Brand Ads: Brilliant Long Game or Bottom-Line Killer?

Let’s cut the malarkey—everyone says they want to build a brand, but the minute someone asks, “Can we measure that?” they reach for the nearest spreadsheet like it’s a life preserver.

In this episode of Advertising in America, the fellas crack open the great marketing mystery: Do brand ads actually work, or are they just smoke, mirrors, and Madison Avenue charm?

Ryan, Mick, and Chris wade chin-deep into the murky waters of measurement, myth, and marketing madness. They expose why most data is as crooked as a two-dollar watch, why digital’s obsession with clicks has made us all a little dumber, and what actually matters when it comes to results.

Episode Highlights:

• Why “slash-radio” URLs are marketing’s version of asking a customer to do your homework
• How trying to measure everything can wreck your brand faster than a bad jingle
• What real indicators of success look like (hint: it's not your CTR)
• And why RC Cola doesn’t advertise—and nobody drinks it
  
  

This episode’s for the marketers stuck in a metrics maze and the founders brave enough to bet on branding. Because in the real world, you don’t build a brand with one great ad—you build it with a thousand consistent ones.

🎧 Hit play. Then stop measuring the wrong things and start saying something worth remembering.

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 On today's episode of Advertising in America, we wanna know how brand ads measure up. Is branding all hype or is there money in them? Their heels? People don't see an ad and then go and buy your thing. Your confusing advertising with hypnotism advertising works when you have a singular, consistent, relevant message that you repeatedly expose your audience to, so they equate you with the problem you solve or the benefit you bring them.

If you don't know what success looks like, well then how will you know when you've achieved it? So measurement is good. When we measure the success of our clients, we measure top-line revenue. How much money are you making? This is more important than nearly anything else. 

Even those famous ads didn't really move the needle. They were part of a continuous, ongoing campaign to share a message that would resonate with consumers over time. So why try measuring any one ad, or even any one channel, when we know it takes more than that, it's all working. The biggest advertisers are generally the biggest brands.

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Ryan Chute: On today's episode of Advertising in America. We wanna know how brand ads measure up. Is branding all hype or is there money in them their hills? Mick, what do you say? 

Mick Torbay: How do you measure success? It's pretty much the first thing we ask a client. If you don't know what success looks like, well then, how will you know when you've achieved it?

So measurement is good. Now, when we measure the success of our clients, we measure top-line revenue. How much money are you making? This is more important than nearly anything else. So why do we spend so much time measuring other stuff? I blame digital. 

Connecting a sale to an ad is a relatively new idea. Back in the days of your, you'd put an ad in the paper, maybe run some TV commercials and hope the phone would ring, and for the most part it did. If you did your advertising well and you ran a good business, success was pretty much assured. Then digital came along and started connecting dots that had never been connected before. Because of the nature of the medium, digital can connect a click to a purchase, and that has changed. Everything because literally nobody had ever walked into a store with a clipped out newspaper ad or declared to the owner of the store, “I saw your ad on TV and I've decided to purchase your product or service”. So yeah, cool. 

With digital, you could now run an ad and see how many people responded. Digital came with data, and data is awesome until it's not. You see, the mistake that we began making was to conclude that if we are unable to directly connect a sale to an ad, then that means the ad didn't work. But wait, based on that logic, no ad ever worked ever before Google came along, and that's just not true. Advertising has been making people rich for centuries, even before Google proved that it's effective. And Heisenberg's principle applies here too. And if you don't know what Heisenberg's principle is, then you have no business measuring anything. Werner Heisenberg proved that the very act of measuring something changes the result, and that applies to everything. If you want to know the temperature of a liquid, you use a thermometer, but if the current temperature of the thermometer is higher than the liquid, then it'll warm the liquid up a bit. When you put it in. If it's lower, it will cool it. The only way to get an accurate reading is to ensure that the thermometer is the exact same temperature as the thing you're measuring only You don't know what that is until you measure it. It works across the board, even in advertising. 

And here's an example. I recently heard a radio ad for Indeed, the job posting website, but at the very end of the ad, they made a huge mistake. They said, “Visit indeed.com/radio.”

Well, wait just a minute. Indeed, you're trying to measure stuff, aren't you? You want to know if radio works, so you're gonna ask your customer to help with your marketing. This is always a bad idea. They don't give one 10th of one shit about the fact that you don't know how marketing works. So you give out this stupid web address and you're trying to collect data.

If a hundred people type indeed.com/radio into their browser, well then that means radio brought in a hundred customers. Wrong. Heisenberg, I type I-N-D-E-E-D. And at the end of at that point, Google just jumps in and goes, “You want Indeed, right? Just press the return key. I'll take you there”. I won't get a chance to put the soup and fricking slash radio in because Google already figured out what I want and they gave it to me.

So now you think you're gathering data, and the data will be wrong, simply because you measured it. Because first of all, nobody remembers your stupid long tail to begin with on your website when we know we can find your website without it, and two, I'm driving to work and I can barely remember the name of your brand, let alone your stupid web address. And three, the system will bypass it even if I wanted to. So now you've got shit data, and even worse, you're gonna make decisions based on it. It's actually better to not know things than to think you know things and then make decisions based on the stuff you for real don't know. And that's what you're doing when you play these tricks to try and measure your advertising, a different phone number on TV compared to the one on your trucks or on your website.

Which one worked well? What if I saw your ad on TV and then looked it up on your website? Wrong phone number, wrong dot connected. Bad data ,and now you're gonna make decisions based on that. Heisenberg understood this. Stop pretending to be measuring stuff that can't be accurately measured. You know what? We can measure how much money you're making. That's how we are judged at Wizard of Ads. Anything else is just wasting your time with stuff that doesn't matter. Digital marketing companies want you to measure other stuff because they don't actually know how to make you more money. They know how to get you more clicks. But in the digital marketing world, clicks cost you money. So put that in your pipe and measure it. 

Ryan Chute: This just does not compute with me. Mick, wanna peek behind the curtain on how Wizards measure marketing? Check out the book Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads by our partner Roy H. Williams. Until then, though, Chris, maybe you can help me cook mixed books.

Chris Torbay: There's an old chestnut. You used to hear from marketing people all the time. “Only 50% of my ads are working. The problem is, I don't know which 50%. Uh uh, clever you.” The thinking being, I'd rather just pay for the ads that bring me customers and not pay for the ads that are purely a waste of money. Well, that's not how it works. People don't see an ad and then go and buy your thing. You're confusing advertising with hypnosis. Advertising works when you have a singular, consistent, relevant message that you repeatedly expose your audience to, so they equate you with the problem you solve or the benefit you bring them.

And every place your brand connects with your audience contributes to that. All of your advertising contributes to that. So why waste your time trying to dissect it? And the big agencies don't help matters, by the way, by continuously presenting new ideas, saying, “We got a great idea for an ad. This one's really gonna get some attention.”

There's no such thing as a killer ad. No one builds a brand with an ad. Sure, there are some great single ads in history that really stand out. Where's the “Beef for Wendy's” or “What's up” for Budweiser? But generally, brands become successful by advertising lots and often, and it all contributes. Even those famous ads didn't really move the needle. They were part of a continuous, ongoing campaign to share a message that would resonate with consumers over time. So why try measuring any one ad or even any one channel when we know it takes more than that? It's all working. The biggest advertisers generally are the biggest brands. Coke used to have a saying at head office if it moves, sponsor it. If it doesn't move, paint it red. And they advertise all over the place. And they're pretty big. Do they care? Which of those things make you want to buy a Coke today? They do not. Pepsi also advertises all over the place, and they are also pretty successful. You know who doesn't advertise? RC Cola. I wonder if that has anything to do with it.

And by the way, why don't we have these standards with anything else? Do you go to your golf pro and say, “I'd just like to pay for the lesson where you teach me to tee off straight onto the green, but none of those other lessons where we are just flailing away working on my swing for an hour” or say to your piano teacher, “I'd just like to pay for the lesson where you teach me the rock marinoff piano concerto number three, but I don't wanna pay for the six weeks where I practice scales every day and still don't know any concertos”.

No, you do the thing. You get the results, it all contributes. Just because you can measure some media, like how many clicks your banner ad got, doesn't mean you have to measure everything to know that it's working. 

‍Ryan Chute: John Wanamaker made that quote. Boy, oh boy, I knew I was kicking at Bees Nest here with this subject. You two are jacked up. After the break, we'll get out the beans and start counting. Stay tuned.

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Remember that saying, only half your marketing is working. You just don't know which half. Let's help you with that. Book it free strategy session with wizard Ryan Chute today at wizardofads.services. Yes, that's a URL wizardofads.services. Now let's get back to the show. 

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Ryan Chute: Mick, you said that top-line revenue is the most important metric, 

Mick Torbay: Which means that it's correct 'cause I'm right about everything. 

Ryan Chut: But you know, you are right about everything and you are right. But it's incomplete. When we look at revenue, we have to look at revenue from top to bottom line, and it's not just okay to figure out whether or not we have growth for the sake of growth; we also want to be making money. What's the point of trading dollars? 

Mick Torbay: Yeah. And you're not incorrect on that. I focus on top-line revenue because top-line revenue is the job of the advertising, and we're called Advertising in America, so advertising on its own cannot make you profitable. That's something that the CEO looks after. So we can't directly affect profit. What we can do is we can affect the number of people who buy things from you, and then it's your job as the business owner to turn additional sales and purchasing. 

Chris Torbay: Yeah. I would argue our job is not even to, is to, not even to determine how many people buy things from you. 

We can get people in your door, we can get people to your store. We can get people to make a call. You still have to close the deal 

Ryan Chute: Well, and close the deal profitably. You know, there is different ways. There are four different business models, right? So of those four, you have to decide which business model are you to be profitable?

Are you gonna be a highly efficient company that generates a high volume and high turn? Or are you going to be a highly customized higher profit, but slower-turn kind of business? Do you have something distinctive to sell, or are you selling something completely unique? Or do you have some sort of distribution dominance that no one else can take from you. Like, you're not gonna lose selling nachos at the baseball game 'cause you're the only guy that's allowed to sell nachos at the baseball game, right? So to me, it really ends up being kind of, are they in growth mode? And that decision will dictate the strategy, right?

If I'm in growth mode, I'm gonna sacrifice efficiency to fuel growth, I'm gonna sacrifice profits at the bottom line. Right to get that top line number. 

Mick Torbay: It almost never sort of works completely in concert. I mean, I've got a client in Western Canada and they went through a major, major growth period last year.

In fact, they're your client as well, and they went through a major growth period last year. They increased their sales by about $3 million. And they were just barely profitable. They basically just broke even. And they were, they were making millions in profits beforehand. On the other hand, they had to do this major growth thing in order to prepare for the future. Next year, they're gonna be tremendously profitable because they did all this investment in their future. But if we, in a sense, if we had not provided the top line growth that we did using the advertising, they would've been actually losing money during this, the whole trying to do that. 

So you're nodding incorrect in saying that there's no point in growing by $3 million if you're no longer profitable. Yes. Our clients need to be profitable, or else they can't afford to keep being in business. But sometimes one will lag behind the other. 

Ryan Chute: And it is a balancing out, right? And as you go into more of a sustainable mode, if you're saying, “Hey, look, I'm effectively top of market”. We have a client down in Florida that does this. They looked at their entire business model and they said, “Look, this market could absolutely achieve $24 to $30 million in revenue. But we're actually going to build our business around a $20 million operation and take the ebbs and flows of what the market gives us. We'll, we'll take the high, we'll take the low, but we'll also do it very profitably because we're not, we're not trying to chase a tail on a thing that's going to not be sustainable”. 

And then you'd start turning this into a little bit more of a cash machine where you, where you can pull that money out because you know that you've done the thing. Yeah. And that everything else is, is gravy. Now it's just about those nudges towards efficiency, 

Mick Torbay: But on the topic of measurement, when you first proposed this topic, the first thing that came to mind was a client of mine in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, a jewelry store.

And I've been writing this store’s ads for about two years, and they were, you know, it's a one-store operation, a fairly small operation, a really well-run company. And they had consistent growth, but nothing too off, off the charts. And then this one July. They had the best July that they had ever had, and the client, uh, reached out to me and said, “This ad that you've written for July is just so great. Like, look at all these sales. We should run that ad again”. And I said, “Um, gee, I don't think you should do that”. And he's like, “No, no. This is the best, the best”. 

So he ran the ad twice, like too long. Ran it in August as well, and actually had the best August that he'd ever had. On the other hand, you have to remember that at a jewelry store, July and August are not super huge months. Like it's a five-figure change that gives you the best July, not a six-figure change. What I was trying to impress upon him, and to this day, he probably thinks he's right, and I still think that I'm right. He still believes that that was the best ad I had ever written, and I maintained, no, it was part of a campaign. It was a good ad, but the previous one was good too. And the one that came after it was also good. But probably what happened was he was just doing a great job at his store. And that it wasn't, or maybe it’s Charlottetown, July and August are tourist months. There are a lot of people in the city. 

Ryan Chute: There are about four times more people in the city as there is in the entire province. 

Mick Torbay: And the campaign had been running for over a year. It was a mature campaign. It was delivering the results that it's supposed to. It wasn't, you know, early in the campaign when things are, are harder to track. It was later in the campaign. I still maintain. He subsequently had the best December of his store's history. But again, it wasn't because the December ad was particularly good; it was because the campaign was good. 

Ryan Chute: Comparable ideas versus cute and clever have a huge, huge impact on things, as do some others.

Let's circle back, though, to metrics and talk about the things that can be measured in brand-forward marketing, where we're not ignoring digital presence or lead generation or any of those other things. What we are saying is, is that when you're spending some money on this bit of marketing and some money on that bit of marketing, that all in all, we have to consider what kind of result we're gonna get and people find comfort in these numbers.

What are some of the leading indicators that you have seen in the marketing help kind of quell the discomfort of launching a brand-forward campaign?

Mick Torbay: Well, I complain about digital, I complained about digital in my rant. Digital is incredibly good at gathering data. And in fact, one of the methods that we use to find out, for example, in a radio or a TV campaign, is we look at Google statistics and Google data.

To show how well a radio or TV campaign is working. And that's because one of the things we measure is direct search. So that's when someone puts “Ryan's barbershop” directly into their search bar rather than “barbers near me”. And so when we run an offline campaign, you know, a broadcast campaign, radio or television, we expect around six to eight months, we will see a market, an obvious, clearly measurable rise in direct search. Now, the important thing about direct search is that there is no digital marketing product that can affect direct search, and your digital guy will get really uncomfortable when you ask him, “How do we affect direct search?”

Because digital guys run digital ads, but they click directly through to a page, and they're measured as the success of that ad. But that doesn't take you to the homepage. That doesn't increase the number of people searching for your particular brand. It takes you right there. It skips over it. But direct search has two important things. One, if you're not searching the category, you're not going to see other businesses that also sell what you sell. But the second point about that is that it is not affected. The only way to do that is with an offline campaign. There is no digital thing that can cause that. 

Ryan Chute: And that's why we see companies like Indeed and Google, and Facebook, and Amazon all advertising offline as much as they're advertising online. Without it, there is no cheap avenue to the end line of at least the conversion, or at least the interaction, the impression 

Mick Torbay: And Google itself will notice an increase in direct search. If people are searching for your particular company, your particular brand, they will raise you in their rankings because they're just trying to get their customers what they want. And if more people seem to want you. 

Chris Torbay: They will tell the algorithm, and the algorithm will say, “This is probably what this guy's looking for.” 

Mick Torbay: Direct search is the best SEO in the world, and ironically. SEO can't achieve it. 

Chris Torbay: Well, but the interesting thing about that in terms of data or in terms of measurability, is it's a leading indicator. It's a thing that says, “You know what? People are starting to know this brand a little bit better, and so they are going directly to it”. Now, does it always equate to a sale? Maybe not yet, but what it shows is that this campaign is working. It's a, it's a thing that shows, is this part of the 50% of my advertising that is working?

It's working. It's showing that people know your brand, they're thinking of your brand. They're looking into your brand a little bit more. They're doing my own research.

Mick Torbay: And this is before they make money. And this is before money changes. 

Chris Torbay: And it also doesn't guarantee a sale, as we talked about it a few minutes ago, right? You're closing the deal, I can get you into the dealership. You still have to sell me the car. So it's a nice leading indicator, but it shows that the advertising is having the effect you hope the advertising is happening. 

Ryan Chute: One of the things that Chris, that you talk about a lot and have taught the Wizard of Ads partners about in great detail is that one big thing, and the power that you use Mick, with the leverage that you use in jingles through embed cues, in audio signal embed codes, and that repetition of brandable chunks. Those notable elements that just continue to echo, echo, echo in every ad, from a simple audio tone to a more elaborate, very specifically designed or strategically designed jingle. All of those things feed direct search, but they also feed, you know, weird brandable chunks like the Eat your Carrots plumbing lady. We have to kind of start to get really comfortable with organic search as well in a weirdly different way than what most digital marketers are, are, are comfortable with, they think, “Oh, a branded campaign, that's easy. We get your name and the misspellings of your name and job done, dust your hands, and off we go.”

When in fact, it's that strange thing that we continue to embed, embed in embed, that's haunting people that just can't get out of their brain. Whether they like it or hate it is inconsequential. The fact that they remember it is the thing that matters most. So organic search ends up being one of these other things, but it's only an indicator if we've actually put it into our keyword rankings and actually tracked it and actually paid attention to the keyword long tails that allow us to capture that lead for basically nothing for ridiculous returns. 

Mick Torbay: But we talk about branded search. And branded search, of course, is tremendously effective and inexpensive. But we forget that branded search only takes place when there's a brand that people know about. So, using Goettl as an example. So, Goettl is a massive heating and air conditioning company. And their advertising is all based on a little boy with a flashlight. It's on all the trucks, it's in all the ads. Little boy with a flashlight, literally one of their branded search keywords, is “little boy with a flashlight”. Well, here's what you're not finding when you Google “little boy with a flashlight:” you're not finding the other guy who sells air conditioners in Las Vegas.

So you can't achieve that simply with a digital campaign. There has to be something offline that's causing people to remember you. And yes, it will affect things like those branded searches. And it will increase your direct traffic 'cause that's skipping over the category and going directly to you, so that's a tremendously effective thing, and it doesn't cost as much money.

Ryan Chute: It not only doesn't cost as much money, it's about 10 times less on the conversion click on digital, but it's also returning a return on investment that is astronomical 'cause that customer is a cap customer,, is a high, what we call a high-cap customer, something that I created.

Mick Torbay: They're not just looking for an air conditioner, they're looking for a particular air conditioning company. Right? Yeah. 

Chris Torbay: They've heard of you and they're kind of curious about you specifically. 

Mick Torbay: They think of how much easier it is for that salesperson to close the deal when that phone call comes through. They were looking for you. They got you, and they want an air conditioner. Go ahead. 

Chris Torbay: At that point, all you have to do is not let them down. You don't if you now don't suck. 

Ryan Chute: Exactly. It's your sale, it's your sale to lose, right? Yeah. And that's a big, big, big deal. And our clients really notice that as they get about six, seven months in, they feel the difference in conversions and if they're tuned in on the sales side, they're really starting to recognize the common ground that's built before they even step over the threshold of the customer's home. 

So these are things that we're trying to create, and that's only six months in. All of this stuff is so frantic in the first year, two years, three years; every single one of the big, big, big clients that we've had, often they popped in year two, three, and five. Those years where the brand has had a chance to embed in conjunction with the two other things that need to happen. 

One, that their thing breaks and two, that their current guy lets them down. Because until those two things happen, it doesn't matter how much they might feel like they like you, you're just going to get the second chance when the first guy messes up or your actual thing breaks.

Chris Torbay: And then, well, I guess this is the problem you get into with people who really wanna measure whether or not their advertising is working, is that sort of impatience, which is, “Well, can you show me how you can show me do.”

“Well, I'm sorry. You have a long purchase cycle thing. If you were selling a soft drink, you know, or if you're selling a beer, you know, a new beer can launch and people will try it right away, 'cause they'll be thirsty tomorrow.”

So that's where you get that sort of mistaken call for measurement. Where we're saying, this is a good ad, trust me, this is gonna build your brand.

And it's like, well, “but the phone's not ringing yet, and it's been eight months”. Yeah, but you're in a business where there is, there is no spigot that you can just turn on like that. And so then they figure, oh, well, can I answer my question then with measurement, “I'm sorry. You can't actually measure it either. It just has to work.”

Ryan Chute: It's measuring for the sake of measuring at that point in time, what Google calls zero moment of truth, which isn't anywhere close to the number zero, is very much this notion of now we've got something to measure. Well, what about all the stuff that happens before you can measure it?

There's an awful lot of that stuff. What we can control are two things based on how much money you have to spend as a budget, in relation to the size of your target market.  And then, how much reach we can get with that budget available, is a measurement that we can take. 

We know that the frequency we can get right, because frequency in embedded are an absolutely critical component, so how often we measure it, is a measurement. That's an astoundingly impossible to-get-right measurement, most of the time on mass media because of what's known as cross-cumulative traffic. 

When we have this person who's listening to that station and this station for this long, and then that for long, and it's really hard to get that combination right for the lowest price, and that's a really big part of our secret sauce is figuring that part out. 

Chris Torbay: Well, and the interesting thing about that is, of course, we then make it impossible for us to measure which of our things. Like, I love it when a campaign gets that big, right? It's great when I just get the assignment to write a radio campaign.

But then if we add an outdoor campaign to that, and if the client says, “You know what, we're gonna pick up some of that stuff that's in the radio campaign. We're gonna put it into our socials and we're gonna, and you know, that's gonna be there. And we're gonna take the character that you put in the radio campaign. We're gonna put them on the side of the truck. Okay?”

And, to me, this is great. Now, this has turned into a big campaign. I'm hearing it, I'm seeing it when I drive by. Oh, there's a truck there, right? And it's turned into a big campaign. What it's also done is it has made it impossible now for you to measure whether it was the radio that was effective because we've made it bigger. 

And now you can't tell or not, not that you can't tell which of those things triggered the purchase. Now it's all of those things that triggered the purchase, in which case, none of them can be measured. 

Mick Torbay: It's like when you walk into Home Depot, they never ask you, “How did you hear about us?” 'cause it's like, “Well, what was it? Was it the TV commercial? Was it the radio ad? Was it the website? Was it those trucks driving around? Was it that giant orange freaking building. Was it the fact that they have excellent, you know, locations? The fact that your buddy probably uses it says, I'm gonna run to the Home Depot. Do you need anything? Is it the fact that you can see it from freaking space?”

All of those things contribute. And now somebody wants data and the trouble when somebody asks for data, is it they will get data. 

In this day and age, if you ask for data, someone will give supply you data, even if that data is complete bullshit. I always ask people, do you know why it is that we have now seven-day forecasts of the weather where we used to get three-day forecasts? And the reason why we have a day forecast now is because people demanded it. People said, I want a seven-day forecast. And so if this TV station gave you a three-day forecast, this one will give you a four-day forecast. It's like, oh, good. Now I'll know what it's gonna be like on the weekend. We don't know what it's gonna be like on the weekend. Nobody knows what the weather's gonna be like four days from now. Freaking nobody. But because we want it, and some idiot is prepared to give it to you and then four days later, it's like, man, they said it was gonna be hot today, and it's cold. It's like, yes, because we didn't know back then. But you felt good about it. We feel good about data, even if the data is wrong. And that's a tremendously dangerous position to be in. 

Ryan Chute: And you're taking that from a position of a pilot who actually understands weather. 

Mick Torbay: That's why I know about weather, because if you call flight services and ask what the weather's gonna be like tomorrow, they'll tell you what it's gonna be like tomorrow.

If you say what it's, what's it gonna be like in three days? They will say, nobody knows what the weather is gonna be like in three days. They won't even guess because pilots actually need to know the actual forecast. And forecasts are good for two and a half days, and nothing else. 

Ryan Chute: Ogilvy, Vice Chair Rory Sutherland says, while marketing effectiveness is crucial and overemphasis on efficiency and measurement can be detrimental, and it's mostly detrimental to the creative process and to the compelling nature that you squeeze out with this overemphasis on measurement.

There's also the huge misnomer of certain data points. Things like cost per acquisition, mean absolutely nothing to a home service company that's looking to acquire a customer for the next 15 years. The reason why it doesn't mean anything is because that if you got them in on that $29 tune-up, you're absolutely losing money on that absurd deal.

Chris Torbay: On that acquisition. 

Ryan Chute: But if we looked at the lifetime value of that, we're gonna see that that is a best investment of your money is to get the customer who's saying, “I'm willing to try you on something small to see if I trust you on something big”. So if we're, if we're looking at this short-term kind of thinking, what the data tells us is turn off all of the maintenance marketing that you have, turn it all off because it's costing you money. There's a real, real psychological problem to the business owner who's hooked on this on this crack of short-term results and short-term return, but A does not equal B within the month.

It’s going to equate to that in the near future or the mid future as customers need repairs, as customers need new things, but we have to start looking at it from. Both sides of the fence to actually get a measurable result. 

Mick Torbay: The way I look at it is if when you're measuring these things the data might be good, the data might be bad, and the general response to that is, well, so maybe it's good data, maybe it's bad data. At least I want some data, and this is where I'll fight them. 

Because if what you're saying is that the data might be bad, that's fine, but for God's sake, don't make any decisions based on that. If you're making decisions based on bad data, holy shit, you're making bad decisions. And so therefore, if you're not going to make decisions on, based on the data, why the fuck are we gathering all this data?

Chris Torbay: Save some data collection money. So spend it on media. 

Mick Torbay: But yeah, exactly. Make your message louder or more often, rather than measuring it for the sake of measuring it. 

Ryan Chute: And look, the cost is way more than just money. It's the stress and anxiety, the frustration and the sheer exhaustion of pouring through useless information. 

Chris Torbay: And I got to say at the corporate level too, at the larger business level, some of it ends up being self-justification for the people who work in the company, right? At the corporate level, you get people who say, “Okay, well, we came up with a new strategy. We called our ad agency. We had them do this ad. Now we've gone out and we've done some market research afterwards to see how well the ad tracked.”

And that's also that the, you know the marketing director can justify their job. It's like, "Well, why don't you take that money, instead of proving that you did a good thing back here, why don't you take that money, sell more for the cars, and start doing another thing and that, and run two ads and try two different strategies or whatever, rather than waste a bunch of time trying to prove that you've been good at your job in the first place.”

Ryan Chute: I think that the overarching mistake here is that believing that boring messages, PPC, and transactional ads that are easier to measure are the only thing necessary to get more than your fair share. When in fact, the most you can possibly get statistically is your fair share

Mick Torbay: And our clients sure as hell don't want their fair share.

Ryan Chute: You need to beat those odds by breaking them. 

Mick Torbay: They don't hire us to get their fair share. 

Ryan Chute: And that data is supported by Binet and Filed, who have been doing this now for two decades and have measured this at a level that nobody has ever measured it before.

And data is irrefutable in so much as to say that the successes that have come out are when brand budget is spent at about 60% in the services category and about 40% on sales activation stuff. Now, what a lot of people start to wonder is, well, what the heck is, is sales activation, and what stuff is branding? Well, you know, SEO is branding and social media is branding. It's all digital. But a call-to-action offer a promotion, some sort of enticement with an urgency and a limitation on it, those are the things that are sales activation, and they absolutely need to be invested in. We don't disagree with that. We support that. 

In fact, what we wanna do is we want to support it in a way that protects the brand's integrity as opposed to just being the schleppy douche bag company in town that looks like everyone else. That rarely gets the result that you're looking for. 

Chris Torbay: Yeah, and those things. Those activations only have value in the consumer's mind when you've made it a brand that's desirable in the first place. When that thing has a special promotion, then it has value to me. 

Mick Torbay: Absolutely. It's like if you put Heinz Ketchup on sale, people will buy it. If you put Ryan's ketchup on sale, it doesn't matter because nobody wants to buy it. 

Chris Torbay: Nobody's heard of Ryan's ketchup is on sale every week. Ryan's discount ketchup then that does not have that same power because, A, you haven't invested in making it a desirable brand. Yeah. But B, if all I know about that brand is it's always on sale. Now you've told me actually something else.

Mick Torbay: If you put Porsche on sale, people will buy Porsche buy. The reason why they don't do that is that they don't want to turn into a discount brand. 

Ryan Chute: And there's an aesthetic to that. You know, there's all of that says something about our brand, and all of this is immeasurable, but we start to see it, to your point at the very beginning it measures back to the top-line revenue one, what money did you leave on the table by discounting it? And two, what money did you give up that you didn't need to give up? 

It's going to affect top-line sales because you just didn't need to give up that money. What you needed to do was make people feel something more about your brand. 

Roy and I were just talking the other day about value goes, “You know, Ryan, the simple equation around value is when somebody sees your thing and goes, Wow, my money's worth less than your thing. That's good value. I'll give you my money in trade. And when they say, Wow, my money's worth, worth more than what you're offering, I'm just gonna keep my money, or keep looking or talk to the wife, or all these other things”. 

That's when we're, so what are we trying to do in marketing? Well, at the top level, we're trying to get them to know and like and trust us and let them know that we are a value proposition that's trustworthy and credible.

But then we get into the mid-marketing sale, and those midpoint things where we're trying to get conversion, and that has to translate as well. But when we, when we're going back up to how do I measure my ads we also have what I like to call roast. 

Now it's ROAS, ROAS, return on advertising spend.

But I like to go one step further and say return on advertising spend total. 

Mick Torbay: Because that turns into a word. 

‍Chris Torbay: I thought you were gonna say Turkey. 

‍Mick Torbay: It was gonna sound like it, Return on advertising spend - Turkey! 

‍Ryan Chute: Turkey! Turn on advertising spend Turkey!

The reason why I wanted to do that was because it's hilarious. And two, is because what we often see is the ROAS on this campaign or this particular ad set or this whatever, and that doesn't matter so much. What actually matters in ROAS is your total advertising spend to the return. That you got. And that's the real measurable here. So when we start to look at top-line revenue matters, how does it matter in relation to your total ad spend?

Well, if you're spending 10% of your market because you're aggressively growing your brand, then perfect. We now have that math and did it turn a result that we're looking for. Now if it turned a result, they gave us an efficiency to drive a whole bunch of people from maintenances to service calls, to service calls to replacements, all of the things that matter to help a, a mix within the actual sales mix.

Get to a net result of profitability, then it doesn't matter that the cost per click on that $29 tune-up was too much. It costs you 300 to get the $29 deal. It'll all turn out in the end. Now, the last, but not least, within this conversation really kind of goes around a bit of the strategy of what we've seen and played with in the past.

We pay a bit of attention to it, not a whole lot, but it isn't an interesting notion. And that's measuring your brand presence through surveys. Now these are often done by third-party research companies, the television and radio stations do them from time to time they're fairly expensive because they have to kind of fit within the expectations and requirements of ethical researching.

But they, they tell us, “Hey, did you show up when we went looking for you before we started this brand?” And three years later, “did you show up differently?”

And there hasn't been a time where we haven't dramatically seen people go from sometimes nothing to, and in some cases, three years ago, they weren't there.

Mick Torbay: Although my spider sense is tingling a little bit in as much as I would once again ask my client and potentially annoy them by saying, “okay, so what is my mission?” 

“Is my mission to make you rank higher on a survey, or is my money my mission to make you more money?”

Ryan Chute: Bingo. 

Mick Torbay: Because, creatively, I would make different decisions if you were judging me based on how I rank in a survey, whereas if my job is to get people to think of you first, like you the best, and feel good about purchasing from you, that would creatively lead me into a different direction. 

So I think there's, I guess that sort of brings it around to the point I made at the very beginning, is I understand the assignment. You got to tell me what the assignment is. 

If my assignment is to make you more money, I'm gonna do a certain thing. If my assignment is to get you more clicks, I'm gonna do a different thing. If my assignment is to have you rank higher on a survey, I'm going to make different choices. What do you want?

Do you want to be known? Do you wanna rank high? Do you want to get a lot of clicks, or do you want money? Tell me which one, and I will do that. They're not gonna land on the same campaign. So what do you want? And then that's what you're gonna get if you're working with ad people who know what the hell they're doing.

Ryan Chute: Well, and it does do exactly what you just said, which is start with the strategy. The strategy is going to inform the creative. And the creative is going to inform the media channels that are purchased to get that net result, be it sales activation or presence. 

We have a client right now where the reality on the ground is they've got three years before they sell. And our assignment isn't to make you the best brand in the next 10 years. 

Our assignment is to make it happen in three years, and that shifts the words we choose to use and the emphasis that we put in the market. The amount of money we spend, and where we choose to spend it, for the return on investment in the shorter-term play that needs to be done for an already decent brand. But a brand that needs to be elevated to the next level. So strategy is really what it all kind of comes back to again. And measuring the things that actually matter, while every healthy business is, is going to measure what matters, there's no need to seek out those magic pills with snake oil promises or fame and fortune.

When you hear these fantastical stories, you can be certain that it's more likely a suppository. When we return, we'll wrap up this episode with some ideas on what to do next and how the best companies that we work with, look at measuring up.

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Hey listeners, Wizard, Ryan Chute here. Want to personalized strategy to instantly 4X the effectiveness of your marketing dollars?

Schedule a free call with me at wizardofads.services. We'll chat about your goals and how you can quickly dominate your marketplace. I have limited availability though, so don't delay. I guess you could delay it a bit, but not too much. That'd be like, like an over delay. So, maybe just, skip the delay part entirely and book your call, just as soon as you're ready to start making money. You certainly don't want to delay that, right? And now, pitter-patter. 

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Ryan Chute: In conclusion, just because things can be measured doesn't mean it needs to be measured. CAP, KPIs, conversion average sale, profit will address 80% of your business's measurements freeing up your time to focus on the CAP KPIS that are not meeting or exceeding expectations.

You also need to be very clear on what measurement is actually saying, not what it seems to indicate that it can be very, very tricky. And numbers are deceivingly slippery, luing into this dark cul-de-sac where good decisions go to die. 

The most successful companies we work with are measuring CAP KPIS to adjust their business, operations and only look at the PIs when there's something to address.

They see their businesses as marketing companies, meant to drive sales, that happens to offer the solution they happen to sell. Operations are purely there to fulfill not only the promises made, but then a little bit extra to replace dopamine with oxytocin. Make no mistake, branding is hard. Investing in the brand has been proven to be the most profitable long-term ROI. But it comes at an early stage cost of getting your words into the mind of your target audience. 

How long it takes depends on the impact quotient of your message, the frequency at which it is heard, and the personal experience factor they receive when they receive your services. And then the reach that you can afford to actually reach with the budget that you have on hand. Equally as much, it's the competition that you face and the economics of the market and the climate that you're dealt with, be it political, cultural, or even meteorologically. 

Chris Torbay: I think you just made up a word.

‍Ryan Chute: They're all made up. Chris. Until next time, this has been Advertising in America.

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Thank you for joining us on Advertising in America. We hope you enjoyed the show and captured a nugget of marketing magic. Wanna hear more? Subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with your friends. Do you have questions or topics you want us to cover?

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