Navigating the Paid Search Landscape — A reflection on marketing, empathy & expertise

Source: YouTube auto-generated captions, lightly cleaned (repeated caption lines removed, misheard brand names corrected).

0:03Yo, what's up on this Taco Thursday? We don't do Thursdays anymore. We're a bit old for that. Um, but this is the home of the paid search playground by it all started with a idea.com. Yes, I am John Williams and we're going to talk about all the nonsense that's going on out there with gosh, economics, politic, paid search, and paid media in general because it's crazy, y'all. Right now, there are all of these instant solutions that uh people are just popping up with and they're not really solving anything.

And to me, I think there's a little bit of a murmur out there. And there have been a few folks that have been posting, and I'm referencing LinkedIn at this time. There are a few folks that have been posting that I think are getting tired of all of this complaining, instant results. Everybody's got the right answer and got it all figured out. However, things we're not hearing about is, well, how come there are 100 people saying they got 500 million ARR? I mean, it's just them. Uh, they have no SEO presence. Their YouTube presence is terrible. They don't have a wiki page. They have no material product. They're not hosting conferences. And it's just one person.

Now, I believe that there's one person out there that might have something like that, or there might be two, but I think a lot of it is just blowing hot air. Second thing is that I think a lot of people are so frustrated about is that all we're seeing is 3,000% with like a gray out. Is it brand or is it nonbrand? And nothing material behind it. And then the last thing that I'm gonna complain about, because it is a complaint, might as well be a complaint, understanding everybody else's complaint, is we have all of these agents uh from ChatGPT. And to me, I like I just got to tell you my opinion, I don't know if they're actually even agents to just qualify that a little bit more. I mean, they could be, but I think they're just GPTs and they're custom and people have

uploaded a bunch of files or the best ones are um they're using make.com and Zapier. So, they're spending money for every time there's a run and they're saying, "Hey, take this and then you got to go and you got to build the thing and you got to pay the money to connect from widget to widget, from platform to platform, from widget to widget, from platform to platform." It's just crazy. It's absurd. And really, it's not even a solution because you could go to GPT and you can type in a prompt and you can say, "Hey, can you solve this for me or can you help me with this?" And you still got to go do the work. I haven't seen anybody's tool build a campaign, build an ad group, build an ad, change a bid, add negative keyword. I haven't seen anybody's tool do that yet. It does exist though. Yes,

3:15it does. It does exist. And timing is everything. But it does exist. I know it. I built it. I have it. I have a version of it in a sheet um in the oldfashioned Google ad script. Tied it tidy it up this weekend. And um I'll give you guys the Google sheet and the script and and all of that because I don't need it anymore because there is an agent that actually does that. Me go my buddy. But for all that rambling, everybody's tired of that. There's your ARR, your MR 3,000% your agents to solve all the problems and then you got the next Zoom. In fact, on a post today, probably like 20 minutes ago, there was a young marketer, maybe an experienced marketer, I should say an experienced marketer, and I couldn't help myself, that made a post, and it was around the

same idea, right? Like, yeah, here it is. Jordan Chappelle, which is interesting. Uh, co-founder at Nude. I have no idea what Nude is or whatever this is, right? And the words were, "Last week, someone went on a rant about how annoying those comment quote XYZ quote for the free guide post are. This week I watched them comment quote GTM quote under one." Now, to me, here's the interesting part. Rather than telling the person that they were annoyed by it, we do what we're so great at doing, which is being passive aggressive and then using that as leverage to then build your own brand to get the same exact thing, likes and comments. Social media at its best. Now, I hope my hope is is that whomever he is watching saw this and somewhere in his 57 likes and 188 comments, this person came back and

said, "Well, hey, aren't you doing the same exact thing?" And they have a healthy conflict going on about calling one another out cuz this is quite ridiculous in my opinion. And then he says, "We've come full circle. Moral of the story, people will say one thing and do another. Do what works for you." So, this works for Jordan and I'm all for it and I think he should do it and I I think it it's kind of crazy that he's even calling somebody else out. But in that vein and being empathetic and like saying, "Hey," I said, "Now that you've lost faith," and I was being a little bit of a smart butt, are you planning on removing your profile? Mark and or being supportive and understanding of that game the get clicks and likes because this post appears to be leveraging the same model albeit comma a different

message and then I put JS comma or #IGS or is it quote JS quote question mark with a shrug. This is the stuff. This is LinkedIn now. These are our SEOs. These are the heads of agencies running media or inside businesses running media today and just like not providing any beneficial information just another form of of Instagram except for somebody jockeying to complain about what somebody else is doing and are doing it themselves. I don't know. We could just be a little bit more empathetic. We could be a little bit more caring. We could talk about the like how to use GPT and not bill somebody $999 or $1,000 to some master class. Um I posted a um a question um on how many hours does it take to become an expert. My understanding is, and I mean somebody can Google it or you can Bing it or you

7:03can Yahoo it, maybe even AOL it, is that you need about 10,000 hours of doing anything, 10,000 shots, 10,000 passes, 10,000 pitches, right, to become qualified. I don't even know if you're an expert because when you stop pitching or shooting or doing that, then you you lose it. Like imagine today Steph Curry stopped shooting threes for a whole year. I don't imagine that he's going to come back and be the same leader that he once was because he's no longer doing that same process and same thing and his body is going to forget it. Right now his body hasn't memorized. He's trained himself to do it. Plumbers go through the same thing. Pilots, NFL players, NBA players. What we do, trades, crafts, engineers, developers, advertisers. What part of advertising do you do? Your craft, right? Um, are you an imagineer?

What kind of engineer are you? What kind of developer are you? What type of creator are you? Uh, and have you been doing it for 15 years and that's all you do every day from 9 to5? Like 9 to5 every day for I don't know, you get two weeks off a year and there what? I don't know. Um, you get paid every two weeks and what is that? 26 weeks, right? That you're getting paid and you've been doing it for 15 years and then you get two weeks off. So you're you're out of the total year, you're working maybe between 30 and and 40 weeks at almost 40 hours plus. Like come on. Like that person if they figure out how to use one of these new tools, like man, they it just they become quicker, they become faster, they become all the things. And

we're seeing some of those folks teach and guide people and they're not asking for anything. Um, I have a couple of fan favorites of folks that I follow. No last names, but one is Will, the other one is Ethan. And I just I I gotta tell you, like they're just oversharing information about SEO and the different LLMs. And it's just it's absolutely amazing. There's no mass. I mean, it's crazy. No master class. Coming from somebody that's been doing advertising, I don't know, for they could say like 10 years, but who knows? they just popped up because they were able to do some report, right? Or they just use ChatGPT to come up with some blog of of information that thousands of people have been feeding it since it's been available and now they're like some expert in it. No, these these folks are like presenting the not so great, the

9:37sometimes great, but using cautious optimism and are are being very predictable and being very realistic about expectations and how to do it and what to focus on and they're sharing it freely. Well, you know, one for their brand, so I get it. They they run businesses. They're part of things. One's an educator, one's a agency, a person, but they're sharing. And that's what we need. That's what LinkedIn should be. But it's it's it is. It's social media. It's a way for people to be passive aggressive, and go after folks that are undereducated. I make it my mission to like chase those people down. You can't really come after me for paid search. I'm going to say it here. I am a expert at paid search. And the last person you want in your account, if you're an agency, is me. I'm gonna tear it apart up and down. And

your client is going to come to you and say, "What in the hell is going on?" And you know, I imagine there are a few folks could do the same thing to me, right? With respect to the game, but I'm pretty damn good at advertising. And it goes a long ways to be respectful because you don't know who's looking at your business, who's looking at the account, who's who needs help. And we put all this information out there and leaders, CEOs, CMOs, CTO's, COOs, they look at all this stuff and they're like, "Wow, this person has a thousand likes and they have 100 comments. This person really isn't doing a whole lot." Sarah today, bless her heart. I don't Maybe it was a couple days ago, but she posted something and I was like, "We need more of this." She was like, "To be truthful,

you as a business owner could probably run your own advertising account." That's the truth of the matter. The only reason you need somebody to manage your advertising is you don't have time. Your time, all of your effort, all 99 out of your 100 hours are going towards your business. And the person that's coming in, they just, you can't afford to hire them full-time. So, you're paying them part-time to come in and work for you.

And they shouldn't be billing you a crazy amount of hours as for multiple reasons. I mean, we all got to make money, right? But there should be a value pay piece there or I mean just a reasonable fee. It shouldn't matter the amount of spend that you're doing. Especially right nowadays I have agency teams that I support. I have big businesses that I support and I look at with millions of dollars in spend. I mean for social media $10 million in spend and this is all part of of of what Sarah is is is talking about. And I can't make updates every day. It's ridiculous. I have to even though I'm spending weekly for one account half a million dollars weekly. I can't go in and make changes daily in my social media account. I only have three campaigns, right? Different levels doing different things. I have multiple

12:32adsets. I have multiple pieces of creative. But I don't need to do a whole lot, right? I do need to be though not in the account but building strategy and having conversations around the creative working with different teams around analytics and measurement. I always do need to be doing something that is consulting at that level within the organization to move things forward. Right? I have to be a week ahead. I have to be preparing. Now on the agency side of the business, right? working on the agency side. It wasn't about can I pull the levers or can I pull the levers.

It's not about that. It's about like training up folks, right? Not to be doers and to be thoughtful. It's very easy to be a doer. But today, we don't need doers. You don't need anything. You just log into Google Ads or into Facebook. You put some titles and some headlines and boom, it does everything as long as you're connecting the dots. Now, you need to manage to it, right? you need to make sure that things aren't going crazy uh and and doing this, but I mean really the overhead to manage a Google Ads account is minimum, right? And so are there other plays out there that you could take advantage of to help you? Sure. Are people being fully transparent and honest with how they're managing business? Probably not, right? Are there unique capabilities that some agencies have the others? No.

Cuz here's the why. They all use Google Ads. I have access to Google Ads. You have access to Google Ads. The other million people in the population that might be adults or two million or three million, however many they are, they all have access to Google Ads. We all log in the same way. We all have the same levers. And if you don't have the person at Google, somebody else has the person at Google. And if they don't have a person at Google, then that other person isn't going to have a person at Google that can do anything different. and they can't do anything on their back end.

They got to go to customer service through escalation to their manager, but they can't change the machine. They can't change the tool. They can't change the platform. Now, does somebody figure out how to target a different audience? Did somebody figure out how to come up with different sentences and different title case and a different structure? Sure. I'm sure somebody came up with this strategy that is the best strategy that was ever invented, but you could do that via GPT. Now, just go into ChatGPT, take all of the accounts that you've ever managed and say, "Hey, ChatGPT, here's all of the businesses that I've ever managed, and they're all in the same industry, in the same vertical.

15:11What's not working? Why isn't it working? What do you think based off of all the information that's stored in your platform that all of the tens of million people that are now using your platform suggest? What do you recommend?" And it's going to spit out something. And if you're an expert, you're going to say, well, that sucks. What else? And then it's going to spit something else and you say, well, that's just not it. I'm not looking for that.

And it's because your gut is telling you like, I'm not going with that. Let's come up with something else. And here's what I was thinking. Now, guess what? You become you become a thinker and you become a strategist. You're less a doer. That's the difference that is. But from agency to agency to agency, unless you have somebody that just doesn't know how to build a feed or build an ad or understand what a bid is or so many other things within Google Ads or Microsoft Ads, then yeah, SEO not my wheelhouse. But I imagine you could probably get schema and markup and get a lot of the things that you need that you don't have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for all of these beautiful tools to use. You could probably get all that information now from maybe Gemini, from Claude or Deepseek, whatever that you

might. And then you can ask it for instructions A to Z with every micro step and say, "How do I do this within my website?" And in some instances, depending on which tool you use, it'll actually provide a layout for you. It'll map it out, right? And you can say, "Well, what are the estimated time that I should expect these changes to take effect?" And it should always depend. It shouldn't it shouldn't be the same.

There should be no one model fits everybody. That's ridiculous. You can do the same thing for analytics. Like I love my analytics folks out there. I love my tag management folks out there. In fact, I'm so glad that there's a Zapier and there's a make and whatever other connector that you might use that exist. But like look, the Ethans and the Wills and the Sarah of the world, like those folks are rare. They're giving away like gold and jewels and diamonds and all kinds of things and nuggets.

It's really up to you. All this fodder for instant success is ridiculous. All this fodder for somebody printing off a report or showing you how to be a master class all of a sudden in GPT and they themselves probably don't have more than like 200 or 300 total working hours um invested in it. Maybe they have like 500, but based off of what I'm seeing, highly doubt it. And yes, I'm being critical, right? Because they're only a few folks. And most of those folks aren't offering master classes. They're really focused on the business and educating folks on how to use GPT. Whatever version that you might use, they're focused on that. And so, I say to you, use caution, right? I say to you guys out there in this world when you're looking at all this stuff, be better than what you see cuz it's not

18:10real, right? Most of the time, if an agency is billing you, I don't know, um 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 $20,000 for your advertising based off of a percent of spend. That's ridiculous. It's just covering margins, right? That's it. And it and the P&L's are simple, y'all. It really is just how many people can we get to work on the sales side of the business to get more of that business in the house because we have so much churn because the people that are managing the business suck at doing advertising because they're not getting the proper education. They're great human beings, right? I imagine everybody out there trying to be an advertiser, come into this world or this game of digital marketing. Imagine they're all great people, great human beings, probably some of the best people that you'll ever meet in your entire

life. That said, probably not very good at advertising because they're not getting education from their leadership, which the leaders don't even understand advertising themselves. And that's that's being critical, but it's fair, right? And there's not a lot that you have to do anymore in Google Ads, especially with performance max, right? Or these automated bid strategies. And then, you know, bless the vertical experts. Bless your heart. You have a wealth of information and whatever it might be, water bottles or pools or lights or TVs or tennis shoes or or Disney or Winnie the Pooh, like bless your heart, that it does matter. That insight matters. But that information is open source. There's dictionaries and books and white papers and PDFs and all of this stuff out there for somebody to pick up. And somebody that's an advertiser, somebody that is buying media, I should say, and in paid search

if they can learn about that business, their advertising is just going to become that much more better because they're going to be able to have a relatable, empathetic, caring conversation that spans. Now, if you're on the other end of that, you're all ears open because this person's now relating to your business. You're stuck because this is where you're at, right? But that person will be able to come to you, talk about it, be able to support you. And advertising might work or it may not work because there's so many different factors out there, right? But again, going back to all of this stuff, anybody claiming that they're the all end all be all and got all the answers to all this stuff. I say I humbug, but I say it's probably not true. And I say we need to be careful with what you're seeing on LinkedIn, with what you're

seeing in Reddit. though, Reddit is is pretty spot-on because it's anonymous and people go after you. So, if you say something that's like pitchy or salesy and you're not trying to be helpful or beneficial to the world or the industry that's out there, those businesses or small business owners are looking for help or those enterprise teams that are looking for help, those those younger folks, those non-experts, experts are going to see that. I I see it. There's a a guy Dwayne that like is on it. He's always providing like sound information and he's not asking for anything. Now, that doesn't mean he's not getting business for being heavily involved in Reddit, but I mean, he's on it and he just cares about paid media. He cares about paycheck. He cares about what he's doing. It's just it's just so important, right? So, y'all be careful. There are

21:41probably one in 100,000 folks right now that are experts. myself. I've been doing GPT since about April 2022 and I have a little over a,000 hours invested in it. I'm not an expert in it. Not even close. I use it every day for 3 to four hours, period. I also use cursor. I spend on cursor probably, I don't know, anywhere between 15 to 20 hours a week on cursor. And I'm working on one project. I'm not working on 10 projects.

I'm not working on how to do this and do that. I'm focused on one thing, right? So, I'm getting really good at being able to have a conversation about what is an agent and what isn't an agent. I'm getting really good at taking information that's being shared on LinkedIn by various folks and when they're talking about it, like um Ethan right now, he just put out an API API call allocation model chart and I'm able to look at it and I can say, "Okay, that kind of makes sense." Like this 3.0 I know that just came out hallucinates. I seen it. I used it today and I'm like, "Oh, it kind of hallucinates." But see, now because I use it so much, it's making its own stuff up. And when I'm looking at the data as it's filtering through mid thinking, I can go in and I can say,

"This isn't accurate." One, because I've been doing paid advertising for a long ass time. Two, I'm really good at math. Like exceptionally good at math. I'm just going to say that. I'm not expert. I'm not a mathematician. I don't know how many people are are experts in math. I'm going to rant. Anybody that tells you they're like an eight, nine, or 10 on Excel. Like, hit a hard pass on that person. It's just ridiculous, right? You should be more balanced because you don't know everything. And then quite frankly, in math, you can do things a 100 different ways. So, just say that.

But I am good. And when I look at what GPT is doing and what it's saying, I'm saying I've looked at it. I've looked at the reports. I don't have time to put it all together to form sentences to put it and beautify it and do all that. Can you do all this for me? This is what I need. Here's how I need it done. Don't do this. So important that you put do not do this, remember not to do this, and remember not to do this. And you get this wonderful piece of information.

That's somebody that's been using GPT for a long time. Somebody that hasn't been using a version of GPT says, "It didn't give me what I wanted." Of course, it's not going to give you what you want. You have to tell it what you want, which means you need to know what you're looking for and what you're asking for to even start. And then once you start, it becomes difficult to continue to get what you want because you don't know where to go with it. Um, and that goes back to all of these experts. Some people are really good at what they do. So there no shame in the game in making a thousand bucks or 2,000 bucks for it, but that doesn't make them an expert because they have a loud voice of a bunch of clicks and a bunch of likes and a bunch of comments

24:42doesn't make them the best person in the world. So just be mindful of that, right? Again, there's a thousand folks out there, tens of thousands of folks out there that do this. There are tens of thousands of agencies that are all really specialized in something. I imagine they're good at something. There's no one grand agency that's be it for what it is. They don't have an answer to the problem that you have. You just have probably been stuck. And be mindful of this. You probably just been stuck in what you've been doing for such a long time and you're going with your relationship and what you trust. So, if you're a business owner and you're listening to this, if you're a CEO and you're listening to this, and you're a CMO and you're listening to this, if an agency is billing you $20,000 and you

only got two people working for you, 80% of that money is going to headcount to pay for other parts of the business, the amount of time that somebody's actually working in the account on a daily basis at a probably an agency today, maybe an hour to two hours a week max. after they've set up your account in Google Ads. There's nothing else that they're doing to change bids takes minutes. There's no golden sauce to that. So, how much are they is your business benefiting from what they're doing. Time to look at your contract. You guys go to a value base. If it's long-term, make sure the fee is reasonable. Like, I get the $1,000 $2,000 a month fee thing. I get it, right? Um, and you know, it's reasonable to have a six-month contract, to have a 12-month contract, three-month contract. It's reasonable. And then if

the just the whole thing is is crappy and not living up to expectations, you can get out of it, right? But remember again, somebody else can do exactly what they're doing and can do it probably even cheaper. And so just because somebody says they're like $500 or $1,000 or $1,500, it doesn't make them a bad advertiser, right? They're just a little bit more affordable and probably a little bit more realistic and they're not over billing you and you can be with them for a long time. You can create stability through that, right? Just because they have a big team doesn't make them any better than somebody with a small team. You just you got to get to know the person, whomever that individual is. But be weary of the people that are just saying, "I got the answer and I've done this a 100 times

27:00because I've seen it. 100 accounts doing the same thing, the same product, and account 101 can't figure the out." And there's so many other reasons, but it could be the brand. It could be whatever. Is this person thinking through that? Is that team thinking through it? Are everything they feing you? Go Google Google. Bing bing bing bing bing. Amazon Amazon Amazon. There's more to it. Are they asking those questions to uncover where your business is headed? Why your business is headed in that direction?

And what your objectives are, not just your goals. Well, I want a three row. Well, okay, great. You want a three rows, but how do you get there? Are they talking to you about that? So, to wrap up this, be careful of what you see on LinkedIn. Everybody's up to the same game. Myself, full empathy. At times, I'm up to the same game. I'm trying to get a few impressions and a few likes and trying to get people to watch and to listen and to learn from what I'm putting out there in the world. It's not a nail in the coffin. It's not 100% going to work for everybody that's out there. It's just not. I'm different.

You're different. Your business is different. If there was one sizefits-all, there would only be one agency in the world and one business for every vertical that exists out there. But some people don't like Nikes for whatever reason. Some people don't like Jordans for whatever reason. Some people don't like Reebok or AS6 or shoes from Walmart, but you can buy Nikes at Walmart. You can buy Nikes at Target. But for some reason, they prefer to go to Foot Locker and pay an increased price to buy their Nikes. Don't know why it's a pair of Nikes. Don't ask me. I got wall full of Jordans. I can't tell you. It's all different. Different preferences, different tastes, different things. There's no specific answer to solve for it all. And anybody claiming today all of a sudden in their headlines they're like some AI expert. Like, look, just hit pause. Um, recalibrate. Start

asking them how they know that things are hallucinating. asking them what models are the latest models, why they prefer Clawude versus Open AI, why they prefer Gemini over this. For example, today I open up Gemini. Man, I love Google. Okay, this isn't a shout out to or any promotion of Google and any promotion of Open AI and any promotion of Claude, but look, Gemini Advanced, man, that thing rocks. V2. I put in a single prompt. Animate a person on a bike with a realistic scene driving on an animated bike and man it was just flawless. Now I'm still probably going to use cling a little bit. I'm still going to use Sora to generate images.

One because I paid for it. So now I'm going to use it and I have a ton of tokens and a ton of credit. So I'm going to use it. But now I'm going to see how all three work together. I'm not just going to rely on one because what I've been watching and what I've been learning is that creatives are using one tool to do something, getting prompting from another, and then having it all put together in another tool, and then they're cleaning it up with like Photoshop or whatever other tools that they want to use. They're cleaning that stuff up. And so, it's becoming really, really interesting. So, I I say like, can that person have that type of conversation? Well, why isn't it doing that? If you're working with an agency that's got some fancy agent, like they don't have some fancy agent. I'm going

30:25to tell you right now, you guys, and here's a just a win for you, and this is really easy. You want your own product. First, you need to get pro version of GPT of any of them. Go get a pro version so you can get yourself an API key so that you can use their product. So, get an MVP, whatever it is, right? whatever your viable minimum product is, right? Give it to me. Go into Google Sheets, go to Google App Scripts, go under tools, open up Appcripts. If you're listening to this, you made it this far, right? Then go into GPT and say, "Hey, GBT, I want to in cell C2, I want you to be able to take the text in that and then output it into a box." and then create a box in I don't know E2 and make a big square

right or rectangle or whatever you want to make and then GBT will output this code and then you put it into uh your Google app scripts now it's probably not going to work on the first iteration so don't get frustrated just say hey this didn't work and here's the error code that I got and then do it again and again and again and after about 10 times you're going to get it right and then you're going to say wow I just can use Google sheets like I'm using chatb BT, but now here's my information. That's the hack. That's a $10,000 course for free. What did I tell you to do? Sign up for whatever GPT program that you want.

Whatever that price is that you feel comfortable for paying. I think Google's like 16 bucks or 19 bucks. Claude is whatever. And then I pay the $200 tag for open. And then I pay cursor's fee. I have I have a a rather large investment in cursor. Um, and I go back and forth with all of these tools for different things, but I use Claude and I use cursor for all my codings. That's what I would say, but you can use GPT, right? Once you've done that and you've signed up for it, go into Google Sheets. Just create a new sheet and go to tools. One, sign up for whatever you want to sign up for. Two, go to Google sheet, open up a Google sheet. Three, go into tools. Open up app scripts. do that thing and I don't know if it's not tools, it could be data,

whatever. Do that. Then go to GPT and tell it what you want to do. Hey, in column A, I want to input text. I want that text when I put it in there. I want it to run and I want it to output whatever I'm looking for in column E. There you go. That could be titles for an ad, whatever it might be. It could be the output. And guess what you've done?

You no longer have to log into GBT to get whatever you need. You can get it all right there. Now, you want to get fancy, right? You can create a your own plugin. You can say, "Hey, GPT, I need you to create a plugin for me. I need you to do something like Shopify and or in WordPress, I need you to create a widget for me, but I want you to do that for my sheet or create an extension for me." And it'll turn what you're trying to accomplish to an extension. And so, it'll create a button or an extension that's free for you to use. It'll give you all the code that you need to do it.

33:33And then you can say, "Hey, I want it to be just like me." So GBT, this works. Now I have a question for you. Don't tell it what to do. Ask a question. Say, "Hey, GPT, I wanted to embrace my method. Your method as an advertiser, as the business is going to be different from business A to 1 million. And your method as an advertiser is going to be different from Sarah, Will, Ethan, and all the other hundred thousands of great folks out there. Advertising is going to be completely different." and say this is what I want it to do and how I want it to be. And then GBT2 say okay I can do that and I'll make sure that every time I make an output this is what it's going to look like. It's going to feel like you it's going to be like you right

and so now what you've done is you just created your own agent your own tool within sheets and you can do that for keywords and analyzing data and outputting ads and it's pretty cool right that's a that's not a big hack but it's a pretty cool deal. Sora is really cool for and really spoton now for prompting for creating images. I I don't know that you need to use Getty anymore. If you got Getty, just take that Getty image, put it in the Sora and ask Sora to animate it. And Sora will animate it and you get like a GIF style or you get a video image and it it's pretty cool.

Whether it's human or whatever, it'll animate it. If you want to take it to the next level, you can do cling, right? or you want to take it even further, you can go into VO or or whatever it might be. And it I mean it goes next level for you. But these tools today really are all about asking questions and getting better at asking questions. If you're a doer, like your days are numbered. Like you have to be thoughtful and you have to be a thinker. The leaders in these companies, they're only worried about their businesses, most of them, right?

But they're not willing. Most of them aren't willing to learn anymore because they're stable and they're past all that. And they know that once they're done making as much money as they can make for whatever period of time that they're worried about, they're gone. And then what are you left with? You're left with figuring it out. And then you got to move on to another company or you got to move on. You got to do something else. You guys start using GPT every day. I I don't of some sort. I label GPT for and people say whatever you know being Microsoft, Google, Google Ads, whatever. Use something now like log in and pay for it yourself. If you go to Starbucks twice a week, you can definitely afford to use one of these tools regularly. Do it if you're an advertiser. If you're not using it today

36:07and you're not using it regularly, um I feel bad for you. And if you're watching this, reach out to me and if you can't afford it, we'll talk. I'll take care of it because I think you should be using it. Now, I'm not going to do it for 500 people, but I think I can figure it out probably for 10 folks. So, if you're if you're watching this and you really want to learn, I'll take care of it. Just reach out to me because you you you need it. You do. And I don't care how senior you are or how junior you are. You just need to learn how to use the tool for the basics to write scripts, to help you with image creation, to help with writing, to help with math, to help with audits, all of these things. I used to spend hours and

hours doing audits on million-dollar accounts. Now, maybe 30 minutes. I can I can name 15 accounts. I can name five. There were multi-million dollar audits that got us to the final round. I can name right now. I'm under NDA, so I can't give you all of that. And it's getting dark, too. But yeah, it's it's all GPT. Of course, now I still have to know what the heck I'm talking about. I still have to know what to look for. I still have to know how to have that conversation and tie it back, but it's a real tool.

And this is just speaking to the agency side, right? More than glad to help you guys. Just reach out. So, we've talked about being careful and being smart with all the fodder that's on LinkedIn and the garbage, right? And the stuff that is just to get likes and to get comments. Social media, nothing more, it's nothing less, right? Don't be offended. If somebody gives you a hard time, accept it, embrace it, but don't be afraid to challenge it. Again, it's social media. And if somebody cares, then they don't matter. And anybody that doesn't care, those are your people.

That's it, right? Those are the people, the ones that are supportive and positive and empathetic and true. There's no game, no catches, no gotchas, because there's a lot of folks that want a gotcha to protect their themselves because they don't know what the heck they're doing. They can't make charts. They can't make graphs. I mean, they're spending a whole week trying to figure out how to make a double line chart. Don't worry about that stuff. You guys keep doing what you're doing and go on your path.

this nonsense of uh just move past it. Move past the kid things, the high fees. If you're a business person listening to this, a business owner, shut it down. Ask somebody to say, "Can you do this for 500? If I'm profitable, I'll pay you $2,000." I I I think it's fair. I do. I think it's fair. And then if somebody's like, "No, I want to be monthtomonth." Then okay, I get it. If the agency is like, "I need 2,000 minimum fee. I need my onboarding fee." I I get that. Like if it's monthtomonth, like they're investing time and energy, so I get that, right? But somebody that's like $10,000 or $8,000 or some random percentage of spend for doing the same thing they're going to do for a $10 account for a million dollar account.

39:09It's crazy. And I got to tell you, the less that you as a business owner spend, the harder it is to make your business successful. Super hard. And your account should always be should get the most effort and get the most energy. Now, some bigger accounts once they get set up are great, but usually those don't require a lot of hands-on effort. They require a lot of massaging with the relationship and instilling trust and learning how to navigate corporate barriers and all those things. The fees should be simple, period. I get the relationship thing. I get everybody's in this to make a whole bunch of money.

Like, I don't have my life. I don't pay my bills. I don't I'm not able to feed my I'm not able to do any of this stuff without have charging a fee or being part of this industry for as long as I've been part of it. I've seen it seen a lot of it. I haven't seen it all. I've seen a lot of it. I'm still learning but it's not that complicated you guys. And anybody saying they have an answer again back to that it's crazy economics y'all not going to go there. It's crazy out here in this world. It is absolutely crazy. I don't understand um from a business perspective how yeah from a business perspective I don't understand how we got to where we're at today with um how we expect to be better as advertisers if we're not willing to invest time in the people. There are no

um existing solutions for agents and applications for solving advertising's problems because they're ever changing and every business is different. What Google is going through that I have full empathy for the trade desk, full empathy for, right? They did a great job at building up their their brands. They did a great job at at figuring out how to do what the rest of us couldn't do. I don't I'm of the opinion that being critical of how Google manages their business and then we ourselves are complaining about how they manage their business and we don't even understand our own business.

To me that's tough. We have to be empathetic because, you know, sure they didn't serve your ad to the right place at the right time to get all the leads and the small businesses or the medium-sized businesses or the enterprise businesses that you're working for to help you feed your family are giving you a hard time, but did you have the right conversation? And so I say from an economic standpoint, the world is crazy. We're complaining about the very tools that we use to feed our families. That the people working in these places are using to feed their families and we ourselves aren't doing anything to try and solve the problem.

We're just complaining to build up likes and build up our own brand. I say stop it. We have to be grateful. Just like when you wake up, you should set the expectation for yourself that you're alive and that you're well and that you're healthy. Nothing else. I've talked a lot today about LinkedIn. And I ranted forever about just being better advertisers, being better at calling out folks that are like shouting from the rooftops about all the answers and all the subject matter experts. I challenge that and I I think you should challenge it. Businesses shouldn't be overbuild.

42:26If somebody's billing you $8,000, I'll do it for $500. If somebody's doing it for $3,000, I'll do it for two. Let's talk about what the contract looks like. If it's not working, I'll let you out. If it is working and you want out, like, sure, go on. That just means I didn't do a great job at establishing trust and answering all your questions. So, that means I I didn't do a good job. So, I have to own that. There's nothing else.

There is no gotchas or no catches or none of that stuff. I'm not in that game. And I don't think we should all be in that game. I don't think we should be following people to then make a post about who we're following and then complain about the post that we're following. just unfollow the people, y'all. And if you see that, speak up on behalf of the person that's not protecting themselves or can't protect themselves. The golden rule, treat somebody as you want to be treated. I think there's another one, and I learned this um with OBX. This is the platinum, right? Like, put yourself in the shoes of the person that's in front of you. A lot of talk about it, but are we living it? Most of us aren't. Sometimes I fail at it, and there are some and and but sometimes I'm really good at it. Let's

stop complaining about what Google's doing and let's embrace it. Like raise it. It's so easy to complain. It's so hard to just say like, "Wow, it's so easy to say, I got 2,000 or 3,000% increase." It's crazy. But then you're not sharing how you did it so somebody else could learn. Why not like share that information? I'm managing millions of dollars and if somebody were just to ping me and say like, "Hey, I need help." I'm gonna make time today.

Somebody was like, "Hey, John, I have this $13 CPC for this DB360 buy." And I said, "Okay, well, let's take a look at the account." Opened up DB3. I went to the campaign. I went straight to the line items. They said, "Let's go to the IO." So, I went to the IO, but guess where I had to get back to the line item. I was okay with them directing me on what they wanted me to see, even though I knew where I needed to go. And then I went and I looked at the history.

So I went through their process, listened to them, and then I came back and I showed them what I'm seeing and I looked at the historical and then I started comparing it. It didn't look too bad. It matched the line and also had information that they didn't have. I knew that there was a 20 to 28 day lag in conversions. So, if the campaign had been live for seven days, and we're only looking at seven days worth of data, and there's 28 conversions, it's because that campaign or that line item or that IO has been live for a much longer period of time than the one that just went over the past couple days. So, I'm able to provide that information and it's free. And then that other person comes down and they're like, "Yes, okay, good. I thought like, no, you're doing good. Everything looks great." And in

45:15fact, your click-through rate is 3x everything and it's been holding for three days. That's really exciting and promising for this new line item that you created. That's the value of somebody that's an expert. They've seen it. They understand it. They can bring somebody up and they don't they can listen to how they do it and then bring you back. They don't have to just show you that one way. They can take you all the way through that process after listening to you and then you feel like, "Wow, empowered because you've learned something. This person is no longer a doer. They just learned a little bit more about something they've been doing for a very long time and they feel comfortable in a new business understanding that." Yep, I did that with DB3. Oh, but you heard me talking about Facebook earlier. Yeah, I go pretty deep and I go pretty wide across

media and I'm still managing CTVE and still helping and and doing all of those things. But my primary focus is uh working on a tool today that hope is um by September I can present something just a snapshot of something that I don't know can maybe change who we work with and how we work with and media and our own personal lives and things like that. It's pretty cool. It's taking a lot of time. It'll probably have some bugs and some kinks I expect to because it's just me. Um, I'm pretty close. Anyways, be helpful, be thoughtful. I continue to push and all that you guys are doing out there. This is a longer episode today, you guys. And most of it was spent on badgering and myself complaining about all of the negative that is out there and ranting about it and talking about fees and

talking about what we actually do in media. There are a lot of uh smart people out there. There are very few experts. Be cautious about the experts. If you're paying $10,000 or more, $5,000 or more for somebody to manage your media, go shop. You don't need to deal with that today. Like somebody should be willing to teach you to manage your media if you're a small business owner so that one day you can walk away from them and you can do your own thing. They shouldn't be managing your media just because and then paying you a recurring fee and they only open the account anytime they have a meeting with you.

Like it shouldn't be happening anymore you guys. There's no need for it. Again, go out there. Go into LinkedIn. Type in Ethan. Look for Jet GBT. Go out there. Type in Will. Look for SEO. Go out there to Sarah and type paid media search engine land. Go out there, look for Monakum and type in uh Performance Max, right? Go look for some of these folks and then look who they follow and look who they're sharing things for, right?

48:00Those are those are the people you you want to follow, right? Because they're only sharing information for folks that are informing them on how to become better at what they do. And these are people I I trust, I care about, I think are pretty dope at what they do. And then remember to invest in Claude or GPT or Gemini of some sort. Use Gemini today, in my opinion, for creative, pretty dope. Use Claude for coding, hands down. GPT, I don't really know. I use it for writing and I use it articulation and I use it uh for strategy and it it's it's pretty good.

And I'm invested in all three personally. and then go get cursor and and play around with it. Learn how to build folders and the file system and how to code. Learn a little bit of Python. Learn a little bit of JavaScript. Learn a little bit of like all of the stuff that's out there so that you can help somebody. Invest in it. Again, I'll finish. If you need some help, reach out. Glad to help. You can find me at it allstarted with aid.com.

just send me a message or ping me or you can get me on LinkedIn at John Michael Williams, which is pretty cool. I still have that um as a like a a title, a name thing. So, JHN Michael Mi Hel Williams, friend me, send me a DM. And again, to 10 of y'all, I'll pay for it and I'll invest in it and I'll invest my time into it. And there's no master class behind it, but you'll walk away feeling good and comfortable. Um, I love y'all and uh, peace.