Edition #4 Like You Do Sometimes, Grandpa?

Have you ever been on a video call with a bunch of other people, and innocently, very innocently at first, you start checking your email (a slippery slope indeed, because you're really still working) and before you know it you're shopping for flannel throw blankets, checking the price of GameStop, texting your mom, tooling with your vocabulary flashcards, or wondering why the Kinship app exists?

... then, like some ghoulish voice echoing through the ether, you hear your name out loud?

Who?! Huh!? Me!? you think frantically, violent butterflies swarming up your esophagus like bile.

You're pretty sure the words that either prefaced or followed your name were, "what do you think about that?" or, "want to take that one?"

We've all been there. I've seen this happen a few times over the past couple weeks. I've been the recipient and perpetrator of this untowardly treatment more times than I care to count.

If you're on a Zoom or Google Meet, and you want/need to call on someone from our team to answer a question, and you're not absolutely sure whoever you're calling has been paying attention, then don't just say, "Want to answer that one, Marcus?"

Rephrase the question with your teammates' name FIRST. "Marcus, do you have some thoughts about how we might limit display impressions in a PMAX campaign?"

TL;DR: Be aware. Have good court sense on calls. Don't ascribe better attention spans than you'd want anyone else to ascribe to you.

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”

- Albert Einstein

Unfiltered Stories From the Heart of the Agency: Chapter 4

Like You Do Sometimes, Grandpa?

At some point during most of these stories, I’ve found myself wondering, what the hell am I doing here? In this case, my father-in-law—a Romanian immigrant—was probably thinking just that as he found himself on my parent’s sofa in front of an eight-person camera crew with little-piglet plush puppets capping his callused fingers.

Just before Covid shut the world down, we are invited to pitch a business that needed an agency to help raise awareness and sales for nine drugs spanning three therapeutic categories. I made a few calls to other advertising CEOs, and each one told me not to bother. Big Pharma, they said, would never give an account like this to an agency with no Big Pharma experience. They were all correct, but they were also wrong. Of course it was worth our time to pitch—I couldn’t imagine slogging through life with such a finite, rational, and desultory worldview.

David Sable gave Ari and me this advice: Don’t try to compete. Instead, show them that AdVenture is more fun, more creative, and more excited for the business than any other competing agency. They’re just people … make them smile.

Somehow, the idea to shoot a parody of the prospect's most popular TV commercials for Symbicort took shape. But these were complex spots. They included live-action filming and custom animation. The first few quotes we received came in at close to $500,000. We needed to bring that number down somewhere between 98 and 99%. And we had 14 days to script, shoot, edit and animate the video, and submit the actual RFP, which consisted of 100+ long answer questions, six presentations, and multiple statistical analyses.

We found a fledgling animation studio in Brooklyn. But they couldn’t do live-action. After three days of non-stop calling, emailing, and networking, I found a freelance team out of NYC that was willing to film the live-action portion for eight grand as long as I’d give them another ten if we signed the account. Cool beans.

The commercial needed a grandfather and a grandson. We used my son to play the grandson and my father-in-law agreed to play the grandfather. We replicated the Symbicort wardrobe (thanks, Amazon), complete with the little-piglet finger puppets. Expenses were adding up, and Nechama wouldn’t pass within twenty feet of me all that week—she was mortified by my profligacy.

We decide to film the live-action at my parent’s house in Huntington. My father-in-law kept forgetting his lines, and my son kept demanding a train set in exchange for his compliance. At one point, Ronnie grabbed him, shook him violently, and said, “Shut the hell up kid. If you do a good job and we get this account, your papa will buy you an actual train.”

A few days later, when it was finally clear that China was shipping us something without a cheap label and the markets were taking a nosedive, we were at a meeting with another client at their hallmark conference in New York. I remember excusing myself to go to the bathroom, only to sneak into a keynote event and listen to over fifty voiceover options for our pitch that our animation studio in Brooklyn had sent us. It was all so strange, but also so much fun.

We went through what felt like a thousand revisions to the script, but finally, we had the video. It was pretty damn good. It was pretty damn funny. It was crazy how we pulled it off. The prospect's team loved it. We watched real-time Google Analytics as the video was circulated through their multiple US offices.

We didn’t win the account, but I can point to at least seven or eight different clients we’ve signed since then as a direct result of the skills, research, analysis and thinking we developed throughout the pitch. The video was a small, awesome project that may be seen as a colossal waste of time and money, but I don’t see it that way. I’ll never see it that way, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

P.S: I never got my son the train, not even a Lionel. Those things are expensive. But I did get him a single wooden little Thomas, which he threw out of the car window on the way home.

What's Going On At AdVenture

We start our weekly Monday morning "run-up" with an AdVenture team member sharing something they're passionate about. We've learned about everything from water diets to what it's like being a Girl Scout and how to find unclaimed funds. The topics are endless.

Recently, Ash, one of our account managers, shared that she typically reads 30 books a month. Yup, you read that right. She put the rest of the team's reading to shame.

Naturally, this sparked the idea of starting a monthly book club at the office. This week we're holding our very first session, and we'll be digging into "The Thursday Murder Club" by Richard Osmond.

We're looking forward to the team's theories on this one—it's sure to spark some lively debate.

Profit on ad spend (POAS)

A thought on advertising

Let's talk about POAS—profit on ad spend vs. calculating return on ad spend. I love this strategy. We’ve done it time and again, and I brag about it all the time. Our most-shared client case study is about this strategy, and Patrick dedicates an entire chapter in his book to how advertisers should do this if they want to profitably scale their advertising.

… but some accounts are not there yet. You may be making it too complicated for Google to make decisions on your behalf.

It’s a more complex bid strategy. More complex strategies require much more data to be effective.

Max Conversions is the simplest smart bidding strategy. Google’s algorithm interprets this as: “spend the entire budget, generating as many conversions as possible.” The key optimization variable is predicted conversion rate. It doesn’t care about the value of the conversions, or the costs to acquire the conversions… it’s just looking to find cohorts of auctions with slightly higher expected conversion rates.

On a limited budget, this generally leads to lower CPCs and lower CPAs; the only way to truly maximize conversions is to also maximize clicks and find the lowest-cost conversions available. 

With larger (or unlimited) budgets, this strategy leads to very high CPAs and diminishing returns.

Target CPA is slightly more complex. It tells Google, “go get as many conversions as possible, but only those that convert within a given CPA range. It the target is $100, and one cohort converts at $150/conversion, then you need to balance that with an equal cohort of $50/conversion; if you can’t do that, don’t spend any budget on the $150 cohort.”

Once you get into value-based bidding: Max Conversion Value, tROAS, or with tPOAS, it gets ever more complex.

Because now, Google isn’t just attempting to predict conversion rate… we’re now expecting Google to also predict the value of each conversion.

With tROAS/tPOAS, we’re giving it constraints about which auctions to enter, based on whether we’ll hit those targets.

But before you implement more advanced bidding strategies, ask yourself, do we have enough data for Google to do this accurately? If you are not getting 30 - 50 weekly/conversions yet, we should talk... 

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