, I give make 11. And by day 90, I'm getting 12 and 13 and 14. That

29:34number is growing exponentially. And uh that's the easiest business to scale because you actually have a business. Otherwise, you're just a media buyer trying to be a fancy salesperson that's essentially setting yourself up for failure. So, it's a very long-winded way of answering your question, but but I hope we get there. And the idea of this is to try to make some of these things I want to give you more context because Alex can give you that simple example which is great but um there are there's far more context if you want to get in deeper and do a lot more. Charlie, I would like just to have

30:13like a a little context on these brands like like you have wor with um under outfit, you have work with Purple Mattresses. Uh you know, you were with the this guy from uh the shirts. What what is the true classic? True classic. Right. So, uh, we see these brands that scale like to millions a year that can pay spend a lot and we have this notion of the CAC LTV ratio like a lot of marketers have told us like uh 3 to five like one to three ratio like stuff like that. So like um what is the average you're a very statistical person so like in the DTC

30:57space forget about the mattress because those stuff are like very expensive but like I don't know for for underwear for jewelry for um for um um fashion like what is like the average LTV ratio that you have seen in these businesses? Uh, so more than ratio is the value like to to start talking about like like it's a 500

31:22plus. I'll say this. Um, I've gotten to $10 million, $50 million, $100 million a year plus with spots where that ratio was 10 to1 and where it was 1.1 to one. Um, I'll say it like this. That ratio has nothing to do with whether or not you're going to be able to grow your business. That ratio has nothing to do with whether or not you're good at what you're doing. And I don't think that that is really going to be the thing that is the reason you win or lose. I would love for that ratio to be bigger,

32:03but here's the problem. If that ratio is 5:1, I would ask you, why aren't you spending twice as much? Because I would rather be I'd rather have 3:1 on two times as many customers. So the most profitable ratio is essentially something where you're not spent where you are not getting nearly as much profit volume as possible. And so the way I like to look at it is um when people talk to you in fractions and ratios, often it's it's because they're trying to sell you something or lie to you. Uh I I care about actual money. Um so the golden ratio, like I said, um when I was

32:55running 310 Nutrition, we went from 15 million to 98. We lost 20 cents on the dollar for every customer we gained. But we grew the LTV from 85 bucks to 300 over 9 months. And under outfit, we changed the uh product mix and the customer journey. The LTV rose from $105 to over $500. But because you're scaling the business and making and getting more customers and everything else, those numbers are going

33:30to change week to week, month to month. And ultimately, what matters to me more than anything when looking at that kind of stuff isn't the LTV to CAC. It's how much money do I make a month from people where it's not their first time buying with me. And if that number is not going

33:49up every month, I have a bad business. That's the biggest inflection point. So whatever makes that work is what I'm okay with. So I think that's a very like sustainable point of view. One thing is to maximize a customer acquisition. But for having like a nice cash flow business model, you see the repeat purchases and and and it's beautiful when you have these businesses that that in the long run have when you have more than 51 50% of of of repurchase rate on your Shopify like normally you can say that okay every time that I'm adding a business the the every time I'm adding a customer is staying in the business. So

34:30you can play you cannot be like so like oh the LTB the CA duration everything and and that's very beautiful. So um Charlie I would like you to I'm going to share screen and this this is like different ways to operate uh and I want I want you to comment on the I have for example different like campaign structures. So

34:49okay got it. I love it. Here is the famous uh one campaign to rule them all star. Fun fact, um I have a sticky note that I framed where I wrote that down the first time and this damn sticky note is framed in a $5 thing I got from the corner store. This one sticky note has made me uh I bought apartment because of that damn sticky note. So like it has made me a lot of money. There we go. Oh,

35:15I took a picture. Yeah, I literally framed that thing because it has made me millions of dollars. Uh that's funny. Yeah, I know. Well, there you go. Uh, I said on the video. Yeah. So, the one campaign structure says Facebook is a machine learning algorithm. What we are trying to do is present a control and then use the scientific method to see if we can change the outcome. So, we have a winner's ad set of proven ads for whatever offer it is. And then the purpose of the other two tests is simple. When I launch this test, does it earn spend? And if so, what happens to

36:00the bottom line of the business? If it earns spend and the rorowaz is great and the CPA is great and the bottom line of the business gets worse, it's a bad ad. If it earns spend and the metrics all look terrible, but I'm making 20% more money every day, it's a good ad. And that can absolutely happen if the ad looks bad because it's got a tremendous ability to reach net new individuals and it's the reason you're reaching three times as many new customers and that

36:30your search and email is going bonkers. Whereas the ad that looks amazing might only be retargeting folks who are already ready to buy already. And the only reason it's good is because it's taking credit from sales that are happening on other platforms. Uh so this is simply scientific method applied to a data machine which in my opinion um we went from riding horses to the moon in a 100 years by leveraging the scientific method. I think it works and uh well we know Facebook's a machine learning algorithm. So let's just use the machine

37:04in the way it was designed to be used. For me this is the most straightforward way of doing things. And I've done basically every kind of campaign you can possibly imagine. And uh I have changed my mind on what the best one should be over the years. But um I built that in 2019 and I've not been able to beat it

37:21since. And for example, this is just just to put more context. So if there's any doubt, you do like um um it's a CVO, right? Like a campaign budget optimization. Uh then you have this the winners um adset and then you have your tests. And in the winnerset I I took the Facebook MBA program you have and um so there's like this thing like one of the most also made questions is like how many ads should I run in a in an ads set right and and and you you you were teaching here in the program that um like it's not that you go all in with one ad that is

38:08has the best CPA because you burn it like you push it forward. The you know you got this economies of scale and then you start like burning the the the the profit and burning the the the a little bit the the edge that this has got has got and you have to have like two or three or four or five that that is more like because then you have like more

38:32suboptimals I don't know how to call it. So can you elaborate on a bit of creative diversity? Yeah. and you're not asking that one ad to do all of the work. It might be the best closer, but it might not be the thing that should go be knocking on doors. Um, and something I like to think is we know machine it's a machine learning algorithm and every ad has learnings, right? And really you can think of it as as ads evolve, they learn

39:03how to do their job better. And so maybe on day one I could make 20 pairs of shoes. And every day I get a little bit better and I can make 21 and then 22. Every day I can make one more. And on day one, let's say my budget is at a certain level where you're only asking me to sell 10 shoes. Well, I you're asking me to make 10, I can make

39:2620. I'm making the best shoes ever. But if the next day you ask me to make 12 and then 14 and then 16, by day 10 you're asking me to make 30 and I know I can make 30, which is great. But then we start moving into a space where you're asking me to make 40, but I can really only do 35. Well, so now that ad doesn't do as good of a job. And by the time we scale a ad's budget beyond what the learning of that ad is capable of delivering, well, we're going to eventually start investing in showing that ad to more and more people

40:05in a way that gives them a bad experience. And now the win rate of that ad gets worse and worse and you will effectively fatigue that ad. Ad fatigue in general is operator error by people getting this getting this wrong. And Charlie, how do we uh like um how how can we make also work the uh this thing that all ads are not like you say some are very like to getting attention are very top of the funnels and others are really good and other other ads are really good converting. So in this world where you know we can run video ads more interacting ads like more really brand

40:46awareness ads where do we place them? Do we place them in the same uh winner adset like and yeah um I mean some ads are going to sit in the top of the funnel, some ads will sit lower and we know that with what we call a 4PI analysis, which we might not have time for today, but I'll put those all in the same adset. What I need is a team, right? Like if you have only your best ad, if it's just Messi on the pitch, I don't care how great he is, Messi versus an entire team is going to lose every match because you can't defend the goal and

41:21score. It's just not going to happen. So, you need a team where everybody's got a responsibility. Some ads sit higher in the funnel, some ads sit lower, and they should all exist together in the same campaign, your proven ones, even in the same adset. And for those that say, well, what about a testing campaign versus a scaling campaign and keeping these campaigns separate? Remember that campaigns don't

41:49talk to each other. So when you have multiple ads within a campaign, that campaign is deciding who to show what ad to in the sequence that they're showing it and when. When you have two ads and two separate campaigns, they are just competing for the same sale. They're going after the same person. So in the same campaign, they're

42:16complimementaryary. In different campaigns, they're cannibalistic. And one of those will help you get much much better results. The other one is really popular by people who try to look busy and sell you creative services. And I and I'll leave it at that. Yeah. So, but when you have this thing that you have, okay, you have an adset and you have your winners there and you have this that you have this thing that Facebook spends a lot in a thing that in an ad that you see that it doesn't deliver in in in conversions and it's still spending a lot and you say like what the hell is spending in this and

42:55I'm not seeing any revenue from that and and you have said back like yeah but it's a good top of the funnel ad and that's because Facebook is investing all the money in there Like sure, shall we trust the machine when we see like a thing that is spending like nuts and not showing us any revenue? I will say this, it is not Facebook's priority to make you the most amount of

43:21money. They are selling you their user eyeballs in a business relationship where your responsibilities to give their people an experience that keeps them on the platform. Their responsibility is to help curate user experiences to drive whatever to your to whatever your business goals are. But if an ad earns a ton of spend and isn't good for your bottom line, that's probably because that ad meets Meta's business objective, and so they're spending on it because

44:00you let them. Spend is a KPI. Spend is earned. But anybody who earns a lot of spend and doesn't help your bottom line, any employee who soaks up a lot of time and attention but doesn't produce revenue is probably not a good one for the team. You know, it's like a shooter that just

44:23keeps kicking from 10, 20, 40, 50. Anytime they get the ball, they never pass. They always kick and they never score. Well, they get all the kicks, they get all the shots, but they're the reason you keep losing. And so, like I I just You might have a phenomenal upperfunnel ad, but if it is out of balance with the rest of the team, it doesn't matter. And I've had a lot of brands where they were really, really good. I'm dealing with a brand right now that's in the car seat cover business and every video they make essentially goes viral. The problem is their ads go viral. They get millions of

45:02views on Tik Tok and their CPMs are really low and that's terrible for them. because it means a whole bunch of people who aren't interested in buying are filling their funnel. So, they're really catchy, great ad that with a great hook rate that goes viral organically every time they post is making actual scalable

45:22success almost impossible. And they were saying, "Well, what is the first thing you do in the ad account?" We just on boarded with them today. And I was like, "Well, I'm going to take all of the ads that earn a ton of attention and earn all the spend and fill your fund with a bunch of bad people. I'm just going to turn them off. We're going to replace them with really ugly static

45:40ads that are great at getting sales. Because your number one way of going from 1.2 million in sales this month to two is to actually sell on the attention that you've earned. And um that's was a very fun conversation to have with them. And I think got us the business because they were like, "Thank you. Everybody else wants a good hook rate. You just want me to get more money." Um, and that's the

46:04that's kind of the way I view things. So, generally speaking, really engaging videos are going to reach more and more people who are less and less likely to buy from you, but they're how you reach more people. really aggressive static images are going to be shown to folks at the bottom of your marketing funnel over and over and over again and they're really efficient, but they need to be the last touch point in a customer journey. And if you ask those ads, the ones with the best CPA and the best rorowaz to go out and do all the upper funnel work, they're going to fail miserably

46:44because that's ultimately just not what they're good at. You need to have a well- balanced team. And and Charlie, when you have this one campaign, but and you if campaigns don't talk to each other and they cannibalize, when is it good to like have more campaigns? Um, I think when you have new business objectives, um, I'll be completely honest. I I think most people have too many campaigns. I think most people are

47:15promoting too many offers. Um, I think realistically until you make a million bucks, you probably should be pushing one offer. Um, and if it's one offer, that means you probably have one campaign, maybe two. Maybe you have one killer offer. I'm selling this thing and it's great, but I also have 50 other things. So, I've got a catalog campaign. The purpose of this campaign is to sell somebody something where I know they're going to come back and buy something from me again. So, that's what we call a cash flow device. And then the catalog

47:47campaign is a uh CPA suppression device. It's a volume of transactions tool. So we can ultimately remember the way you make money in a business is it's average order value minus CPA that's profit times number of transactions. Now your CPA is how much money did you spend and how many sales did you get. Well if we can increase the volume of sales that CPA goes down whether that

48:16sale happened from a Facebook ad or not. And I don't really care about attribution. I'm looking at the business as a whole. So, if I run $1,000 and Facebook says I made one sale, my Facebook CPA might be a thousand. But if my business said I made a thousand sales or a hundred sales, well, my actual CPA is 10 or or

48:38even one. So, the hero campaign, your number one way to grow a business is drive as many people to the offer that's most likely to get somebody to buy a second time. Yeah. break even until those people buy a second time. After that, if your issue is I want to scale my efficiency, meaning I want to reduce my CPA while adding spend, then you add a catalog ad campaign to improve the volume of transactions or you add it's the same thing as having Google search or being more aggressive

49:16on email. Conversely, if everything's going well, but what you struggle with is my AOV isn't high enough, and maybe you have a bundle where nobody that buys that bundle ever buys a second time. Going back to the uh the the Chelsea living room with the salad. Well, maybe I don't know, but maybe they've got a bottle of tequila that's like a thousand bucks. I'll never buy the bottle again. I'll never go back to the joint again, but you got me for

49:44$1,000. Well, if I just sell the steak in the thousand dollar bottles, I might make 500 every time I sell that bottle and that person won't ever come back again, but that's way more profitable today, which raises the average order value of all sales. So, in your business, it's average order value of all transactions. So, if you want to know what your AOV is, it's simply total revenue divided by

50:08total transactions. That number should be larger than your CPA, which is total money spent divided by total amount of transactions. And all you're trying to do is push up the AOV or bring down the CPA. And the way you bring down the CPA is not with hacks and bidding models and attribution and launching a thousand ads and all that stuff. It's just increase the

50:32number of transactions you have. So once I've gotten to the place where I can do the one thing well, then I can start focusing on how do I give that thing more opportunity to be successful. If my CPA is rising too much catalog to bring it down. If my AOV isn't high enough, bring in some high ticket bundle to just raise the average order value across my business. In that

50:56case, maybe you have a second campaign. There's an argument you could even have a third. Now, there are other little campaigns we can be running which we probably shouldn't get to here like Golden Bear stuff and these other brand development and business intelligence efforts. Basil, but I wouldn't be investing more than one or two% of my budget on most of those things. Unless what I'm investing on is the the exception to the rule that I do use a lot is promoting social content so that I can build a funnel and I can earn people's trust so that broad

51:32retargeting audience gets bigger. Because if you boost your Instagram post, maybe it cost you a dollar but your conversion campaign is 20 on the CPM. Let me just do all the prospecting with the Instagram content, get a bunch of followers, and just target the people who've been to my website. That alone can easily get businesses to

51:53six figures a month.

52:11Charlie, we we're running out of time and I I really want to make a lot of more questions. Okay, so I'm going to ask you to to be I will keep the rest short a little bit. So I I mean I love all the answers, but there's too many questions. So sure here I have like different uses of

52:30campaigns that we were talking about. the ones you say no I would I would just put one two 3% in all all all of other those so what I understand is that you mainly go all in at least 80% of the budget you do one campaign and then you do your scientific method right but then for example what do you think like uh this is another way of thinking like uh which uh I think is something is called Ben the guy from true classic it's like okay once you're doing like a And it's like testing every possible angle. Like what do you think about like having a campaign and an adset for every

53:07possible angle? Because people buy for different reasons. Sure. Like and and the angles are avatars, problems, features, benefits, the main benefits. Yeah. Like do you think this is like uh from Ben from True Classic who was working at Facebook when we were starting the disruptor group. So he was a disruptor rep and I was I was helping some of the biggest brands in the world at the time. So, we go way back. Um, this is great when you really know your number one hero product and all you're trying to do is give yourself the best opportunity to sell that one item. This god mode campaign is essentially the same thing

53:44as the catalog ads campaign. only instead of trying to sell anything in the store, you're trying to find any reason that anybody might ever buy this one thing because you know my best customer 50% of them might buy a second time. Any stranger off the street, it's 10%. That's a very easy way to scale on 10% cash flow. So, it works. It's a luxury option. I don't hate it. And if you're spending I think True Classic is spending $200,000 a day, go ahead and

54:18drop five 10 grand on it. Yeah. I I got this this thingy kind of on the the guy from Comfort, you know, Comfort. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So those guys are doing like 40 million a month in in in revenue. And then you do this. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Then you do this. Yeah. Yeah. I'll say this one thing. Don't

54:38copy a nine figure business. Yeah. Never start a shoe company and say, "The only way I'm going to be successful, here's my plan. I'm gonna get Michael Jordan to endorse a shoe." Yeah, you're gonna make a billion dollars, but Nike already did it. The solutions to the problem that Comfort and that True Classics have today is not a problem you will even begin to be lucky enough to have in the next two

55:06years. So, don't worry about trying to solve problems you don't have. So, let's go then to other uses that are more simple. Like there's a big thing going on with the advantage plus shopping campaign, right? Like a lot of people like it and and how do you see them work? Like they usually I have seen them like they usually work with the most budget that you can have and it make it it kind of rotates the ads, right? Like what are your takes on the on this campaign? Um before it was called advantage plus this used to be an option in your audiences called engaged shoppers

55:42and basically what it's doing is it's constraining broad to people who are most likely to click on Facebook ads and buy from them. So this is a higher conversion rate audience. Generally, people will then show all the ads for anything to the audience that has the highest conversion rate in the hopes that anybody buys anything. And I mean, that's a way to make money, but essentially, you're just turning Facebook into Google shopping. And again, I don't hate it, but those ads fatigue quickly. The CPMs on them are generally much higher than average, and it's a great way to make money, but a

56:22very difficult way to produce cash flow. because those people are buying from you for any different reason. So, the likelihood that they're going to buy again for the same reason is almost zero. Um, great. Great for performance, terrible for growth. And do you do you like recommend like having your your one campaign like this like that goes broad and everything and

56:46having this running like on the side? Um, I have cannibalistic. It is cannibalistic. It is aggressive. I also don't hate it. Um, if I can get that campaign out of the learning phase, I might spend five or 10% of my budget on that campaign with the ads that are no longer good enough for my one campaign. One of my favorite things to do is take all the ads that fatigued and throw them into advantage shopping or cost caps and just see if I can get anything more out of it because I know this ad isn't good for me anymore. So, I'm basically it's like a second chance

57:24drawing to see if I can make any more cash. And if I get a cheap win on a negligible portion of my budget, awesome. If I have a $100 to stay, I might spend five there. Um, but until I'm spending a couple hundred dollars, I probably can't get enough volume of transactions to get this thing out of the learning phase. And if I can't do

57:42that, then it's a waste of my time. That's a nice tip. And what do you think about this one? And I've seen some guys talk about this like one campaign and then you have like a you know different type of you know tough tough muff buff. Yeah, this is interestingly enough if you are not using audience. Now if you do this in a CBO you can do it where these are top of funnel mid bottom funnel by audience um and in that case I would say you know it's not 2018 anymore we've evolved we have we have advanced matching um just the world is different today you don't

58:20need 10 years ago this is what all my stuff looked like now it's completely obsolete however if these are done by concept of the ad you've essentially done the one campaign structure It's just instead of having hero campaign or your winners's ad set with two other ideas, you just have three creative tests running alongside of each other and you're trying to manage how much is

58:45spent in one place or the other. It's trying to take an old idea and more appropriately an idea that works for paid media platforms that aren't social media. So, it's an idea that works for Google. It's an idea that works for email and for affiliate that you're then trying to push into Facebook. And interestingly enough, most of the people that I see teach this are folks where Facebook is not their first platform or they haven't really meaningfully run ads since like 2015, 2018. Um, most of the people that I see, not all of them, and by no means do I see most of the people that do stuff. Uh, I my feed is no

59:26longer full of great Facebook advice. It's usually full of questions, so I don't get to see as many new ideas as as I would like. Okay. Uh what about like the the cataloges mean, you know, because there's like two or three main like different setups to run it, right? Sure. Like the advantage flash shopping catalog, the catalog for remarketing, the one that you you tell us about the

59:50prospecting catalog, right? Where you just put it broad and you put the little button that says, "Okay, go and find." And that's the one that you say that goes in the checkouts of other Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So, I I'll say this. I mean, I just dropped a twohour long course video on my Disruptor Academy YouTube channel. Um I think it's called How to Crush Catalog Ads at Any Budget. Um and so that's got extreme detail, but I'll say this, I love catalog ads. I think they're I love them for three reasons. One, they have no learning phase and and they don't fatigue. Love that. Two, they show

1:00:31people the thing they're interested in whether or not they've shown interest from you. So, you're talking about stealing sales from other people. If I've been on five other people's stores and looked at an item and I haven't bought, the machine is scouring other cataloges that have that same kind of item and they're going to show them to me. If I'm in market for a red pair of shoes, red pair of trainers, and I just didn't buy from Adidas or from, you know, uh, Nike or from Reebok or Puma or Sakone or whatever, then I'm going to

1:00:59get hit up with like a New Balance ad. Shout out, I used to run their ads, but like uh like I'm going to get hit up with that because Facebook knows I'm clicking on ads with red shoes. I'm shopping around. So I en I enjoy I engage with my experience on the platform is better because I'm seeing that ad and hopefully I buy from it. So it's me telling the machine what I'm looking for based on my behavior both on and offline and then them doing a great job of showing me things that I like. And a carousel ad, which most catalog ads are, I can just swipe through is a really

1:01:34engaging way. You can spend five minutes just scrolling through all the little square pictures. That's infinitely more time than you spend looking at a picture and moving on. So, I love catalog and uh I do prospecting with it. I do retargeting with it. And um we don't nearly have enough time to get through everything here today, but I did, like I said, on my Disruptor Academy YouTube channel um you can find a two-hour course video that I made in partnership with the people that make the best catalog tools um called Marpipe. uh good friend of mine uh Dan uh and then what they're doing is fantastic. So I love it. I use

1:02:14it and I will say this too. If you don't have a hero product, maybe a print ondemand store, you have a wide skew count, but you have maybe a hero like you know people that buy a Bigfoot t-shirt are more likely to come back and buy another one. Whatever it is, you could absolutely use cataloges as your hero product, as your hero campaign. And in that case, what you're doing is you're curating the items that are shown so that ultimately you're showing them different categories of you're showing them a bunch of different variations within a category. Um, and in that case, you might say, "Well, I'm a print on

1:02:51demand t-shirt store. I've got 300 different products." I'd say, "No, you have two. You have t-shirts and sweaters. You've got a hundred variations, but you only sell two things." And then catalog ads are a great way to push them. You Do you have any takes on like simple ways we can use AI to le leverage

1:03:16our creative output? Um yeah, I mean I think leveraging AI is awesome. I actually have a video coming out very soon talking about this. Uh actually have two videos. one how to use nano banana and arc ads to make really like unhinged creative and a second one talking about how way too many people try to get AI to do all the heavy lifting but most of the ads are So I have two opinions but all that to be said um I think it is not worth people's time to try to get really good at all of the AI

1:03:54platforms on making content. What I do think you should be doing is trying to understand what content works. I love using AI to write copy to try to see what headlines or primary texts or captions or concepts people might be interested in. I love using AI as a research tool. Um, when it comes to using AI to make your ads, like I said, I have a video coming out very soon on nano banana and arc ads, which will be interesting and

1:04:31fun. Um, I will say this, AI is a phenomenal tool. Words matter the most. So using ads to using AI to do research to build the best ads and and get the best words is a great way of doing things. Um what I caution people against is taking the bait of using AI to make

1:05:04as many ads as possible. I think March 25th, 2025, Chat GPT 4.0 0 image generator came out and everybody can make any ad they wanted and for like a week it was amazing. The problem is when everybody can make something and it all looks the same and you can pump out a hundred ideas for a penny, you ultimately don't have anything of value because you've optimized for volume. And um I'm more interested in the actionability of the insight of the data. I would rather get 10 ads that really work rather than a thousand ads

1:05:44that might. And uh so when I'm using AI, my favorite AI for ads is the flexible ad function on Facebook. Give me three creatives, two primary text, two headlines, build a 322 ad, let it build it thing together. We call dynamic creative. That's the greatest ad AI on the face of the planet outside of maybe catalog. Catalog might even be better because it just shows somebody what they want, but it's not really creative. Um, but that's the best way of doing it. So, think of AI as a way of doing research and deploying

1:06:20ideas. Don't think of AI as a way to produce a ton of really bad things. If you have a hundred cooks in the kitchen, none of the food's going to taste good. And if all the food at every restaurant tastes the same, no one is special. If you want to make money, competing to be ignorable is a really

1:06:46bad investment. So, you're more into the quality rather than quantity. But there's also this this force that volume brings you quality at the same time. Yeah. If you have enough money, if you're spending $100,000 a day, run 50 new ads. Sure. Yeah. The point is, yeah, just hire M. Hire Steph Curry to wear your sneakers. Get Messy to wear your shirt. Go for it. If you got a 100 mil to blow on a celebrity endorsement, it seems like you're going to make some money. Um, Charlie, but if that's not an available tool,

1:07:28don't try to leverage that option. What What would be like us brands that doing maybe 20, 50, 100K a month on e-commerce? Like maybe not such a big team. Maybe we have one, two, three persons on our creative team. We try to work with influencers or content creators. like what what what would you think is like a healthy output of ads or or like a healthy routine for ads to to

1:07:56come up a week? Yeah. A month. If if I have like a one or two person creative team, I'm going to I'm going to see what we can do. Well, um, I'm dealing with a business where they make amazing videos. So, their creative team needs to start hammering out images or we outsource it. I've got other people that are great at images. We need to hammer away on video

1:08:20or outsource it. Lean into what you do. Well, my buddies at Portland Leather Goods got to $100 million a year before ever running a video. And I've worked with plenty of other brands that do 100 million and only do video. The point is there's no real correct balance or path. It's do what you do well. What I would suggest with your team is understand the skill sets and the value. If you're amazing at running at creating videos, you better have really highly converting landing pages because you're going to get a whole bunch of

1:08:58lowquality attention for dirt cheap. Okay, but we know what we're good at. We know what we need to do. That's fine. If you're phenomenal at making images and copy that converts, then try to outsource the attention getting effort. One of my favorite ways of doing that that I've done for years because I'm terrible at creative is I'll go to I'll go to creators for me. I I'll

1:09:24get influencers. I'll get UGC makers. One of my number one recommendations for brands last year, this year, and will be forever is run partnership ads. Whether it used to be whitelisting, you can now have a whole other tool called partnership. Get people who don't look like your customer to talk about your product. that ad will appeal and will be shown to people who don't look like the folks who are currently buying from you. That's a really really easy way to be way more

1:09:54successful. It's like a like a non and I would definitely focus on that if we can um because it's a really cheap way to reach a whole bunch of new individuals. um when it comes to uh what I would do on a team outside of that is understand what else on the team I need to do. Well, um if my landing page is converted below 1%, either I'm phenomenal at getting attention or I'm terrible at getting people interested to buy. I've got a lot of opportunities, but ultimately what I want to do is understand what are my skills, what are the things I'm exceptional at. And then

1:10:37what are the rest of the things that I can outsource or directly improve upon that are the counterpoint to my skill set. So again, that brand that's phenomenal at videos, we are getting somebody to make images because it's not what they're good at. the brand that is phenomenal at copywriting and has a newsletter that's amazing. We're getting outside people to make videos to talk about it that don't look like the brand itself. Um, I'm doing that right now with the men's wear business and all we're doing is we're getting women to make videos and we're getting women to talk to women about the business because the number

1:11:14one opportunity for growth isn't getting more men to buy for themselves. It's getting more women to buy for the men and tell the men this is great. But understand where that underleveraged opportunity is and then focus on that. And um you can have 10 people inhouse or it can be a one-person show. Uh whatever you're not good at, outsource. Uh when I run brands and I'm my businesses, I'm terrible at creative and I'm a oneperson show. I will absolutely get on camera myself to make videos, but more importantly, I just get my customers to talk for me. I'll use templates from tools like Creative OS to get

1:11:51testimonials turned into images. Um, I I'll do anything I can to figure out how do I in the most effective way leverage other people's expertise and experience in the things that I am the worst at. Does that make sense? Yeah, for sure. And you mentioned like um you mentioned um the you mentioned creative OS as your like primary tool for you and you also me so is this thing that lets you like make different templates from it's like um uh how do you say um swipe file right of millions of ads and then you you do that uh sure that's great I don't use I didn't use

1:12:37this one uh you you mentioned Arats, are there any other software tools and stuff that really like move the needle or you love when it comes to ad creation or making ads? Um, I mean, I think my number one I'm seeing it on your screen here, they have not officially uh announce the release of this option yet. So,

1:13:03Foreplay is uh the bounty option. Foreplay is about to release this thing any day now. They they paid me to make a video, so full disclosure. Um, but I also really liked it and it basically paid for the editor is what more or less of what happened. Um, but they have a thing called Bounty and what you're going to be able to do

1:13:27is say, "Oh, I like all of these brands. I like these 10 ads or these 20 ads or whatever. I want somebody to make it for me. This is my budget. This is the landing page of my product. This is my business. And it will send, you can see it up there in the upper left. Bounties. You

1:13:42see it? Oh, boom. Click on that. You can with this. This says it's uh so yeah, you're you're getting you're they they released it like today. As of three hours ago, this was not in your foreplay. So there you go. Um, you see it says coming soon. It's coming soon. If you just click post the bounty real

1:14:03quick, let me just just click on this. Oh, it's not let you. Oh, okay. I didn't know where I didn't know where they were at. But the point is you're going to be able to say these are the 10 ads I like. I have a budget of a hundred bucks, 5,000, whatever it is. And people will bid on that work. Think of it as like Fiverr, but instead of any random person with Canva, it's their proven creators bidding for your work. This is going to change everything. It will replace 90% of the ads that are AI that actually work. I don't think it'll actually eliminate most the AI ads, but that's

1:14:46because I think everybody's finding a way to get a cheat code and um the cheat code of do good work is a wildly underleveraged one. But uh I love this. Hopefully it's going to come out before October 31st. Oh no, that's their uh that's their other thing. So what they've done, by the way, right here

1:15:06is Foreplay has posted a bounty. Now, their bounty isn't uh make an ad. Their bounty is use N8N or Gum Loop or anything else with their API and just build a tool. The whoever builds the best tool with Foreplay's API gets five grand. So now you can gify and make an open market. And um this I think is going to be the coolest thing cuz you're like you see video editor, creative strategist, stuff like that. Oh, I need

1:15:46videos done. I've got footage. Cool. Here are the five videos I really like. I want to make them for my business. Awesome. I can spend a hundred bucks or a thousand. Great. This is my landing page. And then send and effectively making a marketplace. That is going to be sexy. And I can't wait to drop the video. It's done. I have a video from my editor ready to go. I just need two screen shares. I need to go through their bounty to have a little bit of B-roll and then publish the damn thing to YouTube. But I'm sitting on like 20 minutes on what that's going to

1:16:15be. Uh that I can't post it yet. So, one of these days I'm going to be posting it pretty soon. Um I do want to give a shout out to another cool called Pressmaster.ai. Press Masters. Um, it is not an ad maker, but it will make your ads a lot better because Pressmaster is a great way of it's essentially an AI tool for a press

1:16:47uh for like a PR team. Oh, okay. And really, it's not like a chat GPT rapper. um what they do which I love and I think I did I have a video for them too that's coming out soon that because I was like this is rad. I got to make a video on it because I make videos on tools that I like. Um and they were like

1:17:05okay they paid my editor to do the work. I'm like awesome. So I'm getting more YouTube content and I don't have to pay my editor. They do it for me. Happy days. What I like about this tool is you can put into it trending topics. You can tell it what you're looking for. They call it like a trend master um and some other stuff. I forgot the internal

1:17:28tools. Uh trend master. There it is. Yeah. So uh what it will do is it'll bring you all the viral content and all the trending content on that topic. And then if you want to, you can have an app on your phone. You can go into here. You can say, "Hey, write an article from my perspective on this thing." Which sounds like write me a tweet. But what I love is that you can actually, this is what there's called their social suite. So you can see it. And if you look at this, there's no m dashes. You're not delving into something. It's not chatpt. What happens is it will then interview you

1:18:01like a journalist. And I do it live in my video is like takes less than 10 minutes to be like find me ideas. Awesome. So it just sends you content like here's a new trending idea on something you could talk about. So mine in my video I did it on Black Friday strategies and it was like how do you know what to do? And it was like X Y and Z. And then it just interviews you. And I just talked to my computer, right? It opened up the little microphone, answered it five or six questions, and it wrote a three to 600word article for me. Now, the beauty is I can publish

1:18:33that everywhere all at once. It sounds exactly like me because it is me. I don't have to do any of the research on what to talk about. And the beauty is this is getting attention and building authority so that the by the time my ad hits somebody, I'm not letting them know I exist. I'm not trying to convince them that I'm

1:18:55legitimate. By the time the ad hits, somebody's ready to buy and um it works pretty well. Uh I I I uh I have not needed to really edit the work that it does. And um so again, maybe I'll I I probably need to get an affiliate code for them because I'm pretty sure it's going to be something I talk about a bit more. Uh but I do have a video where I walk through the process. I think it's really smart. Um and again, it's just how do we solve the problem in a better way? So Pressmaster

1:19:28fills your funnel without using ads. Now, you could also make an ad out of it, right? Who's to say you don't turn that article into a script or you just take a screenshot of a tweet and post it on Instagram like Hermosi or whatever. Go for it. You could post 10 a day. So, I love that. And then Foreplays Bounty is going to be an amazing way for you to be like, I don't have to have a creative team anymore. I have a budget and I know what I like. I don't know how to do it. I don't know what to pay, but this is how much I can afford. This is

1:20:03what I want. and just find me something. You're replacing entire departments for a fraction of the cost. And I love it. It these are the types of tool. These are the AI or lack of AI tools that I really like to use. Um but yeah, what I'm not using is chat GPT image generator to produce Facebook ads. You're not using that. I I I think I told people to do it and I showed them exactly how to do it, but that was in like the five days where it was bonkers and then they restricted everybody and then they brought it back, but all the ads look worse and now just everybody's

1:20:42done it. It is very easy when you go through your feed to be like, "Oh, chat, that's made by chat. That's made by chat." Like, it just looks the same. Have you tried these these guys? Um, I know those guys. Um, they're like Arc Ads. Um, they're they're okay. They have a really great

1:21:01idea. Yeah, I think they are essentially becoming an ad agency right now. Um, they sold a lot of people on the big dream. They got a lot of money in and a lot of clients.

1:21:30I don't know if every I I I have not run across people like oh man the secret to my ad account is I use icon. Um, and to be fair, I haven't seen that with Arc Ads or with Chat GPT or I either you have somebody on your team that's dedicating their entire day to getting better and better at AI ads and you have the budget to just fail a thousand times or you're using AI for leverage, but you're not actually asking it to make any of your ads at scale. Um, that that's kind of my position. So Charlie, what what I tried icon like it's also like oh they sell you that

1:22:10it's going to be your everything and I quite like the mo the thing that I like the most was that it made a lot of creative testing that they were like kind of okay that I could search other ads and replicate them and it was like kind of amazing and the fact that I can just press a button and the thing will publish like a lot of ads directly into the ads manager and I wouldn't have to do the pain in the ass work of putting every ad. So are there any other platforms that like are good on creating ads and you you can just embed them like

1:22:41on create the one that you mentioned the the creative I creative OS creative OS does that like plug in the app directly? No creative OS is a template for Figma or for Canva. You still have to do work. Um, I don't know of any tool that makes a good ad and publishes it. Um, I honestly I don't know of a tool

1:23:07that makes good ads. Publishing ads is easy. Um, so I think for me uh I haven't seen a solution to that. And there's another tool that I'm using called ad manage lately which it lets you launch like ads from an Excel spreadsheet or Google sheet. So you could theoretically launch a 100 ads at once if you want to which I basically just use for Golden Bear. Um and that's

1:23:41fun. But the bottom line is the ads that make you the most money are the ones that have been running for a long time. The ads that I've spent $100,000 on or a million on were ones that were designed to be good or were just random social media posts that took off. What I have yet to see is anybody spend a million bucks on an ad that was produced exclusively by AI, but I've definitely seen people lose a million dollars testing a thousand AI ads. So, uh, the path to success is not hundreds and hundreds of ads that all spend a thousand bucks. It's getting a couple of

1:24:34ads that spend $100,000 a piece. I I I really hope that what we get out of all of this is that the most valuable investment is the simple one that works. Complexity, volume. Honestly, being really clever is a great way to lose a ton of money. Um, the time and effort you spend on all of these other things could be spent on improving your conversion rate. or your average order value or getting more people to buy a second time or getting better at email. Um, remember that Facebook ads are the top of the funnel of your marketing efforts and they're essentially the least

1:25:25profitable sale your business will make. Trying to make the least profitable sale a lot better almost always translates to just really efficient sales but at much lower volume. It is the least profitable way to make the business better. Um your rorowaz will go up until you go out of business and I see it all the time. So, um, again, I love AI for research. I

1:26:01love AI for copywriting. I love AI for scripting. Um, but I'm not having it generate the stuff. Um, and maybe there are people who are better than me and that's all they do and it's amazing and we've all seen some tweet from some person that made some ridiculous amount of money making it work and that's cool. If it's legit,

1:26:26awesome. That's the 1%. Um, the problem if you hit that is that unless you can repeat it, it's not a business. And um every business I've built is on the back of repeatable processes that are stable, measurable, projectable, and scalable. And that's why I've been a part of half a dozen exits over the last five years for over eight figures. And I built a couple been a part of building a couple brands that are in the nine figure range. Um that's because my focus is not how do I make $1,000 today. My focus is how do I six months from now have $5,000 every day. And I think

1:27:17that's and the honest truth is make less than you're worth right away. Work harder than you feel like you should. And eventually things will turn around that all this the shiny object looks better. But that takes time. And I've been doing this for 13 years. Um, I've never seen anybody rely on cheap wins and hacks to build sustainable success. I've seen a lot of people try. I've never seen anybody actually do it. So, that's maybe my overly philosophical parting shot for I love it. I love it. Charlie, thanks for taking us to First Principles. And I think that we are now at the end. Um, is

1:28:00there any any question that you would have liked me to ask you? Oh, great question. Um, I was in my favorite to ask people. Um, I think just given the time of year, it would have been like, do you have any tips for Black Friday and stuff like that? Okay. Um, and my number one piece of advice for Black Friday is you should launch your offer tomorrow. My number one tip for Black Friday is know how much money you want to make and try to make it all by

1:28:36November 1st. Um, and the number one way to make money on Black Friday. Remember the golden rule. Black Friday is not about running your ads at a discount. Black Friday is either an opportunity to sell your products at a discount or to buy customers at a discount. People who spend less are less brand loyal. Black Friday is an amazing way to get people who are willing to spend more money to do it for cheaper. So instead of selling that $50 item, which normally cost us 10 bucks to make the sale, instead of selling it for 35 so you can get more, sell the $100 item, but

1:29:18instead of the CPA being 30, maybe get it for 20. That is the way you do the job. And in my opinion, I'd be like, "How can I sell a $200 thing for 50?" That's immediately where I'm going. Um, and uh, that would be my number one piece of advice is start right now with the highest AOV you can possibly get and know that the closer you get to Black Friday, the lower the CPA will be on that really high AOV. and just figure out what the market wants. Set your targets and your goal should be to meet it with the month of November being free

1:29:56money. And at that point, just don't spend too much. My favorite Black Friday move is to not spend a penny on Black Friday. Like spending money on Black Friday is awesome for the Shopify screenshot, terrible for the bank account. If I can make if I need to make a million dollars on Black Friday, I'm gonna try to get 800,000 by the 1 of November. And then the other 200,000 before Black Friday hits. And then on Black Friday, I'm sending an email. And maybe I'll do some retargeting campaigns at really small budgets. And as we move further and further away, I'll ramp my stuff back up. But

1:30:38I uh I made a million dollars for business on Black Friday once by literally not running an ad. They wanted to spend like $400,000 on on ad spend. And the year before they had spent 200 and had made $800,000 in revenue. So 600 grand in profit. And so the next year what I did is spent nothing. They made a million in revenue and it was all

1:31:04profit. And uh that was a fun situation because they're called like where are the Black Friday ads? I'm like we're making money. Don't worry about it. and uh they panicked and then called me the next day and apologized for waking me up at five o'clock in the morning, which I appreciate. Uh I was a good I get it. But um anyway, that that's that's where I would go. But with but that being

1:31:28said, man, uh I appreciate your time. It's been about an hour and a half and and everybody here and um you know, if you want to see more of me, I I run disruptor school. Just type in disruptor Facebook. I'll probably come up. Oscar, you know where to find me. Disruptorschool.com. I'm on YouTube. All that fun stuff. But um my number one thing I'm trying to tell people about is

1:31:52Disruptor Academy. I've got a little thing on school. It's about 150 bucks a month. If I can make you $5 a day, it pays for itself. And uh we've got multiple brands in there doing real big money. So anyway, check it out. And I built that bundle that you see on the homepage. Um if you don't want to do

1:32:10a subscription, check out that bundle. It's like 650 bucks. It comes with 30-day free trial to the academy. Um, and a bunch of other stuff. So, if you don't like communities, you just want all the stuff right away. That's every every one of my top selling master classes in one spot and it's like 70% off. So, more than a few people have taken that and been really happy. Plus, you get a gift card. So, it's basically, you know, it pays for itself. Um, but yeah, that being said, man,

1:32:39I will let you go. Thank you, Charlie. Go check. And thank you, Oscar. I appreciate it. I had some other slides we didn't even get to. I think we could have probably gone on for another three hours and gotten through half the questions you had, but I won't shut up, so I apologize. Charlie, what is your the song that you would recommend for us to listen? Give me Some or Naked Dirty Cake. Like your

1:33:03favorite Dirty Cake song. Oh man. Um, let's do Give Me Some. I love that video. the the the give me some video is so great with the with the with the puppets and stuff. A buddy of mine built that. I still love it. Um and it's got good energy. It's amazing. But uh Yeah. Yeah. So Charlie, thanks a lot. Thanks

1:33:22for your time. Really appreciate it. Thanks for all the value that you have gave us today and uh see you in YouTube. You're always there and bless. I'm always there, man. Uh Friday lives, man. I I don't know if you've been a part of the Friday lives, but every morning, Friday, 9:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, I'm live on YouTube for an hour just answering questions and helping people out. Uh so, uh yeah, with that being said, dude, I'm going to let

1:33:48you go. I'm finishing up this script. Take care, Charlie. Thank you.

1:33:58Wow.

1:34:22E-commerce.