I got a lot of hate because we ran ads for the Golden State Warriors for five and a half years. I had all these “friends” saying, “You know I’d love a ticket for my buddy and for my girlfriend,” and you might laugh, but many of us are guilty of cold-emailing and cold-calling like these folks.
They ask for your time, money, and connections without adding value first.
Like anyone else, I believe in driving sales and working hard.
But the way to do it is to CREATE VALUE FIRST. Not blasting out thousands of messages, like some desperate college kid hoping that submitting thousands of job applications will improve his chances.
If you want someone important to give you their time– perhaps it’s a potential client or an expert that you’d like advice from– treat them like humans first.
Few people take the time to do their homework, get clarity on what they want, and create value first.
If you’re one of these folks, you already know how easy it is to get access to the busiest, most successful, most important people.
In the first year we ran ads, they hired a new head of marketing named Kenny Lauer, the new CMO. He said, “Dennis, I’m starting this new job and you’re the first person I’m calling because a lot of other marketing people have tried to do social media and run ads but couldn’t get it to work. I’m staking my reputation on this, so I’m really counting on you, buddy, to come in and work some magic here.”
I said, “I don’t promise magic, but I promise we do what we do really well, which is find what’s working and amplify it. By looking at the analytics and setting up what we call digital plumbing, we figured out who was buying tickets and who the best fans were. If you build lookalike audiences, even a 1% lookalike audience based on people who buy, provided you have a custom audience pool of at least 200 really high-quality people—not just people who visited the website, but people who’ve actually bought tickets—the work has been done for you because you started with the right initial ingredients.”
In that first year, we spent a million dollars and drove $38 million in Ticketmaster revenue, provable in the system. We didn’t care about how many fans, likes, or followers we had. We cared about revenue measurable inside the Ticketmaster system.
Ticketmaster had to make several changes to their system because they didn’t have the kind of tracking we were looking for. For example, Ticketmaster had to implement secondary revenue tracking because of us. This meant distinguishing between resale tickets and those sold for the first time. Our games were all sold out, but tickets can be resold multiple times.
We tracked the revenue from resale tickets, making significant money. We earned 15 cents on every dollar of resale revenue and remained profitable. We simply amplified what was already working, partly because the team was doing really well, winning NBA championships and similar achievements.
I got hate from other agencies saying, “It’s easy for Dennis to be a successful social media agency because he has the Golden State Warriors as a client.” I would respond that we show incremental revenue because of our efforts. The revenue is going up because the team is winning and ticket prices are increasing—which makes it harder for us to sell tickets since the revenue team is raising the prices.
When you have a lot of attention, and we had the winning team, the cheerleaders made videos for us. We got sponsors like WingStop, United Airlines, and Uber; they did all kinds of unique things.
I was hoping for Buffalo Wild Wings, but we got WingStop. They initially gave us terrible creatives: coupons like “buy 10 wings, get four free,” and wanted us to run them on our site, Facebook, and other social media channels. I told them it wasn’t going to work. The first year, we did it their way because their brand team wanted to use us like a commercial—we just pushed it out there.
The click-through rate was about 0.2%. I said, “You know what we should do? We should have each player say what their favorite flavor is—zesty garlic, habanero chili, or honey mustard. Just have each of the players hold up a wing with their favorite flavor, and then you can run your coupon: buy 10 wings, get four free.” It took me two years, but finally, I got them to agree because I showed them the results of the stuff they put out there.
I ran it their way because I didn’t want to argue, and we had a contract with them. Then we ran it my way. We got a 2% click-through rate, which was 10 times higher. We were also able to measure how many more people went into the store because we had digital plumbing set up.
With Google and Facebook, you can measure how many store visits you have when you run ads, which we were able to tie back to the point of sale. This allows us to see how many repeat customers they are able to get, not just people who came in for the coupon, but also how many people continued to come back.
We were running a quasi-agency for several big brands sponsoring the sports team. This was great because I had access to some huge companies’ databases. I got access to them because they wanted to match their CRM, which is called a custom audience, also known as offline conversions, which Facebook and Google still have. For some reason, no one seems to know about this, but in retail, it’s huge.
We did it for Ashley Furniture, the world’s largest furniture manufacturer. We matched these custom audiences and ran offline audiences, measuring store visits. We found that every dollar spent on ads drove $28 million of revenue for Ashley Furniture.
And we’re tying to their goals, which is revenue. In the first year of their reports, the Facebook reps said that “you will need to spend $1.5 million – $2 million,” and they did. They ran a bunch of 4th of July blowout sale furniture ads like “come in for free hot dogs’ ‘ and RC Willey kinds of ads. I said those are terrible ads. I even went to RC Willey one time. I’m sure the meat they were using is not even real meat.
I told them the reason people buy at Ashley is not because there’s a blowout sale; they buy because of the stories. All of these furniture stores jack up their prices and then offer big discounts, pretending it’s a sale. So, instead of shooting professionally made videos saying, “This is a chair, this is a bed, and this is a table,” we had a contest where different salespeople made walk-and-talk cell phone videos. Whoever made the best video got a $20 gift card to Best Buy and other stores. We gave out gift cards in the break rooms of the various Ashley furniture stores. We created a shrine with chips, tangerines, and other items to celebrate collecting these one-minute videos.
That worked so well people came in and requested, “Hey, is Richard here?” because they saw Richard in the video saying, “Hey, you know, I’m Richard and I work in Lehigh, and this is my favorite couch because it reminds me of how my grandma used to watch football and BYU on Sunday.”
We had this guy, Woody, who was from Alabama. He would say, “On Sundays, we got together and watched Alabama football.”
So he told stories in this huge southern accent. It worked well in Alabama, but one of our people made a mistake. They accidentally ran the ad in Seattle, Chicago, and Amherst, New Hampshire, or Massachusetts. It was supposed to only run in Alabama because people in those cities don’t talk like that.
The ads worked, so we didn’t pull it. Then we found that ads in Seattle could actually work in New Hampshire, Cleveland and Ohio, and we could show employees that didn’t work in that same state because it would bring people into the stores.
We also ran ads on the cheapest couch, which was $299 and came in five ugly colors. However, if you were a college kid wanting a comfortable couch and didn’t mind any of the five colors, that was pretty cool for you. It’s better than some couch that might have lice in it from some yard sale. You get a new piece of furniture, and the thing was, that couch was out of stock, and we still ran the ads.
So corporate got mad because they said we were running ads promoting this couch that they didn’t even care about. That’s a legal liability because what if someone asked for that particular couch? But we never got in trouble, and we made millions of dollars selling furniture. By the time people came in, they said, “Hey, you guys have that cheap couch, right?” And we responded, “Oh yeah, look, here are three other cheap couches we have.”
And they’d end up buying one of them. They didn’t remember the model number of that one cheap couch we were showing. Because that ad accumulated so much traction on Facebook and Google, we had an edge rank. Once something generates enough likes, comments, and views, it helps you put more money against it because it already has so much social proof. You can see many people have commented, and the ad’s click-through rates show it’s already a proven ad.
So why would we turn that ad off? I don’t care if Valentine’s Day is over. Let’s keep it running. The main point here is that when you have something that’s working when you can figure out exactly who is buying and why they’re buying, which is the job of the agency, that’s 80 percent of it.
Then the rest is just loading up the ads, letting them run, and making sure you’re measuring everything. Give the client a little bit of love, educate them with a bit of consulting, and explain what these things are—a little client service, bedside manner kind of stuff.
But the bulk of the ROI driven by a digital agency, I believe, is all in the setup. It’s all in choosing the right client and making sure you can whittle down their ideas. They’ll try to give you all kinds of ideas they think are great. Show that you heard what they said, but ignore them all.
Because the only thing that matters is driving sales. If you implement their ideas and those ideas don’t drive revenue, guess who gets blamed? You do, even though you did what they asked for. Clients will always hold you accountable for sales. It doesn’t matter what they say.
They’re going to hold you accountable for sales and will fire you if you don’t drive sales.
I have the scars to prove it.
