Gratuitous sorcery and incantations from actual Wizards.

Before the name Amazing Morrow meant anything in Houston, they were just another solid HVAC company: trucks, tools, heart all in place. But no one knew their name.

They were spending millions on pay-per-click and direct mail campaigns, yet they blended into the crowd like khakis at a contractor convention. Leads trickled in. Growth stalled. Sound familiar?

“We had a great team and a solid business, but we weren’t the company people thought of when their AC gave up in the Houston heat.” — Justin Morrow

This is where Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services stepped in.

The Strategy: Start with Questions, Not Answers

Too many marketing campaigns start with tactics — spend money here, post there, run that ad. Not us.

We started with questions:

• Who are you really?
• What do you stand for?
• Why should anyone remember your name the moment they need you?
  
  

And then it clicked: Mr. Morrow, the cartoon character lurking in the old logo, was a story nobody knew.

So we gave him life. We gave him a voice. We gave him a personality.

We didn’t just rebrand a name. We transformed a company identity:

• Morrow Mechanical became Amazing Morrow
• New logos, trucks, identity, and voice
• Radio ads that were intentionally silly, unforgettable, and stick
  

“When they hear something, we want them to think of us — not just now, but when it really matters.” — Justin Morrow

The Wizard of Ads Approach

Here’s how we made the brand impossible to ignore:

🎙️ Auditory Anchors

We created radio ads designed to lodge in listeners’ minds — so even complaints about them meant people were remembering the brand.

🧔‍♂️ Mascot Activation

We turned Mr. Morrow into a vintage, memorable character, giving him a personality people could connect with.

🚚 Strategic Rebrand

Updating everything from the company name to visual identity and tone, making Amazing Morrow instantly recognizable and trustworthy.

💡 Smarter Marketing Spend

 Low-performing PPC campaigns were cut, direct mail optimized, and auditory messaging amplified — achieving more reach with less spend.

The Results Speak for Themselves

In October 2022, Amazing Morrow was pacing $6.5M in revenue. Today, they’re on track for $14M+.

But the story isn’t just numbers:

🔊 Listeners called to complain about the ads — then booked service.

📈 Inbound leads from both customers and job seekers surged.

💰 Marketing spend dropped 40%, from millions to hundreds of thousands.

💸 PPC was eliminated entirely.

🧲 The brand became magnetic and impossible to ignore.

Amazing Morrow didn’t just grow revenue, they multiplied reputation, reach, and relevance.

Why It Worked

Most HVAC companies chase today’s customer. We persuade tomorrow’s prospect.

Marketing shouldn’t make you look like everyone else. It should make you unforgettable.

By transforming Morrow Mechanical into Amazing Morrow, we created a company Houston thinks of first when they need someone they trust.

“Your marketing shouldn’t just chase clicks. It should anchor memory, build trust, and multiply your business over time.” — Ryan Chute

The Takeaway for Essential Services

• Brand first, tactics second: Your story is the engine. Ads are the wheels.
• Make your company unforgettable: People hire who they remember and trust.
• Strategic weirdness works: Personality, humor, and boldness cut through white noise.
  
  

If you want your HVAC, plumbing, or home services brand to become a household name, not just another line in a directory, let’s talk.

✨ Because being remembered beats spending money on ads that sound like everyone else’s.

👉 Start the Conversation

Campaign Highlights

Industry: Home Services / HVAC

Location: Houston, TX

Growth: $6.5M → $14M+

Strategy Focus: Branding, Radio, Image, Identity, Strategic Weirdness

‍

Let’s be honest, ad fraud isn’t a glitch in the system. It is the system.

In this episode of Advertising in America, Ryan Chute, Michael Torbay, Chris Torbay, Vi Wickam and Christina Gressianu pull the curtain back on the dirty economics of digital advertising. From bot traffic and fake clicks to AI expansion that floods your campaigns with people who were never going to buy.

They explain why Google and social platforms are financially incentivized to let some fraud slip through, how display networks and audience expansion quietly multiply waste, and why most dashboards make bad traffic look like progress.

But this isn’t just about what’s broken.

It’s about what still works.

The conversation turns toward brand and why branded search is the hardest thing to defraud, why specificity beats scale, and why companies without a strong brand will struggle as AI search, voice assistants, and automated booking systems take over.

Because when AI starts choosing one provider instead of ten…Only brands survive the cut.

Episode Highlights

• Where ad fraud actually happens (and where it mostly doesn’t)
• Why display networks and audience expansion are fraud magnets
  
• How bots inflate impressions, clicks, and “performance” metrics
• The conflict of interest baked into auction-based ad platforms
• Why strong brands are the cheapest fraud protection available
• How AI search will reward familiarity—and punish anonymity

🎧 Hit play and learn how to stop paying for attention that was never real.

📱 Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

💥 Brought to you by Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services

On today's episode of Advertising in America, we're looking forward to talking about ad fraud and the implications it has on your marketing strategy.

Truthfully, Google Search Network is probably only 1% to 2% fraud clicks. Google makes money off the fraudulent clicks just like it makes money off the real clicks.

If somebody is Googling Vi’s Computer Consultancy, and I buy that click, the list comes up, and it says, “Would you like to visit Chris's Computer Consultancy?” No. I was deliberately looking for a Vi’s. You're luring me into the thing and very subtly going to switch me over to this Chris guy.

Unless you create a webpage that says Vi’s Computer Consultancy by Chris, really small.

What are some of the ways that we can advise our clients to protect against ad fraud and maximize some of their ad dollars to go to the best uses?

I actually have no idea because I don't do any of this. I would say you have to hire someone who knows to do the computer shit.

Ryan Chute: On today's episode of Advertising in America, we're changing things up a little bit. Today, we have two other partners with us from the Wizard of Ads. Christina and Vi, welcome to the show. And we're looking forward to talking today about ad fraud and the implications it has on your marketing strategy.

We'll start off with Vi Wickam, talking about ad fraud, what ad fraud is, and how it implicates us in the marketing strategies that we follow.

Chris Torbay: Help me understand the first thing again when you talk about the bots that are supposedly getting views or getting clicks, is this something where those things are registering, or those clicks are registering, and Google is independently logging them as having been viewed, and it's being fooled, but the tally is coming from them? Or are they part of the problem, or how exactly does that work?

Vi Wickam: Yes, and yes. Say I build a website, and I want to display Google Ads, and that would be called Display Network in Google Ads term. And I am going to put up video ads, and I'm going to put up banner ads and I'm going to put them all over the site.

And I'm also going to make it so that I display maybe a hundred ads on every page, but only five of them actually show, but somehow I'm also writing a program that's going to go through and click on my ads. And Google specifically does catch some of that. It doesn't catch all of that. Google is much better, though at catching and stopping those clicks from being charged than Microsoft is. But if you look at Google Search versus the Display Network, there's far less click fraud on Google Search, which happens within Google, than within the Display Network, which happens on all the other websites that display Google Ads.

Now, ultimately, Google is incentivized to catch some of this, but not all of this. Just like any of the other ad fraud software that are being hired by agencies to catch bot fraud. The reason being is they want these agencies, are generally being paid by a percentage of spend and so if they were catching half of the clicks and saying half of these clicks are fraud, or 75% of these clicks are fraud, and all of a sudden only half of the budget is being spent, they look pretty bad because they're buying lousy traffic. So there is a built-in incentive because Google makes money off the fraudulent clicks, just like it makes money off of the real clicks.

And truthfully, Google Search Network is probably only 1% to 2% fraud clicks. Google PMax, which uses Display Network as well, is a much higher percent of fraud, probably in the 7% kind of ballpark. Microsoft doesn't let you block Display Network by default. It makes you block it a little bit at a time as your ads run, and consequently, Microsoft is harder to keep clean. In our historic reference, comparing Fou Analytics, which is a software that we install on all of our sites that is specifically designed to track and differentiate quality traffic, human traffic, spider traffic, which is another type of bot, but isn't necessarily fraud and fraudulent traffic to your website.

And so in looking at that traffic and comparing, very often with Microsoft or Bing Ads Network, we see fraud rates of 20 to 25%. With PMax or Display Network campaigns on Google, we often see fraud rates of 5 to 7%. With Google Ads running search only, it's typically less than 2%, but very often in the 1 to 2% rate. And most of that Google actually catches and refunds. With the Microsoft network, we have found times where, in addition to the 20% of Microsoft flags is fraud, there's another 20% that they paid for that was actually fraud, that Microsoft didn't catch and wouldn't refund.

Mick Torbay: See, that was going to be my question. For example, in one of the examples you just gave on a particular Google ad will have 5% fraud. Who came up with that 5%? Was it Google saying, “Yeah, this is 5% fraud.” And can you trust? Is that just the ones they caught, or is that not the ones they caught?

Vi Wickam: That is just the ones that Google caught. And in addition, there's usually a few percent that we can identify as probably fraud that Google doesn't catch.

Mick Torbay: Okay. So new question. If you are able to spot it, why is Google not able to spot it?

Vi Wickam: It's not a question of whether or not Google can. Again, Google has an inbuilt incentive to not catch it all.

Mick Torbay: So if they wanted to catch it all, they could.

Vi Wickam: I would say yes, they could, but then they'd have to.

Mick Torbay: They'd take a financial hit to do that.

Vi Wickam: They would take a financial hit of potentially 2% of their business, which is billions of dollars if they were to do that.

Mick Torbay: So they could do some R&D, they could solve this problem, and it would only cost them billions of dollars.

Vi Wickam: It would only cost them billions of dollars to do the right thing. It would also require that they build in better detection methods. So it would cost them money on the front end and on the back end.

Mick Torbay: So the question is, how much money are they willing to invest on this program that would cost them billions of dollars more?  

Vi Wickam: It's a very good question. And they're the ones that are doing the best at blocking fraud. So let's be clear that even though they're not catching at all, they are doing a better job than their competitors at blocking fraud. And the areas where the fraud is the worst is on social networks. When you turn on the audience expansion or those kind of AI or algorithmic expansions of who you're targeting, you are getting potentially up to 95% fraudulent or worthless traffic.

Mick Torbay: Where is that, where is that happening?

Vi Wickam: So that happens on all of the social networks. On Facebook, we've seen numbers of 40 to 50% be fraudulent traffic when you use the audience expansion. I read a statistic about TikTok being 95% fraudulent on the expanded network. LinkedIn is often above 50% in the data we've seen when you expand the network. So never use an expanded network on any of those platforms if you want to avoid fraud. Also, don't use the Display Network on Google if you want to avoid fraud.

Ryan Chute: And what you're speaking about here in plain terms, in layman's terms, in everyday terminology, is if you don't want to spend money on fake clicks, don't expand your networks on the social networks and put bot blockers in place on the search engine networks.

Vi Wickam: For sure. And so we use a combination of bot blocking software and fraud detection software that we use in conjunction with each other to both identify and block IP addresses and signatures of fraudulent behavior or programmatic behavior. Things like clicking on areas of your page multiple times when there's nothing on that page. Clicking on and having mismatches between screen sizes and devices. For instance, the screen size is a device size that doesn't exist, or the screen size doesn't match what the device is. It says it's an Apple iOS device, but the screen size doesn't match any Apple iOS devices, and that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of ways you can detect it, but it's not easy.

Mick Torbay: So it's not only fraudulent, but it's also lazy. If the fraud people could just get the device sizes right, they could do way more fraud.

Vi Wickam: Absolutely. The smarter you are at fraud.

Chris Torbay: Anyways, whose side are you on?

Mick Torbay: I'm just, I'm not saying you should do this. I'm saying they're going to get better at this, aren’t they?

Vi Wickam: They will absolutely get better. And what you have is in other countries, you have data centers full of humans and robots and computers with programs running on them, specifically with the intent of defrauding people in the Western world through ad fraud.

Mick Torbay: The people who are doing this, how are they making their money by paying Google for ads that are not seen? Or am I just not doing that?

Vi Wickam: So they're not paying Google. Google has a program called AdSense, where you can get a 60/40 split on ads that show on your website. So if I have a website that has a lot of traffic, I can show ads on that website. When people click on those ads, I get a 60/40 share of whatever that click is.

Mick Torbay: You're incentivized to have more clicks.

Vi Wickam: I want more visitors and more clicks, and as long as Google doesn't flag me as being fraud, I can keep on making a 60/40 split on a bunch of garbage, a bunch of garbage traffic, and that's not real people.

Mick Torbay: But you don't care about traffic to your site.

Vi Wickam: Not real traffic.

Mick Torbay: You care about clicks on those Google ads.

Vi Wickam: Google is tracking the traffic as well as the clicks. And so if Google sees that 100% of the people that visit my site click on an ad, Google's going to know and trigger it as fraud.

Now, again, Google has an incentive to not work really hard.

It's like that Polish king who wanted his peasants to eat potatoes. And so he first tried to tell him you should eat potatoes. And then he figured out that if I guard the potatoes, but I don't guard him very well, everybody's going to steal my potatoes and plant them. Google's guarding the potatoes, but not especially well.

Ryan Chute: This is interesting. It may, it reminds me of a movie I saw years and years ago, just trying to see if I could find it on ChatGPT, and it's giving me a few different options. It was about scraping fractions of pennies off of each transaction.

Vi Wickam: Oh, absolutely. That's what all the banks do.

Ryan Chute: This is what all the banks do. And this is exactly what this one person did and made hundreds of millions of dollars.

Vi Wickam: Yeah. Fractions of cents.

Ryan Chute: And this is ultimately what we're talking about here with ad fraud, in one element. One element is that there are bots that are making money off of your ads.

Let's bring this down to real life here. We have a client who's in Southern Texas in a fairly large city, and he's getting tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, more impressions than he is getting total population in the industry. There are way more impressions than there is people. On top of that, those impressions are turning into the potential of how many households might need to have air conditioning repair.  

Mick Torbay: So literally every man, woman, and child in that community is clicking on this guy's ads several times.

Ryan Chute: More than once. Or getting that impression, not on the ads, but on the impressions. But then you go through the exercise with him of how many possible people could there possibly be looking for “air conditioning repair near me” today. And the answer is tens of thousands, maybe 18,000, maybe less.

Vi Wickam: I'll accept your supposition.

Ryan Chute: Yes.

Mick Torbay: Certainly not everyone.

Ryan Chute: But based on the certainly not everyone

Vi Wickam: And certainly no more than 5% in a year are looking for that to be replaced.

Ryan Chute: Or a replacement. Or a repair. So if we look at the pure math and the fact that the clicks coming through are 5, 10, 20, 40 times more than the actual demand. You've have to ask yourself, where are these extra leads going to come from? Which ones are real? Which ones are fake for one? What are you paying for? What are you not paying for? You are completely susceptible to not just the ad fraud that's being done externally of Google and other search engines, but you're also getting the ad fraud of Google extorting you for your own name, accepting the fraud that comes that they could catch and they're not catching, and the fact that there's just not that many people possible to capture that. And then of course, they're an auction system that also is the seller of the product, which creates the most significant conflict of interest on the planet.

Vi Wickam: Alright, let's start at the top of this. There's a lot to unpack here. The first thing about impressions and clicks and the population and how many people are in the market. So Google creates in-market audiences. And those in-market audiences could be, like in the market for HVAC service or repair, the way those audiences work is I type in a keyword at some point and for the next six months or 90 days or whatever the length of time for that audience is, I'm in that audience whether I've bought the thing now or not.

So it might be six months' worth of people who mostly have already purchased the service who are still in this audience, because it is people who have typed in one of these keywords that Google has identified as putting you in the market. Now, it could also be that IP address, which is a business that has a thousand people, that all of those people get flagged now as being in the audience, because I did the search from work, and there's a thousand other people that work with me at that same IP address.

Google is trying to make those audiences good, but there are a number of factors that make it hard for those audiences to be good. So I bid on, I want to show to people in this general geographic area who are in this audience. If it's a six-month window, then instead of me looking at the, and the turn of this is really a one-week churn, then I have 25 times more people in that audience than are actually currently in the market. But I don't know how many of those people and which of those people are and aren't actually in the market for that service.

So that's one of the issues with these audiences. And it doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to bid on those audiences. It just means they aren't perfect, and you should know what you're actually buying when you target those audiences.

The next thing is when we're talking impressions, somebody could get 5 or 10 impressions of one of your ads in the same day. So if you're showing ads to people in this demographic area or geographic area, and you're showing a PMax or a Display Network Ad, it's showing as many times as you have budget for clicks to people, all through that area, who fit whatever profile you set up and those profiles aren't perfect and you might be 50-50 at best on them being in your real audience that you're trying to target. So when you get to the end of that, you may have hit some people 20 or 30 times a day, over that 30 days. And some of those people that you wanted to hit, you didn't hit at all because they weren't in the audience, because they didn't search Google for that keyword. So again, not perfect, not actually fraud.

Chris Torbay: But also not what people wanted from their ads.

Vi Wickam: And not really what they were for looking for.

Chris Torbay: And scrolling through a page and then getting served the same ad like 20 times. We have all these sorts of guidelines around frequency, and we know that you need a certain amount of frequency for stuff to really seed in people's minds.

Mick Torbay: But that 20th ad doesn't really do much,

Chris Torbay: But if you're dumping 50 views, 30 views on me, that's not what that client wanted when they said I would like to buy 10,000 views of this ad.

Vi Wickam: No. Now, when you mentioned charging you for your name and letting your competitors bid on your name, that's a whole different class of problematic behavior on the side of the search engines themselves, which is, they won't let you use the name of your competitors in the ad, but they will let you pay to bid on your competitor's name. So not technically fraud, but on the verge of trademark infringement being allowed. But they have lots of lawyers that tell them how far towards that they're allowed to go before it becomes trademark infringement.  

Ryan Chute: And it does become those issues of “Best Home Services” and “Quality Home Services.” These are all just generic names. There is no trademark ability of those names. So these are all statements.

Vi Wickam: And even when there is, Google will not stop you from bidding on your competitor's name. So if I bid on my competitor's name, I'm not likely to convert that, but I'm likely to steal that click from them. I'm much less likely to convert when they're not looking for me. They're looking for them. But if I don't pay for my own name, I am potentially giving those clicks to my competitors, which is problematic as well because, from my perspective, Google shouldn't allow that behavior. That is too close to trademark infringement. I would call it trademark infringement to bid on somebody else's name. If I resell a product, then I think that's legitimate. I should be able to bid on that product I sell. But to bid on a competitor's name, I think is problematic.

Mick Torbay: You call it problematic. I call it straight up dodgy. That’s like, if I sell you a gun, and then I say to Chris, Vi's got a gun, and he might shoot you. You should get a gun too to protect yourself from Vi because that guy's packing,

Vi Wickam: And he's got a gun.

Mick Torbay: And I'm selling to both of y'all, and then I go back to you and you're like, he's got a gun. You need a bazooka.

Vi Wickam: Definitely.

Mick Torbay: And the only person who's winning here is me.

Chris Torbay: I think you make a fair point. It's not, you're not going to lose a lot of those things because if somebody is Googling “Vi’s Computer Consultancy” and I buy that click, and so the list comes up, and it says, “Would you like to visit Chris's Computer Consultancy?” It's no, I was deliberately looking for Vi’s.

So then they're going to search again or scroll down to, you'll be at the bottom of the list, whatever. But maybe a couple of them. “Oh, we'll go and say I was looking for Vi, but this guy Chris looks okay. So maybe I'll try him and that for sure.”

Vi Wickam: You won't lose a lot, but you will lose some.

Christina Gressianu: Unless you create a webpage that says “Vi’s Computer Consultancy By Chris,” really small. And so then, when I search for Vi's Computer Consultancy, and I click on this link, and I think it's still Vi's, and I make the phone call, and you're like “Yeah, we've got Vi.”

Chris Torbay: Oh, you mean where you're really devious. It has also happened where it's visconsultancy.org, and it's not his, which is a .com. And so then you go to it, and it's a decoy, but then you're luring me into the thing and very subtly going to switch me over to this Chris guy.

Christina Gressianu: There was a lawsuit. Some lawyers sued some other lawyers. This happened. They won because they won like the deceptive practices. But the lawyers sued the lawyers who were bidding on their keyword. They didn't sue Google.

Mick Torbay: They didn't dare

Christina Gressianu: Rats.

Vi Wickam: No. And that lawyer who was trolling wouldn't outright say that they were them, but they would not say that they weren't. And so they were deceiving the customers as well, and they had ads that used terms that made people think that they were them without using their name, and they still lost millions of dollars for defrauding those customers. So you're right, it's shady. And it's shady on Google's behalf for allowing it to have it.  

Chris Torbay: I was going to say the secondary point here is that Google also knows what's goes on, so it's one thing for that person to do something deceptive. But if Google sort of is totally aware that kind of deception is happening, they need to do more.

Ryan Chute: They are conspirators.

Vi Wickam: They're making many millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars off that behavior. And the way that it adds up is if I own the name, and my website is the name, and my content on the website is the name, I get that click for really cheap because I have a very high quality score. If you, Mick, are bidding on my name as a keyword, you are going to pay 10 times more than I would pay for that same click. Google's incentivized for you to get some of those clicks. If I'm paying $5 for that click and you're paying $50, I want you to get some of those clicks.

Mick Torbay: Why do you pay $5, and I pay $50?

Vi Wickam: Because I'm going to have a quality score of 10, which is the best, and you will have a quality score of one, which is the worst. And the quality score is a multiplier that says, I pay one 10th for this keyword.

Mick Torbay: Most of Google's users are not happy with landing on my page.

Vi Wickam: Correct. People are going to be bouncing most of the time, but you're still going to sell a little bit off that. And you're going to, especially if you're tricky about it and you try to deceive people, and when they call you, you don't say, “Oh, we're not Vi’s Computer Service. You clearly have the wrong company service. We're Mick’s Computer Service. We don't wanna deceive you.”

Ryan Chute: There's also an incentive for companies like Google, Amazon is certainly a big culprit of this, where they've coined it broad search, and that's broad search, both in the keywords specifically and in the geography.

And for example, at our home service company in Phoenix, we're consistently seeing companies or clicks coming in, paying for clicks from areas that we're not servicing. And it's just enough outside of the areas that we've already identified equally as much, they take away a certain keyword to say, “Hey, it matched so we're going to show it up.” And then of course, you paid for that. Click congratulations.

Vi Wickam: And Google has systematically made keywords broader in terms of their behavior. In terms of geography, I've gotta side a little with Google on this one, because restricting geography by IP addresses is notoriously hard because you don't know exactly where they are unless they're on a mobile device. If they're on a desktop computer, they are registered to an ISP. The ISP is in a specific town, which may not be the town that computer's located in, and if the ISP doesn't report back where that specific IP address is assigned to, which they generally don't unless they're subpoenaed. Google doesn't actually have a great way to know exactly where you are. They're estimating most of the time.

Mick Torbay: So how tight can they be on mobile devices?

Vi Wickam: It depends on the provider and what data they sell to Google.

Ryan Chute: And if your location is on.

Vi Wickam: Yeah, if you have location tracking turned on, and you have Google Maps installed and active, Google knows exactly where you are. Same thing with Apple and Apple Maps. Apple knows exactly where you are if you're using Apple Maps, or Waze knows exactly where you are, and a lot of those software sell that data to whoever's willing to pay for it. Google's default location is you are in, or frequently in or interested in this area. Now the more restrictive is you are in this area right now, so if you want to have better targeting, you're going to say, I only want to target people who are actually in this area right now, but sometimes it's useful to say I sell tours to Hawaii and I want to target anybody in the US who's interested in Hawaii. I want to target Hawaii and people who are interested in Hawaii, or maybe I want to target anybody who's interested in Hawaii, but not people who are actually in Hawaii.

Ryan Chute: Fascinating subject, and Bob Hoffman's book inside The Black Box, he talks about this being at the levels of organized crime in the multi-hundreds of billions of dollars worth of fraud happening every single year. What are some of the ways that we can advise our clients to protect against it, and the listeners here today, to protect against ad fraud, and maximize some of their ad dollars to go to the best uses? I wouldn't mind picking on you a little bit, Christina, because I know that you have a few ideas on this.  

Mick Torbay: And you might not use insider jargon like he does, so that we might actually understand the answer.

Christina Gressianu: Oh, I actually have no idea because I don't do any of this. I would say you have to hire someone who knows how to do the computer shit.

Mick Torbay: That was a great answer.

Ryan Chute: That was actually, that was such a good answer. So you've got to do the computer shit.

Mick Torbay: I picked on Vi a little bit. But the trouble is that you're talking to us like we're smart people, and you need to cut that out.

Ryan Chute: So smart. So I get click bots, like you need to have fraud protection?

Vi Wickam: So step one is don't buy things that are typically fraudy. So don't buy programmatic ad exchanges, which are a thing. That's a thing that a lot of big agencies spend lots of money.

Ryan Chute: Like Tabula and yes.

Vi Wickam: Like Tabula, and there's a bunch of them, but typically those are the most fraud-filled transactions, and I could get into the technicalities of it.

Ryan Chute: Please don't,

Chris Torbay: Just say that's go easy on us.

Vi Wickam: That's mostly fraud traffic. The next, so avoid programmatic. Two, avoid audience expansion anytime you can.  

Ryan Chute: So, audience expansion is saying, I want more of the same customers in this area and you're clicking a little button on Facebook, Meta.

Vi Wickam: It's usually on by default, so whether it's Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, et cetera. Turn it off.

Ryan Chute: So we're turning off that function.

Vi Wickam: Always turn off audience expansion.

Ryan Chute: What else?

Vi Wickam: And don't run display ads. So turn off the display network and the Search Network on Google Ads.

Ryan Chute: Does that include PMax?

Vi Wickam: You gotta be very careful with PMax. PMax can be run at a positive ROI, but you've got to be very careful. PMax is just as fraudy as Display Network if you are not extraordinarily careful because it's running AI expansion, and just like Google added AI expansion for search, and also generates tons of garbage.

I had an HVAC company that we added “HVAC repair” as one of the keywords we were targeting. And it was targeting handyman and lawn service keywords, things that were only tangentially related at best. The expansion of any sort, where you're letting a computer decide who you're going to see, is going to be rife with fraud and garbage.  

Ryan Chute: Fascinating.

Mick Torbay: It's terrifying.

Ryan Chute: Absolutely. One of the ways I'm going to throw you another softball here. One of the ways that we can go about getting, avoiding, or reducing the impact of fraud is to have a stronger brand.

Christina Gressianu: So then, when people are searching for your name, that is the hardest to defraud.  When people search for Christina Gressianu Shoemaker, that is the hardest brand to defraud because no one can really be Christina Gressianu. So I'm a big fan of all the messaging. Keep your eyes on your own paper and speak your truth in all of your marketing, and don't worry about what's going on out there. And then the right people, whatever that means, will be looking for you specifically.

Ryan Chute: One of the interesting things that I've recently reconciled with is that the right copy finds its way in front of the right people. For example, Ryan Deiss, when we were listening to some of his problem statements, is “Minnesota Moms, True or False? I want an air conditioning company that can come to me in the next hour.” Just as a problem statement. And that copy, just as a simple example. Gets in front of the right person. When I'm tugging the hearts of people who have a heart, a soft spot for veterans, and you leverage a strong, authentic, true veteran message and story, you're going to get in front of the right people who want to be a part of that tribe. And those have the power in bypassing this channel reliance that we have, which is where a lot of people have to overspend in an already expensive space.

Marketing is not cheap, and just because you double your budget doesn't mean you're going to double your leads, and if you doubled your leads, there's a good chance that 25% of them are fake garbage robots. That's right. Robots don't buy air conditioners or hot water tanks or,

Christina Gressianu: I don't know. Robots need a lot of cooling.

Chris Torbay: Yeah, they don't take hot showers.

Vi Wickam: When it really comes down to it, having a strong brand is the cheapest way to avoid fraud because if you're not bidding on general keywords and you're not bidding on broad keywords, and you're only spending money on people who are looking for you by name, which you've got to have a really darn strong brand to only bid on branded keywords.

Chris Torbay: That's what struck me is it sounds like the possibility for fraud expands or grows as you move into these markets where it's open space, people throwing darts at a wall, and you want to be up there with all the other brands that no one has a preference for, right? The more you are in a space where people already know your brand, and they're looking for you specifically, the less there is that ability to have fraudulent clicks, fraudulent displays, fraudulent links and the cost of that connecting to the wrong, paying for a link to somebody you don't want to go to.

Vi Wickam: For sure. I totally agree. The more tightly you are built around your brand, the less opportunities there are for fraud.

Christina Gressianu: I would say that the more generic of a business you have, the more you're right for fraud. If I'm looking for a plumber who likes dogs and cats because I have dogs and cats, then that's a more specific business, more specific person than a plumber.

Ryan Chute: So dialling in a deeper understanding of what our clients are looking for from us helps pull us closer to the people who are looking for that specific service.

Christina Gressianu: I would say so.  

Chris Torbay: And the more specifically they're looking, the less rife with fraud, those aspects of the digital space are.

Vi Wickam: For sure. And the better we convey who we are and who the audience can be selected by the messaging, and if the messaging truly reveals who we are as a person or as a business, the better we are going to connect with that audience we're trying to reach.

Christina Gressianu: And the more serious that buyer is, right? If I'm just looking for women's suits, I may or may not be actually ready to buy. But if I'm looking for petite women's suits that are satin and plum, I have a very specific thing. And if you show me that ad, I'm probably going to buy.

Ryan Chute: This is where I think a lot of the click fraud has come up in Amazon, and Amazon is really happy about you clicking on 10 things that are wrong before they click on the one that's right, because they're getting paid all along.

Vi Wickam: Which may be Amazon's undoing in the long run because ultimately, Amazon has been a brand built around customer satisfaction and how much their search function has gone downhill to drive more clicks, which they're getting paid for and is a big part of their revenue, now has undermined customer satisfaction.

Ryan Chute: I think it's a following the money kind of thing, right? It's like I need more money. When we saw Google lose a significant volume of search revenue last year, we saw prices dramatically shoot up. Some of that was announced, a whole bunch of it was not announced, meaning you're just surprised. Get to pay more now. Tough luck.

Vi Wickam: Not actually an auction.

Ryan Chute: Not actually an auction, right? It's actually a complete scam of an auction because you can't be the auctioneer and the person selling the product to make it an auction.

Vi Wickam: And Google came on under scrutiny not very long ago when internal documents were leaked that showed that internal people to Google had increased prices just because they were trying to meet revenue.

Ryan Chute: There are pressures. That's right. So, how does this shift as we finish off this conversation? How does this shift with AI search? And with voice search making a significant leap forward?

Vi Wickam: So Google just announced that AI mode is a thing. And so we've gone from search results that were just “search,” right? We just had organic search, and then we added a sidebar of ads. Then we added the three ads at the top, and so what Google really wants is people to do things that make Google money. So ultimately, they don't want you clicking on organic search results. Those are just there because that's the value to the customer.

Mick Torbay: Which is strange because that's actually the thing that we all thought we were going to get.

Vi Wickam: That's what we all wanted.

Mick Torbay: That's what search was going to do today. We wanted an honest search.

Vi Wickam: So then we started adding structured snippets, which were attempts to answer the question without you ever leaving Google. So undermining the organic search results by answering the question first in a structured way. The next level was we added AI search summaries, and that is causing huge drops in search traffic for people across the board. I read recently that many sites have seen 50% or more drops in traffic without drops in impressions. So the same number of people are searching for you. You're showing up in the same place, but you've just lost half the traffic because the answer is being given in an AI summary and people are staying on Google. Google wants people to stay on Google unless they're clicking on an ad,

Ryan Chute: Deeply incentivized to stay on Google.

Vi Wickam: Unless they're clicking on an ad. Google doesn't want them clicking anywhere.

Mick Torbay: And now to look at it at a true like legitimate search, you actually have to go to the second page.

Vi Wickam: Absolutely. Nothing above the fold is leaving Google without Google getting paid.

Ryan Chute: And who wants to keep going? At the end of the day, if it's answered your question, they're clicking the phone, they're clicking the chat, they're clicking the “Schedule Now” button. They're clicking the “Reserve Now” button, and Google's getting paid.

Vi Wickam: So, AI mode now is only going to give them one answer.  You don't get the results, may or may not get any citations, you're going to get one result, which is in the direction of what we talked about at the partner meeting after my presentation, which was what Google and Alexa and Siri and Cortana are all going to do before long is I'm going to call or I'm going to say, “Hey, Google, my air conditioner's broken.” And it might go even further, where my air conditioner contacts Google and says, “Alert, alert, signal.”

Christina Gressianu: “Help me. Help me.”

Vi Wickam: Preemptively, because it's monitoring it. And Google will automatically dispatch whomever they decide.

Mick Torbay: And that will be whoever pays Google the most amount of money.

Vi Wickam: Correct. It will be whoever is paying the most for that booking because software like ServiceTitan already has booking integrations with Google. If you don't have those set up, and you don't have a strong brand, and you don't own the relationship with your customers. You're not in that game, you will soon be out on your teeth.

Ryan Chute: If that's the case, and if you're not a company that's big enough to have ServiceTitan or chooses not to use ServiceTitan for their own good reasons, brand still seems to be pulling forward to help equalize this over the three layers of marketing that we can do.

Vi Wickam: Brand is the only way to hijack this system. You can manage the system if you're a strong enough company, and you target tight enough. You don't tie, you don't target broadly. You don't target geographically, broad or keyword broad or any of those kinds of things. You target as tightly as you reasonably can. You build a brand, you have to build a brand. That is the only way to hijack a system where the AI results get booked automatically.

Ryan Chute: So to be clear, we're not talking about brand or lead gen. We're not talking about one or the other. These aren't mutually exclusive things. Marketing is never going to be successful that way. Marketing is going to be successful based on the astounding amounts of research that already exist out there with brand awareness, sales activation, and lead capture, working hand in hand, not independently in silos.

This is what I call holistic brand forward marketing strategy, and it's built and designed to think about where you're going to both spend your money and deliver your message, and how you're going to deliver your message in a way that isn't just going to be seen at the moment of need, but before that and after that, so that you can build a base that doesn't have such dependence on the channels.

This has been a really fascinating conversation. I appreciate everyone here today with the contributions and input, and insights, and I look forward to seeing you. We all look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Advertising in America. Until next time.

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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?

Join us on our socials @advertisinginamerica. Want to spend your marketing budget better? Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today. Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and your audience captivated.

I've spent countless hours in Q4 of 2025 with brilliant economists, scaling experts, exit strategists, and wise old, battle-seasoned operators who’ve survived these tumultuous seas before.

I've been poring over the business topology for 2026, and I can summon it up in two words. Cautiously optimistic.

But don’t expect to get out of it without being bloodied. 2026 is going to be a vicious knife fight in the fog. The fog of AI platform updates, search algorithm changes, PPC price hikes, and oppressive economics. Most everyone is already swinging blindly...except the wise. Already, there are many bodies who never made it out of 2025 alive. 

Consumers are uncertain, and they are relying on us to give them certainty. Certainty that we're not going to try to sell them the farm. That we have their best interest at heart. That we can make that old clunker of equipment last a bit longer to see us through this fog.

Obligations are high. High mortgages, gas, and food prices aren't going away. People are putting their groceries on ‘4 convenient monthly payments.’ Tariffs are holding prices at all-time highs. Gold has never been so expensive, cresting $4000 an ounce for the first time in history.

We may not be in a traditional recession, but make no mistake. We are in a TRUST RESESSION.

And do you know who wins in a trust recession? You guessed it!

Those worthy of trust.

Think about the signals you're casting off. Do you have an aura of greed, ulterior motives, and creepy PE vibes?

The most trusted are the ones who will gain impressive market share, yet it won't feel as satisfying as you'd hope. Topline revenues will likely hold steady for the hardworking, honest types. You'll do more small jobs. Your average ticket will be up because of prices, but down because of lower replacement units.

But you'll be winning over the hearts and minds of your market in spades. You were there for them in their tough times. They'll appreciate you for that.

In 2026, people will NOT be looking for the best solution. They will be looking for something slightly less shitty than what they have right now. A repair, not a replacement. A restoration, at half the price of a new mid-priced system. A good enough piece of equipment. Low-level maintenance. None of the fancy stuff. Repairs will shift to their buddy Earl before it'll come to you. You'll fix what Earl muffs up.

Your closing ratio will rise, but your call volume will drop. Get serious bout your sales training, and have closing ARCs ready to go. High pressure won’t work, but polite persistence will. 

It's up to you to earn their willingness to even pick up the phone every day. Even the ones you've served before. When things get tough, people pull back to the fortress and protect the valuables. It’s been that way since the start of time. You get your piece of the rations when you earn your keep. 

That's a trust recession.

So be trustworthy. Exude empathy, then competence. Be convenient. Be abundant and reassuring. Be the company your mom would be proud of.

‍

2026 won't be sexy. It'll be sweaty. It'll require a lot of outbound calling. It'll be a lot of smaller tickets.

1. Protect your brand repetition to the masses.
2. Lean heavily into brand messaging about efficient operations and fast, fix-it-first repairs and Michelin Star service at Applebee's prices.
3. Stay curious, generous, and optimistic. People are looking for the Leaders to show themselves. Appear to be their leader, and they will follow.
4. Embrace the experiment. With so many unknowns, we are back on the digital frontier, cutting a path to potential.
5. Don't get precious about toplines. Get obsessed with efficiencies to drive the bottom line without sacrificing delightful service. Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. ‍
6. Be a gentleman, not a creep. Leave that to the finance bros and spreadsheet weasels. Love the one you're with. Take them all, big and small. Get intentional about building average tickets slowly and carefully. The era of the one-night stand is over. It's time to settle down and start courting again.
7. Don't start getting ready. BE READY. Train, train, train. From CSRs to Sales. Heck, even those AIs you have answering your phones. From mindset to motivation. Competence breeds confidence. Have your team ready to act like a SWAT team, not just in sales, but in problem-solving, adaptability, creativity, and enthusiasm. 

‍Luck favors the prepared. Luck favors the bold. 

While more people obsess about trying to hit the public (and AI Search) with low-quality quantity, you hit the masses with the soothing words that make them feel right about you. You're GOING TO WIN. You did this year, and you'll do it again in 2026. And you'll look back as one of the proudest years of your life. 

Tiring. Frustrating at times. Stressful too. I know you have a lot of obligations to provide for the people in your care. I respect the hell out of you for that. 

Just remember, you can't go on an adventure without facing trouble. 

Let's get this!

‍

A friend. A client. A brilliant mind. Shawna Devlin of Mo Better Garage calls it the Midterm Miracle. A Marketing Maven in her own right, Shawna has a lot of optimism for the latter half of 2026. Amid significant pressure to win the Midterm elections, her keen eye sees an economic reprieve in the trailing half of 2026. I like the way you think, Shawna. 

In 2025, we saw the average operator spend 12% on marketing. New Jersey, California, and New York topped the list with sky-high marketing costs. Meta and Google each nearly touched a 200% price increase that not even the most elite digital marketer could avoid. 

Nobody knows what Google and Meta will do in 2026. We have seen aggressive moves by YouTube in late 2025, and we expect Google to level the playing field in its favor in 2026. OpenAI and a handful of up-and-coming AI companies are all vying for a new grab at the AI advertising gold rush. 

Reddit and YouTube are currently the most frequently cited platforms for AI LLMs. Tomorrow? Nobody knows. 

As for trust, well, that requires words. Stories. Feelings. If you invested in a truck wrap, well, that’s not going to help you this year. If you invested in telling the world who you are and why they should care, you’re already in a better position than basically all of your competitors to dominate the shrinking market share available in 2026. 

If you don’t have a strong selling system, don’t delay. In a drought, you need to make every customer count. Handling resistance. Building the sale. Nurturing the relationship. These all matter more when there are fewer people to talk to. Every customer is like the pretty girl visiting an all-boys school. They are going to get a lot of attention. 

2026 is the year of the bottom line. Don’t let inefficiencies eat away at profitability, but don’t get rid of the inefficiencies that optimize profitability. Sales training and powerful brand messaging are your saviors. Guarantees with real consequences will show the world who you are when it hurts. And monthly finance payments will make the pain tolerable. 

You’re going to make your own economy in 2026. Lean into the trust signals and feel right. Familiarity. Calm abundance. Graciousness and kindness when nobody is looking. Standing for something. 

Build simple-to-follow systems and get them 70% right and 100% fast. It’s a mantra my friend at Call Dad, Matt Pozda, lives by, and it has served him well. 

There are a lot of shiny objects out there right now in marketing. A tsunami of media channel options promising you the perfect customer served up on a silver platter. AI promises lightspeed efficiency for covering any and every possible keyword a human could ever hope to search for.  

And seemingly delusional old people (like me) are insisting that people still listen to the radio and watch television (the data would break your brain). 

Then there’s what you say. Some scream out loud about your call to action. Others insist that you need to share your story with the world. Everyone wants your money, and it feels like you pay everyone else more than you ever receive.

You're left wondering,

‍“Where in the world do I spend my money?”

I believe that marketing researchers are pretty astute folks with a whole bunch of helpful data. I also believe Operators who have to deal with the realities of life on the frontlines. I’ve sat in the chair, making the decisions on what to cut to ensure payroll was covered. 

I understand how stressful it is to make the best decision about where to invest your money to achieve the best results from your marketing investment. 

Early on, when all you have available to spend is smaller than the impact you need to make, you have to add your Guerrilla Marketing resourcefulness into the pool to offset the lack of cash to make things happen. 

Here’s the thing. Brand awareness is what keeps you in the game. If they don’t know you exist, you’re just dumping your money onto a roulette table at Casino Google. With the steeply rising costs of PPC, this is a surefire way to make Google rich. 

Top of mind has always, and will continue to always be exponentially superior to top of search. Choose which game you’re trying to win. You only have so many resources.  

It has been clearly proven that 80% of marketing’s long-term ROI¹ comes from brand messaging, not performance-based marketing tactics. Auditory brand messaging, supported by related visual brand elements, builds memory, preference, and trust. 

It is scientifically impossible for PPC to do this as a function of brain chemistry.

It has also been well documented² that brands that advertise through recessionary periods (including trust recessions) grow more, both in revenue and market share.

Here’s what really hurts, and this means you folks in the back who are still sitting on the brand messaging sidelines. Cutting brand spend costs you more in the long run³. For every $1 you cut from the brand today, you’ll need to spend $1.85 to recover lost ground.

Thinking of going dark? It’ll hurt. In year one, the average sales decline is 16%. By year three, the data shows us a 36% sales crater⁴. Ouch! Not to mention when you cut (or don’t play for real) you’re just handing over your market share and revenue to your competition. 

Imagine your competitor doubling down on brand while you retreat? Expect to lose at least 15% market share⁵. 

What most competitors have failed to realize is how much solid branding builds pricing power. When 94% of pricing power comes from being meaningfully different, to opt out is to give up profits as well⁶. A 1% price increase will drive more profit than volume growth or cost cuts⁷. 

When making the case for how to show up in a trust recession, how can I avoid mentioning CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)? Familiar brands convert better and click cheaper. 

Our data at Wizard of Ads® shows that branded keywords and brandable chunks come in at a whopping 10X less than unbranded keywords. These clicks have a significantly higher conversion rate and capture an 85X ROI. A strong brand message will make an ad budget go 11X further than a performance-centric strategy⁸. 

In Essential Home Services, your brand is the beacon of trust. In a trust recession, you want to be the shining light when all else feels hopeless. Brand messaging is as essential as the services you provide. Don’t let it slide. 

Be the leapfrog. 

TL;DR 2026: The Year of the Leap Frog

• 2026 isn’t a recession. It’s a trust recession. Consumers are anxious, overextended, and skeptical. They’ll choose companies they trust, not the flashiest or cheapest.
• Winners will feel boring, but win big. Expect fewer calls, smaller jobs, more repairs over replacements, higher close rates, and slower topline growth. Profit comes from efficiency, not volume.
• Trust beats tactics. Empathy, honesty, fix-it-first service, fair pricing, and real guarantees will outperform aggressive sales and “finance-bro” vibes.
• Brand > performance marketing. Top-of-mind awareness matters more than top-of-search. Cutting brand spend during a downturn destroys long-term revenue and market share.
• PPC is getting pricier and less reliable. Rising ad costs, AI-driven platform shifts, and algorithm chaos mean unbranded clicks are expensive and risky.
• Strong brands lower CAC and raise pricing power. Familiar brands convert better, click cheaper, retain customers longer, and can raise prices without losing trust.
• Train relentlessly. Sales, CSRs, operations, and even AI systems must be sharp. Polite persistence wins; pressure loses.
• Do more with less. Obsess over operational efficiency, protect margins, and don’t worship topline revenue.
• Marketing message matters more than channel. Words, stories, and emotional reassurance build trust—truck wraps and gimmicks won’t.
• Stay visible during the fog. Going dark costs market share and future recovery dollars.
• 2026 rewards leaders. Be calm, competent, generous, and consistent. Show up as the trusted guide, and customers will follow.

Bottom line:

2026 will be gritty, not glamorous. The companies that lead with trust, invest in brand, train hard, and operate efficiently will leapfrog competitors. You’ll look back on 2026 as one of your proudest years in business.

Sources:

1. WARC – Advertising in a Downturn
2. Analytic Partners – ROI Genome
3. Boston Consulting Group (BCG)
4. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute
5. Analytic Partners
6. Kantar – BrandZ Differentiation Study
7. WARC – Profit Partners
8. WARC – Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Marketing

Niche ideas. Niche products. Niche market. They're everywhere you look in the business world today. Marketers have discovered that it's easier to target a small, specific group of consumers with a product or service that appeals directly to them rather than trying to sell a one-size-fits-all solution to everyone. This focus on narrow markets is called "niche marketing." It can be an extremely effective way to grow your business.

What is niche marketing, exactly, and how can you tell if it's right for your company?

The meaning of niche marketing refers to the process of targeting a specific group of people with services or products to sell that meet their specific niche or unique needs. To be successful, you need to have a deep understanding of the needs and wants of your target market and then create a product or service that meets those needs. There are a few key factors to consider when deciding if niche marketing is right for your business:

1. The size of your target market: Niche markets are usually small, specific groups of people. If your target market is too large, you may have trouble reaching everyone with your message.
2. The competition: Niche markets often have less competition than broader markets. It can give you a competitive advantage and make it easier to get noticed by your target audience.
3. Your resources: The niche industry can be resource-intensive, as you'll need to create custom content and build relationships with influencers in your target market. Make sure you have the time and resources to commit to a niche marketing strategy before you start.

Not all Niches are Created Equal

"Think too deeply about customer profiling, and you'll soon fall into niche marketing. And the problem with niches is they're not created equal." — Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads™

When it comes to niches, there are many different ways to slice and dice them. And not all niches are created equal. Some niches are more profitable than others, while some are more competitive than others. Some niches require more resources to get started than others, too. Before you dive into niche marketing, it's crucial to do your research and make sure you're targeting a profitable, competitive, and resource-friendly niche. Otherwise, you could find yourself spinning your wheels without seeing any results. Are you in the home services industry? Do you know how to find your niche? Do you need help with developing or maintaining your niche marketing strategy? Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services has the answers you're seeking. Book a call with Wizard Ryan Chute today.

The Book of Reis and Trout

Niches were popularized in the 1981 book "Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind" by Reis and Trout. According to the book, we should consider our competitors' strengths and branding before deciding how we want to be seen by customers. Though some only read it as such, the book is much more than a marketing guidebook. It's not about marketing at all. It is about positioning your product, service, or company in the customer's mind so they will think of you first when they need what you sell. Niche marketing is a form of marketing that focuses on a specific target market or demographic. Niches are often small but can also be significant. They can be defined by geographic location, demographics, type of product, and many other factors. The key to successful niche marketing is to find a group of people who are underserved by the current market and create a unique offering that meets their needs. You can do this by catering to a specific demographic, developing a new product or service, or creating a new brand image.

The Seductive Logic of Niche Marketing

"Tragically, the seductive logic of niche marketing makes perfect sense even when it does not apply." — Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads™

Niche marketing is all the rage these days – with good reason. When done correctly, niche marketing can be effective in reaching a specific target market and building a loyal customer following. However, there is a downside to niche marketing– and that is, it can be effortless to fall into the trap of only catering to a small group of people and ignoring the needs of the larger market. Roy H. Williams, the founder of The Wizard of Ads™, calls this "the seductive logic of niche marketing. "The seductive logic of niche marketing is that it makes perfect sense when you are first starting. After all, when you are just starting a business, you can't possibly be all things to all people. It is much easier (and cheaper) to focus your efforts on a small group of people with specific needs that you can fill. The problem with this approach is that it can be very easy to get comfortable in your niche and forget about the larger market. It is especially true if you are successful in your niche. Why bother reaching out to the larger market when you already have a loyal following of customers? The answer is that catering only to a small group of people is not sustainable in the long run. Eventually, you will reach a point where your niche market becomes saturated, and you will need to look for new customers outside your niche. That's why it's essential to keep an eye on the larger market and ensure you are still appealing to a broader audience. It may seem like more work in the short term, but it will pay off in the long run.

A Classic Example

Here's a classic example of this seductive logic from Roy: A dentist from a small town reached out to Roy for help. He was tired of seeing six or seven patients daily who only required thousand-dollar dental work. Instead, he wanted to focus on one or two patients daily who would require significantly more expensive treatments, between 10 and 30 thousand dollars each. "And make sure all of them have the money. Many people need that much dental work, but most don't have the money," the dentist said. Roy feared for the dentist. To pursue this would leave him very disappointed in the results. People in wealthy towns with good dental hygiene will not be his primary customers. He chose a target market that was much too small.

2 Known Strategies for a Smaller Target Market

"Considering a niche? Do the math. Be detached and objective. This isn't a time for wishful thinking." — Roy H. Williams, The Wizard of Ads™

If your market isn't big enough for niche marketing, here are two known strategies for a smaller target market:

1. Positioning: Positioning is about creating a unique selling proposition (USP) for your product or service. It sets you apart from the competition and makes you the only logical choice for your target market. For example, say you're in the HVAC industry. You could position yourself as the only company that offers green solutions or the only company that offers 24/7 services.

• It thwarts your competitor's advantages.
• Being unaware of what your competitors are doing is like driving with your eyes closed. To succeed, you need to understand the realities of the marketplace and recognize the position that your competitors occupy in your customers' minds.

2. Persona-Based Ad Writing: This writing style taps into personality type and hooks a larger-than-average portion of readers, even when those readers are selected at random.

• It's designed around the customer's preferred approach to purchasing.
• Persona-based ad writing focuses on your consumer's personality rather than their demographic profile. What personalities are your advertisements currently intended for?

Have You Found Your Niche?

Niche marketing can be quite valuable for some small businesses. It allows you to focus your resources on a specific group of consumers more likely to purchase your product or services. When done correctly, it can be an extremely effective way to grow your business. If you're thinking about starting a niche marketing campaign, the first step is to identify your target market and determine if it will be lucrative. Once you've done that, you can develop a marketing strategy that will appeal to them. If you're a home services business owner in need of niche marketing, you could always book a call with Wizard Ryan Chute of Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services . We know how to market a product. We can help you slide into the niche marketing strategy you've been pining for.

Let’s be honest, rebrands aren’t acts of courage. Most of the time, they’re acts of panic. Or worse… vanity projects dressed up as strategy.

In Episode 24 of Advertising in America, Ryan Chute, Chris Torbay, and Mick Torbay take a hard look at rebranding, why it’s so often suggested, why it’s so frequently wrong, and how it quietly destroys the trust brands spend years building.

They unpack the uncomfortable truth that companies don’t own their brands, the customers do. That logos don’t carry meaning, memories do. And that changing everything because “it feels stale” is usually a sign the leadership has lost touch with the story that made the business matter in the first place.

From famous rebrand failures to everyday service businesses flirting with identity loss, this episode draws a bright line between evolution and erasure and explains why most agencies are financially rewarded for recommending the latter.

Because when you rebrand without clarity, you don’t look bold.

You look unfamiliar.

And unfamiliar brands don’t get chosen.

Episode Highlights

• Why customers (not companies) decide what your brand is
• The critical difference between a rebrand, a refresh, and an ego project
• How rebrands erase trust faster than they create attention
• Why “new” is not a strategy and often a warning sign
• The hidden incentives that push agencies to recommend rebrands
• How to evolve your brand without killing what already works

🎧 Hit play and make sure the next change you make strengthens your brand instead of starting it over.

📱 Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

💬  Are you fixing what’s broken or just bored with what’s familiar?

👉 And if you changed everything tomorrow… would customers still recognize you?

💥 Brought to you by Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services

On today's episode of Advertising in America, we can look at brands that done messed up bad. Should you rebrand your company or stand by what's been working? 

Here's the thing about rebrands. They're exciting. You hire a new agency because, for whatever reason, you weren't happy with the last one. What does that new agency want to do? Bill you for stuff.

Just like the old saying, when all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. When you're a branding agency, every client with a problem starts to look like they could benefit from a full rebrand.

Change things because they're bad, they're wrong, or they're inconsistent with your future plans. Going to a clean slate might be throwing out perfectly good material. Might even be something that consumers relate to. You actually don't get to decide what people call your company, the consumer does. Nobody calls it Federal Express, they call it FedEx. 

Over time, great brands start to belong to all of us, and it's your job to understand what they mean to us and not. 

Ryan Chute: Should you rebrand your company or stand by what's been working? Do you need a little tweak or a total overhaul? It's like renovating a home. Where do you start and where do you stop? Mick, how do you not screw up a rebrand? 

Mick Torbay: My first step would be to ask, why are you rebranding at all? Are you sure you need to? Because it's easy to not screw it up if you don't do it in the first place. Here's the thing about Rebrands. They're exciting. You hire a new agency because, for whatever reason, you weren't happy with the last one. And what does that new agency want to do? Bill you for stuff. You see the standard agency model bills differently from how the Wizard of Ads people do. Agencies bill based on hours worked, which gives them the incentive to increase billable hours. How best to do that? Change fucking everything. And that's fun. New name, new logo, new colors, new designs, new messaging, new everything. Man, that's going to take some time. going to have to do research. Many, many working lunches to get all that taken care of. And wow, is that going to be a huge bill at the end of the year? But hey, at least we're excited about stuff. 

Now, here at the Wizard of Ads organization, we are not paid on billable hours. Our clients pay us based on results. That's it. No more, no less. You make more dollars, we earn more pennies, which means we are not incentivized at all to change something that's working.

We're not paid to change stuff. We're paid to get you paid, and not everything you're doing right now is wrong. So why would we change it just to change it? We only change stuff if it's holding you back from growing to your full potential. And here's an example. I had a client in the plumbing business called All Drain, not great, but not bad either. When we met them, I asked if they had any plans to expand into other trades. “Yes,” they said, “we're going to add HVAC and a year or two.” Okay, then, All Drain is going to be a problem, so let's change your name now so that the marketing plan we come up with will be ready for another trade that's not freaking drains. 

That's a reason to do a rebrand. Change things because they're bad, they're wrong, or they're inconsistent with your future plans. But look at every marketing element on its own merits. Going to a clean slate might be throwing out perfectly good material, might even be something that consumers relate to, and you're just going to arbitrarily throw it all away because “new”.

If you're looking for a change, it might be a pivot that you need rather than a rebrand. Maybe point the spotlight at something that's already there, but maybe hasn't been given the attention it deserves. Oftentimes, a rebrand happens because of ego, and that's not a good reason to change stuff. Remember, it's not about you, or the marketing director, or the agency, it's about the consumer. Never lose sight of that. And above all, if someone tells you everything needs to change, double-check that it's good for you and not good for that person's billable hours.

Ryan Chute:  If you don't believe a rebrand works, just search what Mick looked like when he was in a Canadian boy band. That's right. Ever see a grown man in spandex singing to teenage girls? It's unsettling. Up next, Chris will tell us more about how to redo the do, Chris? 

Chris Torbay: Okay. Full disclosure, I am totally culpable on this topic. My last corporate job before joining Wizard of Ads was the Executive Creative Director of a branding agency. An ad agency that specializes in helping you rebrand if your brand has evolved or become dated, or somehow become disconnected from its previous self.

But just like the old saying, when all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. When you're a branding agency, every client with a problem starts to look like they could benefit from a full rebrand. Why? Maybe they needed one, but also maybe because we could charge $100,000 for it, and so agencies created something called The Brand Refresh. This is a perfect little term that suggests you'll spend a bunch of hours perking up the brand, but don't worry, we won't fuck up anything that'll get you in trouble with the boss. Not a revolution, an evolution. Ooh, that sounds good. Pay me for a bunch of work, and it'll still be like, it was only better, and you can look like you did something. And to be fair, brands do this all the time. You can probably find a graphic online of the Coca-Cola logo or the Campbell Soup Label design over the past hundred years, and while they retain their brand essence all the way through, they really do progress with the times.

If you think the Coca-Cola script that you see today is still their classic, original script, look it up, and you'll go, “Oh yeah, it really did look old-fashioned back then.” When you do a brand refresh though, you need to determine what you keep from the past and what you change. Campbell's needs to keep the red and white can. Ferrari needs to keep the prancing horse. NBC needs to keep the peacock. You ask yourself, what are the elements of our brand that have embedded themselves in consumers' minds, and how can we build on that? 

A brand refresh needs to please your target, not your graphic designer. 

And this is where things go famously wrong. See, graphic designers are young kids straight out of art school, and they want to do art, and they want to move fast and break things like some .com startup. So without an attentive babysitter, they'll suggest all kinds of crazy new ideas that will “appeal to a younger audience.” Which always sounds good to a brand manager.

The recent Cracker Barrel fiasco was a good case in point. I suspect they asked a bunch of focus groups what they thought, and decided that the oldie style illustration and typeface didn't appeal to Gen Z as much as it did their grandparents. So they modernized the typeface a little and got rid of the barrel and got rid of the cracker.

Jaguar made the same mistake when they changed their look from an old, rich British man's car to soft, gentle, feminine protection product. Lost the traditional serif typeface for some rounded sans-serif that you might choose to make a suppository brand seem a little less intrusive. In both cases, the design team, and I'm not blaming the young here by the way, this was a young-focused perspective that had to get approved all the way up the chain, they didn't focus on the consumer and what the consumer expected from the brand. 

Musicians, screenwriters, and directors will tell you when you're making art, you make the thing you want for a long time, but at some point you release it out into the world, and then it belongs to all of us. Musicians hear all the time what their songs mean to people, and sometimes it's not nearly what they intended. Every Breath You Take isn't about love. It's about a stalker. The same is true for a brand. Over time, great brands start to belong to all of us, and it's your job to understand what they mean to us and not fuck that up. Make the strong parts stronger when you can, remove the things that are dated or less and less relevant, but know what your brand is in people's hearts and minds. Don't mess with that. 

Ryan Chute: To brand or not to brand. That is the question. After the break, we'll get into some of the crazy messes we've seen and how to clean them up. But first, a word from our sponsors.

Ryan Chute: If the decision is made, then it's time to rebrand. Let's discuss the mistakes to avoid and the best practices to follow.

For me, as you guys were talking, what I was really thinking about was, we have to choose what to keep. We have to choose what to lose, but we also have to choose when to introduce the brand elements that are both operationally possible and right for the timing of the campaigns that they're around.

For example, Call Dad was always intended to have the “I'm on my way” tagline, but we couldn't do it in the first year. That didn't happen until year two, when operations and capacity allowed us to be able to say that, and it's a true statement. I see that consistently in some of the same things that you spoke about early on in this episode.

Mick Torbay: And every time you do a rebrand, it's usually about adding something, and we sometimes lose focus on, if you add something by definition, you have to take something out. And I think, very often, businesses are not 100% aware of what it is about their brand that was so appealing to people before. And sometimes, believe it or not, I think the consumers are not aware of what it is about that brand that they like.

Another famous rebrand screw up story is Tropicana Brands Group.

They did this, I think it was about five years ago, where they completely did a rebrand, and they lost the orange with the straw, with a straw sticking into it. I'm sure it was a focus group. It's a huge company. I'm sure they focus-grouped the living heck out of it.

Chris Torbay: We've been seeing that for years.

Mick Torbay: And I'm sure people said, “What do you think of this new Tropicana thing?” And I'm sure they said, “Yeah, it's great.” And it is. It was an excellent design. But what the consumers didn't realize is that without that orange with the straw in it, they didn't actually know where the Tropicana was. People would literally come up to the staff in the store and say, “Where's the Tropicana? I want to buy Tropicana, and you guys don't have any.” And it's no, it's right there. It says fucking Tropicana on it in giant block letters. But they weren't looking for that. They were looking for the orange with the straw. So sometimes, even the consumers, I don't think, aren’t a hundred percent aware of what is integral to the brand, but it might not have come up at a focus group.

Ryan Chute: And there's a lot of programming that goes into this. It's not a matter of plopping up a truck wrap, a mascot or even a typeface. All of the things that we are creating and manifesting, through the auditory channels, and then the visual channels to reinforce it, are all things that are embedding into the brain and getting past that short-term memory, the forgettable memory, into the long-term chemistry.

When you paint the house of the real estate that you're building, you may not recognize the house anymore for what it was because you remembered it to be that other thing, that orange Tropicana logo, that symbol, that thing that was an easy landmark in the mind to refer to when they went looking for the thing that you sell. So you have to be conscious of the branding you have done before. Now, can you rebrand an old company that's 38 years old? Sure.

Chris Torbay: Absolutely. I wonder if some of it is also starting with one of the channels, rather than starting with a strategy. Ask yourself, “Hey, our brand is too dated. What shall we do?”

And do that rather than say, “You know what, let's change the packaging.” What is it that you were trying to solve by changing the package? You've just started doing that, and you touched on this in the introduction. Do you just start with a truck wrap and then try and see if you can make all the rest of your marketing go around your new wrap? What you've done there is you've painted yourself into a corner because you brief your truck wrap guy, he comes up with an idea based on just doing truck wraps, because that's the only thing they do. And then you call us, and we go, “Okay, now we have to create a campaign that works with this new visual that you've set up on your truck wrap. What was the original idea like?”

Can we go back and we have to rebuild a strategy around that, as to what the new brand is trying to achieve? Rather than starting there, saying “Okay, our brand is looking dated. Our brand is not identified with consumers. What shall we do? We could change the marketing.” What is it that's wrong with it? And decide if, and how any or all of those things should be changed.

Ryan Chute: And I think that's where we've seen so many brand fails, even from allegedly “good, high-quality, very high-end branding” agencies, certainly in the home service space, where some of the time they get it right and a whole bunch of the times they get it wrong.

Chris Torbay: And it's mostly because they're just playing. We've had this happen with brands that we've worked on, where somebody changed something about the visual, look at it, and it's okay. If your assignment was just to change the visuals, these visuals are fine. My job is to build a larger story for this entire brand, and I got nothing from this visual. Now, if you had changed it to this, don't you see that I could have taken this and told a larger story,

Ryan Chute: And a comparable story, not just a cute and clever story.

Chris Torbay: And it's half their fault and half not their fault. Their job was just to come up with another logo design.

That's fine if somebody says, “Fix the logo design for Cracker Barrel,” somebody could just try a bunch of things, but what are you trying to achieve, and what do you think you're going to achieve? Are you really trying to get rid of all the people who like the old-style design? Are you really changing your brand from what it was to something that's going to appeal to Gen Z? Because if you are, there's a lot of things you need to change, and are you sure you want to throw out so much of the old in order to get so much of the new?

Mick Torbay: Now you're talking about a brand that's been around for decades and is super powerful. A national brand. Everybody's heard of it. And when you're doing that, I think you have to consider the head and the heart. And when you're doing a rebrand or even a refresh by definition, you're using your head, you're saying what strategic decisions can we make to make some nuts and bolts presumably improvements to make it more effective, to make it more whatever, to make it newer or more contemporary or appeal to a new demographic. But the heart is very different, and the heart doesn't necessarily react in a rational way. And a very famous example of this, and this is not an example of a refresh, but it proves the point about the head and the heart, when back in the 1980s, Pepsi Cola was doing an incredibly good job of scaring the hell out of Coca-Cola.

And that's because Pepsi was running this thing called the Pepsi Challenge. They would give people a blind test, taste test, and they put it on TV. But they also would do these at events, they would do the Pepsi Challenge, and they would cover the two things and have say, “try this now, try that. Which one do you like more?” And 8/10 times people would choose Pepsi. And it's like there, see, in a blind taste test, people actually prefer Pepsi, even though it's not the leading brand, and this scared Coca-Cola so much. And they even did their own tests, and they were like, “Goddammit. It's true. If people don't know any better, they actually prefer the taste of Pepsi.” And so it scared them so much. They actually changed the formula of Coca-Cola. They called it the New Taste of Coke, and they researched the living shit out of that. They spent years coming up with a formula that in blind taste tests, people preferred over Pepsi. It was sweeter, and they made a bunch of other decisions, but the point i,s they solved the problem. The Pepsi Challenge would no longer work because this new taste of Coke, in fact, in a blind taste test, would beat Pepsi.

Thank goodness, everything's going to be fine. Right? Wrong.

The head, in a blind taste test, makes the decision. In, but the heart says, “I like, I just, Coke. It's Coke.” You fucked with Coke.

Chris Torbay: How dare you?

Mick Torbay: You can't fuck with Coke. How dare you? It's always tasted like this. It tasted like this 50 years ago. It tasted like this a week ago, and now you changed it, and you took it away. But you like the other one. But my heart says that I’ve lost something.

But you don’t even like it as much as Pepsi.

Chris Torbay: And it's not your brand anymore. It's my brand. I'm the consumer. Stop messing with my thing. You don't have the right to do that.

Mick Torbay: You can't take that away from me.

Chris Torbay: That happens all the time in naming things, too. And I'm trying to think of some good national examples, but where people will change their name because their name is no longer accurate. But there are plenty of companies where even though the name's not strictly accurate now to what it is that the company sells, people still like it.

Mick Torbay: Knott's Berry Farm. It falls into that.

Chris Torbay: Exactly. I mean there was a very famous, in Toronto, there was a very famous record store called Sam The Record Man, and he'd been around for generations. And eventually they were selling CDs and DVDs and all kinds of stuff. They were making much more money. They weren't selling records. But you don't change the name of Sam The Record Man, that just stuck in people's minds. There's lots of brands where if you focus grouped it and said, “Is there a better name than Piggly Wiggly for a supermarket?” Of course there is, there's a much more strategic name out there. There's much more to say, but you know what? Piggly Wiggly. It's goofy. It's weird. Does it make sense? No, but don't take that away.

Mick Torbay: I don't even think the Grand Ole Opry is true to its original name.

Chris Torbay: Exactly. It's where it has just worked its way into people's hearts and minds, and it belongs to them now, and it's their thing, and they identify with it. And it's not yours to mess with because you've decided you want to be more strategic and try to accomplish something scientific.

Mick Torbay: Now you're talking, we're these last few examples have been big national brands at everybody has heard of. In our world, we're generally dealing with smaller companies, smaller brands, and we have to be honest about the fact that in a lot of cases, the brands either have no significant public presence or a very small one. Which means that it is less dangerous to do the things we're talking about. But it doesn't make it any less important to make these strategic decisions.

I'll give you an example of something there. I had a client up here in Canada called Pefferlaw Peat, PEAT, and they sold organic soil. And we ended up doing a rebrand and mostly changing their packaging. Why? Because the packaging said Pefferlaw Peat, and then it would say, “this is three-in-one mix”, or “this is house plant mix”, or “this is garden soil”, or “this is Peat Moss”, or whatever it is.

And we were looking at this thing. The most important thing about this is that it's organic. Organic soil. There are incredible amounts of work that you have to do to actually sell your soil, as organic. You can't add this, you can't add that. It can't be anywhere near this, it has to be tested. It has to be approved, it has to go through all to jump all through all these hoops, and it said organic soil in the tiniest typeface on the thing, and we were like, no. It needs to say organic in huge letters along the top, white on black, so that from across the store you can see organic on the top.

And then we changed the name from Pefferlaw Peat. It was made in the town of Pefferlaw, which no one's ever heard of, and we changed the name to Delicious Dirt. Which has alliteration, and also it forces you to rethink something because delicious and dirt do not go together well.

Chris Torbay:  And interestingly, the opposite of Sam The Record Man, but crucially, because it didn't have a huge brand. They originally called Peat, and it sounds like they were all kinds of soils. So dirt is more true to what they're offering has evolved into. And to give credit to the branding that we used to do, when you find that your business has actually changed from where you were, you've got to ask yourself, “Am I steering people the wrong way with my old identity?”

And this is what happened with All Drain, which is, if you just stuck with that, it's going to be very hard to sell air conditioners because now you're steering people the wrong way. So that's when you make a conscious decision.

Mick Torbay: But yeah, you do it when you have to.

Chris Torbay: When you're going to find yourself handicapping yourself by some brand elements that are holdovers from the past.

Ryan Chute: Another company that we saw that transition in was Morro Mechanical. Now, Mechanical is a pretty confusing name.

Mick Torbay: That's industry jargon for HVAC.

Ryan Chute: HVAC. Yeah. And it felt commercial. Is it cars? Is it home? Is it like, who knew? And ultimately, we ran a campaign using their name for an entire year. It was almost a year and a half, and they came to us and said, “We are getting so many people calling us Amazing Morrow,” because that was the core brandable chunk in our advertising, that we changed the name to Amazing Morrow. We did a brand refresh using the same logo, using the same mascot, and then refreshing that brand to a little bit more modernized colorings, keeping the same color scheme in general. And then Amazing Morrow instead of Moro Mechanical.

Chris Torbay: So you're keeping elements, Morrow is going to be a holdover from people who've used you for the last couple of decades, or whose dad used this client or whatever.

Mick Torbay: But that just goes to show another thing that I've ranted about several times, which is you actually don't get to decide what people call your company. The consumer does. Yes.

Ryan Chute: Nobody calls it Federal Express. They call it FedEx.

Mick Torbay: They were calling it FedEx before they finally gave in. FedEx changed their name.

Chris Torbay: FedEx finally said, “You know what? Let's stop getting around it. I guess we're FedEx.”

Mick Torbay: Yes. It's like you don't get to choose your own nickname. Your buddies choose your nickname. It's exactly the same with consumers. And so when you've got yourself a company called Galling in Henderson and Worthington and Armstrong, and it's like nobody says that. They just say Galling. It's just give up. Just call it Galling. Just embrace what the consumers need.

Chris Torbay: It's funny, and every law firm has done that. Now, all these law firms that used to be “Somebody, Somebody and Somebody.” Everyone's just naming themselves that first name because that's what everybody in the business was doing.  

Mick Torbay: You can fight it, but you can fight it at your peril. The consumer ultimately makes that decision, and consumers will always shorten it and make it easier.

Ryan Chute: And in a recent conversation with a law firm, they chose to just put the three initials of the owners. As the law firm, and I said that's infinitely worse than just using one of the names.

Mick Torbay: GHP is not a good name either.

Chris Torbay: Again, there's a few of those that work. It works for KFC because of the millions of dollars they put behind it, and they also did it because Kentucky Fried Chicken decided that perhaps they'd like to be known for being more than just from Kentucky, and fried is a kind of a bad word in food, and they wanted to make more than just chicken.

So all three words were bad, so let's call ourselves KFC.  But they also put millions and millions of dollars worth of advertising where they call themselves K-F-C, K-F-C, K-F-C. Then that can become a handle that sticks in people's minds. For a small firm, becoming yet another three-letter something in the world. Boy, that's tough sailing.

Ryan Chute: Other failures that I've seen, we had a client that had three letters as the initials of the owner, and the three letters meant absolutely nothing to anybody. So we made fun of that for the very, very strategic intent of being able to have the people remember these three unrelated random letters. That worked famously well for getting attention and having people pay attention to the brand. They chose to part ways with us and recognize that about seven months later, that was a crazy bad mistake because they made the letters mean something, and it was astoundingly boring, astoundingly superficial that anybody could have said. And on top of that, their agency of choice decided to completely steal a logo, a trademarked logo, and repurpose it to their vehicles, which puts them into a massive risk of getting sued. So it's not just about taking the easy path, the obvious path, the path that seems like everyone would get it.

The fact that we had three random letters that we could randomly say anything about that added humor, levity, and like ability to the mix, was actually an infinitely more powerful strategy than making it a generic blob and then having an allegedly legitimate agency rip off logos from trademark companies.

Mick Torbay: It's frightfully easy to get this wrong, and the fact that they came to one group and said fix this problem. Then soon after tried it again. It's if there's one thing that's worse than a rebrand, it's rebranding and then rebranding again immediately. Oh my God, no one's going to know who you are and what you stand for and why you matter if you're constantly changing your mind, what that is.

Ryan Chute: And it is a self-inflicted wound, and there's an important lesson to be learned, and not constantly changing. If you have to change marketing agencies that have a track record of success over and over again, tt's not the agency, it's you. Figure yourself out, and you're going to have more success because there's something that's stopping you from having that move forward.

Mick Torbay: And make sure that when you do this, the people you're working for make a change that is authentically you. Because then in a sense, it doesn't really matter what agency you're with. If the brand idea is authentically you, then it should survive an agency change. If it's just the whim of the agency, then that's not a good plan, frankly.

Chris Torbay: And I think you made a good point earlier, which is it's not that you should never do it. If your brand, large or small, does not have much that is out in the zeitgeist, it is not a household name, it is not a thing that people have grown up with or whatever, and it’s just really failing on all cylinders. By all means, try a revolutionary thing.

On the big brand side, Old Spice was an interesting example. It's a brand that had been around forever. And it just had completely fallen off the radar. Nobody was buying it. Even old people weren't buying it anymore. Like, it had really, really declined. So you go crazy, you do the man, Your Man Could Smell Like, you do a comedy where they'd always done hail and hearty old people and the little. exactly. They threw all of that out when a completely different direction.

Why? Because what they had was not hugely valuable. So yes, You take her back to the studs. And so not to tell people to always be afraid of it. Never take it back to the studs.

Mick Torbay: Do it when it’s right.

Chris Torbay: There are times do it when it's right. Honestly, look at yourself and say, “Am I keeping this old thing because I just kinda like it?” If no one in the market really knows, then start with something that's going to be more helpful for you.

Mick Torbay: When we changed Delicious Dirt, nobody said, “Oh, where's Pefferlaw Peat?” Nobody said that. They were like, “Oh, look. Organic soil, you can buy organic soil. If you want an organic garden, you're going to need organic soil. I'm going to buy that soil.”

There's a bag that says organic, and it was bigger than Delicious Dirt. Like it was more important.

Ryan Chute: And that goes back to my original question of can you rebrand a 38-year-old company? When you have no brand, when you have a company, when you have name recognition from the people that you've served, and fundamentally your marketplace

Mick Torbay: And a following, and people who are passionate about following you.

Ryan Chute: So ultimately, I think about our garage door friends in Florida, and they had a super legacy brand, like four and a half for decades. $5 million a year in revenue. They'd never broken that in revenue. They were partially commercial, partially residential and commercial in garage door, and they thought that they had a brand that was worth it.

Everyone thought it was worth keeping. That it was worth it too. They had their phone number and email address too, and their mailing address, so we could tell them, guess what? We have a new name. So that solves that problem. The rest of the city had no idea that they mattered or existed.

Because they never, ever did any marketing. Aside from showing up on Google pay per click or map pack. They were invisible. Why does that matter? Because there's no story to be told with their old name. There's a huge story to be told with a very strategic name that allows them to take a national play if they so choose.

Now they're a +$30 million company, and this was never even in the cards.

Mick Torbay: And they're in several states now too.

Ryan Chute: Because they had the wherewithal of an extraordinary operator in conjunction with a memorable brand that stands you out against all of the noise.

Chris Tobay: That you could build a good story around committed going, they not paying change it next year.

Mick Torbay: They're going to commit to it.

Chris Tobay: And they're not going to try another thing 18 months from now.

Ryan Chute: That's exactly, but that, that, that really does lean into kind of the other part of rebranding. If you plan on putting a truck wrap together and a new type face and some colors, and a mascot and just call it a day. You've done nothing.

Mick Torbay: You’re not changing it for the sake of changing it.

Chris Torbay: You've done a third of the work and you've made the other two thirds a little harder now because it may or may not set you up as well as you think to do the other two thirds.

Ryan Chute: Well, the other two-thirds. It pulls two points for me. And one is, do you create the cover of your book and name the book before you've written the story? Do you write the story and then name it appropriately from the story, and then put pictures that support that story appropriately to that? And are you telling a true story or a false story?

If you're telling a true story about yourself, you're going to be far more compelling in your own unique, entertaining way, but it still holds true. The second is that the people who absolutely obsess about their brand are driving it into their culture because your brand is your culture, and your culture is your brand, for the most successful.

Anyone who's not playing that game is not winning the game at the same level. They just aren't every single one that I've seen that kind of treats their brand like a, just a piece of the puzzle and not the fabric of their soul. These are the people that are not seeing the same.

Call Dad is a perfect example of how they live, breathe, eat, sleep, drink, smell, taste, everything is brand. Everything right down to their salmon shirts. Why? Because when you call Dad, and you go, “Dad, hey, nice pink shirt.” What does he say? “It's salmon.” They bought their shirts just so that they could make the classic dad joke that you would get because it's Call Dad. That is branding. That is an obsession in the culture that is unwavering, but it also entertains people until the time that they need what they sell.

What we discovered from that exercise was something bigger than even we anticipated. We knew that people who had that feeling about Dad were going to be very compelled to call Dad because the very first phone call you make when you get, taken to prison is dad. So the same holds true when the water's leaking or the air conditioning goes out. You call the person you trust the most to be able to do the thing that needs to be done. But we started to attract people who had bad relationships with their dad and wished they had somebody like that.

Chris Torbay: This is an opportunity for a good one, right?

Ryan Chute: So the double whammy that we got from this was extraordinary, incredibly touching, but that feeling is what moved this thing forward. And that really comes full circle, too. A brand isn't just a name, but the name has such force, it's so representative of what it is that you're trying to stand for or stand against. And to your point Chris, many times you've told us about the tennis ball story where you take a bucket of tennis balls and chuck them at somebody, they're probably not going to catch any. But if you just took one ball and threw it to them, there's a pretty good chance you're going to catch that ball. And having one big thing is almost counterintuitive to a lot of people in branding.

Mick Torbay: Except that if you want to be remembered by consumers, it's the only way to do it. So I think if you're talking about how to not screw up a rebrand, try and move towards something. Like in my Delicious Dirt example, we went from Pefferlaw Peat, which didn't really stand for much, Delicious Dirt stood for something. It stood for being organic and different. And in Chris's example with KFC, it was absolutely a move away from something and towards nothing at all. What does KFC stand for? It stands for nothing. It was a move away, but not a move towards. Whereas when we changed our client's AC company to Mo Better Garage, that was towards something that mattered and had an attitude, and that was memorable, and it was away from something that could have been confused with another big company that had a similar name. It was a move towards, so if you're going to do this, make sure you're moving towards something. And that going that direction is a smart thing to do.  

Ryan Chute: It's multi-strategic. It's the visuals, it's the editorials. It is the campaign able strategy, not just the cute and clever. No one cares about the toucan on the side of your truck. But when you now, instead of having a ridiculous toucan, which isn't even local to the area, turn it into Captain Kool and Captain Kool is the guy who's coming to get you cool. And we are able to capture a brand name that is one of the most prolific, familiar names from our past, well we're winning on multiple fronts here in getting the brand right. And all of these things have to be taken into consideration at once and put in the right order.

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Ryan Chute: A rebrand isn't a magic wand, it's a scalpel. Wield it carefully, and you can carve out something sharper, stronger, and more aligned with your future. Wield it recklessly, and you'll bleed out what little goodwill you had left. Don't start with logos, colors, mascots, or clever taglines, and certainly don't start out with a name.

Start with clarity. Ask, what do I stand for? What do I stand against, and how can I say something that no one else could possibly claim? If your current brand is still serving those answers, don't touch it. If it doesn't, just fix what's broken, not what's actually still working. The strongest brands are adaptable.

They evolve without losing their core. Their job is to nurture the essence, not smother it under some new truck wrap. As the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, clearly states, don't panic and don't forget to bring a towel. In short, don't cock it up. Your true story is your brand. The pictures you use to help tell your story and the title you give the book always follows the story. 

Focus on making your brand truer instead of newer. Consumers are smarter than and more forgiving than you fear, as long as you honor what they already love about you. Your brand is about people you serve. Keep them at the center, and you'll never go wrong. Until next time, this is Advertising in America.

Until next time, this is Advertising in America.

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?

Join us on our socials @advertisinginamerica. Want to spend your marketing budget better? Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today. Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and your audience captivated.

Let’s be honest—marketing myths aren’t harmless little white lies. They’re stealthy budget-eaters, reputation-robbers, and strategy-warpers that make good brands do dumb things.

In Episode 23 of Advertising in America, Ryan Chute, Chris Torbay, and Mick Torbay pull back the curtain on the most expensive misconceptions in marketing—from chasing perfect attribution to thinking cheap production is a shortcut to success—and lay bare the truth about what actually drives results.

They dismantle the dangerous belief that reach beats frequency, expose why DIY media buying rarely works, and explain why excellence isn’t a luxury—it’s a competitive weapon. Plus, they remind you that marketing and sales are two very different beasts, and that customers rarely buy “the best”—they buy “better enough.”

Because if your campaigns are smart but your strategy is broken… you’ve just spent money entertaining your audience, not converting them.

Episode Highlights

• The costly trap of perfect attribution
• Why cheap production often costs more than premium
• The false confidence of DIY media buying
• Why frequency beats reach every time
• How excellence becomes a competitive advantage
• The subtle but critical difference between marketing and sales
• Why “better enough” wins more often than “the best”

🎧 Hit play—and finally make your marketing work like you always hoped.

📱 Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

👉 Two Questions:

1. Are your campaigns driving results—or just looks good on paper?
2. And when people notice your brand… do they actually act?
   

💥 Brought to you by Wizard of Ads® for Essential Services

In this episode of Advertising in America, we're talking about marketing myths that just don't measure up.

Which advertising message brought about a particular sale? I saw this ad. I bought a product. That's what the business owner wants.

Pay enough to make it awesome and nothing fancy after that. Hire smart people to solve your strategy problems, write your campaigns, and buy your media. Don't do that yourself. You'll get electrocuted.

Format doesn't fucking matter. The only thing that matters is how many people are you reaching? How often and for how many dollars?

That one time and he sold a $50,000 roof, and then nothing for a month and a half because that's not how it fucking works. That's not how it works.

But if you want me to think that you're smart, skilled, meticulous, and committed to excellence, make ads that reflect that. Yeah, your nephew's got a Mac, an iMovie, and you'll probably do it all for just weed money, but it's not worth the money you'll save, and it's not worth the money you'll spend.

Ryan Chute: Henry Ford once said,

“Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping a clock to save time.”

In this episode of Advertising in America, we're talking about marketing myths that just don't measure up. In a marketplace filled with alternative facts, here's Chris to check some facts. Chris?

Chris Torbay: Hire actors who will make your ideas great on the radio and on TV. Hire photographers and musicians, and directors with talent whose talent will reflect positively on your brand. If your positioning is the bargain basement, cheapest, low-cost provider in the world, by all means make your ads look super cheap too, and you can be damn sure I'm gonna believe you. But if you want me to think that you're smart, skilled, meticulous, and committed to excellence, make ads that reflect that, yeah, your nephew's got a Mac, an iMovie, and he'll probably do it all for just weed money, but it's not worth the money you'll save and it's not worth the money you'll spend.

Ryan Chute: I love that you pretend like you're not working for weed money also. Between Mick and his wife, they have two doctorates. Be sure to ask him about that sometime. Now, here's Mick to talk about more marketing myths that don't measure up. Mick.

Mick Torbay: Okay. My myth is, measurement is everything. I love it when a client asks us how we're gonna measure success because we have a really solid answer for that. We are going to measure success by how much money you're making, but then sometimes that seems like it's not enough for them. They want to measure really closely. They want to connect the dots precisely. They want to know which advertising message brought about a particular sale. I saw this ad. I bought a product. That's what the business owner wants. Sadly, that's not a thing, and it makes them really mad when I tell them that. Still true though. And just because you want to be able to connect every dot doesn't mean you can actually do that or even that they're connected the way you think they should be.

But it does raise an interesting point. Where did this obsession with measurement come from? “I wanna have a different phone number on the radio ads and another number on the TV ads, and another one on the trucks, another one on the digital ads so we can see which one is working.” You think that's crazy? Sometimes they have a different web address for different radio stations. They're not wondering if radio works. They're wondering if sports-talk works. or if it's new country that brings in the sale?

It's all nonsense. It's a myth. Radio works. TV works, digital works, social stuff works, direct-mail works. When did you all become research scientists, trying to ask, answer the grand question of “What advertising works?” And remember, if you actually do think you're a scientist, and you're not, by the way, your research is completely worthless unless you have a control. Do you have a control? Do you even know what I'm talking about? If you don't, then stop asking for measurements. If you want to know if country music works, you have to run a campaign, reaching a fixed number of people, a fixed number of times a week, and you have to run that for about a year, and then the following year, you have to run commercials in a different market, this time on a sports talk station. Again, for a year, being sure to reach the exact same number of people the same number of times.

Oh, and you have to have the same message, two identical commercials. This is a control. Remember, at the end of the second year, you can compare your results and consider the data. I don't know about you, but my clients don't have time to do a study like that. And luckily, this shit has already been studied over and over again, and the results are, format doesn't fucking matter.

The only thing that matters is how many people you are reaching, how often, and for how many dollars. Ditto for TV, ditto for digital. When you wrapped your trucks, did you measure the results of that? When you changed your uniforms, did you measure the results of that with a control, of course? Send 50% of your staff out with the old uniform and the other half with the new ones, and track the productivity of the two groups. No, because that would be stupid, crazy, and a waste of time and money. Ditto for marketing.

Trust the big data advertising works. Do it well. Do it often and stop pretending that one commercial makes anyone do anything. It all works together. The marketing, the truck wrap, the uniform, the staff training, measure it all together. How much money are you making? That's how you measure success.

Ryan Chute: And then there's the facts, Jack. When we get back, we'll debunk more marketing junk. But first a word from our sponsor.

Ryan Chute: Chris is taking swings at cheap thinking and Mick smackdown measurement madness. So let's keep busting, because the myths don't stop there. Some of the most dangerous ones are the sweet little lies business owners tell themselves every day. Let's walk through a few more of our faves. We've talked about the myth of production, and we've talked about the myth of measurement. What are some of the thoughts that you have countering each other on each one of these myths?

Mick Torbay: I’m not sure I want to counter him necessarily, but there's an aspect of that myth that I think is interesting. When you look at things in terms of line items, then obviously any reasonable person is gonna say, “How do I make that line item less?” Because anytime you can reduce a line item that goes straight to the bottom line, that makes everybody happy.

But I put that in the context of what you're trying to accomplish. Are you trying to get a job done, or are you trying to win a game? Here's what I mean. The three of us are very familiar with private equity. And private equity is known for coming in, buying a company. And the first thing they wanna do is reduce efficiencies, right? That's how they make their money, is they reduce efficiencies. Can we buy toilet paper for less? Can we find ways of reducing costs and laying off staff, and downsizing things? And one of the first things that private equity companies generally do is fire us. And it seems very self-serving to say, I think that's a mistake.

I know why they do it. And that's because they can absolutely find somebody who can write their ads, who will charge less than me. And I think that's the conversation that goes on at these companies, “Can we find someone who can write commercials for less than these guys?” And the answer is, “Oh yes, absolutely. Unequivocally yes.”

But you are thinking in terms of how much does it cost to get this job done? And if you think of it in terms of getting the job done, then if you can get it done for a lower amount, then you do that. If you change the thought to how do I win? All of that goes away because if you talk to the New York Yankees and say, “Can we find somebody who can go out there and play baseball for less than that guy?”

Oh, yes. You could find people to play baseball for a lot less.

Chris Torbay: He wants millions of dollars, apparently.

Mick Torbay: You can find a guy who's who will give up his hundred thousand dollars a year job to do it. Will he win games? No, but he can swing, he can hit, he can pitch, he can run around the bases, he can do all of the, ostensibly, all of the things that those players can do. The only thing he can't do is beat the other team. The only thing they can't do is win the game. So ask yourself, when you're making these decisions about, for example, production, are you saying to yourself, “How much does it cost to do this job? Or how much does it cost to win the game?” Because when you're making a commercial, you're trying to fucking beat somebody. You're trying to beat the other guy. You're trying to win. You're not trying to tick a box. You're trying to win.

Chris Torbay: Oh, good. We got a commercial made. Done.

Mick Torbay: And I think that mental mistake that people are making when they just think of things as a line item and say, “Can I do this cheaper? Can my nephew with a camera do this?” Yeah, sure. But can he win? Can he beat somebody else? We have to beat people, right? Our job as the ad company is to grow our clients' business to make them more money. Where does that money come from? Somebody else. It comes from somebody else.

We're not flying new customers into your market. We're taking business away from your competitors. We're making them switch. That's fricking brutal. We're making them change their minds. And you think you can accomplish that by simply doing the job? No, we're winning. We are the winners, and they are the losers. This is harsh stuff we're talking about. If you wanna win the game, you need to get fricking winners, not just get people who can do the job. I get fucking pissed about this.

Chris Torbay: Take that losers.  

Ryan Chute: That is really one of the myths that we outlined of the big ones that we constantly hear. Anyone can do marketing? Well, yes. Anyone technically can do marketing.

Mick Torbay: If you're ticking the box.

Chris Torbay: If you just need to put somebody in the chair.

Ryan Chute: There has been so many astoundingly obvious cases of massive failures of that exact thing. And it's not just a one-person thing either. It's not just the writer who matters. It's not just the media buyer that matters, but it's also the operator that matters. If the operator's not behind the brand, if the operator's not championing this at every single level, our most successful companies have always been obsessed with the brand. It's not just that this is my brand. This is my culture. This is everything.

Mick Torbay: My rant applies to everything. It applies to the media buyer. Some people say, “Oh, I've been buying media for a while, I can do it.” It's no, you can't. You can do it. You can do it. Yes, I could buy media too. I wouldn't do it well, but I could do it. And I can't do it in such a way that my media buy can beat another professional media buyer's buy.

Ryan Chute: It was fascinating to hear a person of interest, not what I consider a prospect, but a potential prospect for the Wizard of Ads say, “Oh, I buy my own media. I'm pretty good. It's a local station. I can get a really good deal outta 'em 'cause I'm a good negotiator.” I'm like. You have articulated everything that you don't know.

Mick Torbay: When you walk into the radio station, do your negotiation. You sound like a guy who walks into a Vegas casino and says, “I can win at blackjack. I've got a system.” Oh, they love people with systems. Please come in, try your system at our casino's new wing, I'll give you free tickets to Penn and Teller if you wanna try out your system with me. They love these things. You think that you can do that as well as someone who only buys media all day, every day and is constantly trying to win?

Chris Torbay: And this is the thing that gets me, is as soon as you reverse that argument and say, “I could probably install that water heater myself. You really just gotta connect the hot cold, plug it in.”

Mick Torbay: “I watched the YouTube video. It's not actually that complicated.”

Chris Torbay: There's lots of videos that show me how to do that. And they will go on about how “No, you gotta have years of experience to know whether such and such,” and they do, and they're right. Exactly right. So it's like, how come it doesn't apply for, nobody says, “I could do a little dental work. I've got a mouth.”

Mick Torbay: I got a drill.

Chris Torbay: “I brush my teeth every day. So I can certainly help you with your cavity.” What's. Wow. How hard can it be?

Ryan Chute: This is it. Fun fact, leaders in businesses absolutely call out marketing as the number one challenge that they have in their businesses every single day. And now marketing is a monstrous category. It includes sales, it includes advertising, it includes lead capture, and all of these different components. And yet they feel like getting it out to the lowest common bidder is going to be the solution to piece together this highly complex piece of machinery.

Mick Torbay: How many times have you been in a situation where a client says, “Hey, I'm gonna have an in-house marketing person. I haven't done that before. I'm doing that now.” It's oh, that's great. “It's my niece.” And it's okay, “oh, you're screwed.”

Your niece asked you for a job, and you said I'll put her somewhere where she can't do any damage because she doesn't know how to install water heaters.

Ryan Chute: She always wanted to do marketing.

Mick Torbay: And she knows something about social media,

Chris Torbay: She likes to Tweet.

Mick Torbay: We're looking to beat professional marketers.

Ryan Chute: You're putting yourself in a position of a special kind of screwed.

Mick Torbay: If your niece is 50 and really good at marketing, please do that.

Chris Torbay: If you're hiring away from Anheuser-Busch, there you go. By all means.

Ryan Chute: There's a skillset there, and there's a huge difference between a writer, a videographer, a marketing ops person, a strategist, a media buyer, and nobody is all of those people.

Chris Torbay: And that is one of those great myths that we're up against, which is, anybody can do marketing. And the number of times you've made this point, that's the number of times they promote a guy from the sales department to the marketing department, or from this department to the marketing department. It's “because he knows the stuff.” It's like new; it's a different job.

Mick Torbay: Sales and marketing are not the same job at all.

Chris Torbay: Those are not the same job. And just because you watch TV and you've seen tons of commercials yourself.

Mick Torbay: I watched all of Mad Men. I can do marketing.

Chris Torbay: Yeah, exactly. Guess what? I watched all of ER. Do not give me a scalpel!

Ryan Chute: They do think that it's the same. I grew up thinking that I knew lots about marketing. I knew lots about sales and promotion, but I didn't know anything about marketing, really to speak of, and you and I spoke about this before, Mick; there's a tension that needs to be between sales and marketing.

Mick Torbay: Their goals are not perfectly aligned, are they? No. And the worst case is when somebody puts somebody in charge of both of those jobs because that's a problem. Marketing's job is to make the phone ring. Sale’s job is to answer the phone and close a deal, and once the phone has rung, marketing's job is done. Sale’s job has just started. They're different.

Ryan Chute: And that's where most of our clients are hitting the wall with marketing, is that they think that marketing is selling.

Chris Torbay: They really do.

Ryan Chute: When selling is a subset of marketing. And marketing does not sound like selling at top of funnel. At the top of funnel, it’s about making a person feel enough that they trust you to show up at their door or come into your showroom or whatever the case might be.

Mick Torbay: To give you a shot.

Ryan Chute: Give you a shot, and it sounds nothing like sales. That's the very first lesson I learned at the first Wizard of Ads™ meeting with the Partners was, “Oh, I don't know what I'm doing here.”

Mick Torbay: It's one of the things I liked, actually, when I met you. I have to confess, I had a bit of that same myth in my own brain. I thought I knew about sales because I knew about marketing, and I was just as wrong. But when I met you and, “Oh shit. I didn't know anything about sales, actually.” I thought it was just getting people to walk through the door, and then they would magically purchase things. No, it’s not as simple as that.

Ryan Chute: There's a little bit of a dance, and that's why people struggle in sales. That's why people struggle in marketing, because people are gonna continue to struggle in the thing that is difficult for everyone, and that's communication. One, because people are a wild card, we don't know how they're going to respond individually. Masses of people are predictable, but the individual is not. What do we do? We have to play two different games as the game is being played, and that's a struggle for a lot of people.  

Mick Torbay: So there's a myth right there. Sales and marketing are the same. No. They should be fighting each other.

Ryan Chute: They’re dramatically different. They should be in tention with each other. They shouldn't be; they shouldn't be in friction with each other.

Mick Torbay: But sales should want more leads, and marketing should want you to close more deals. That's it. But they're not the same thing…

Ryan Chute: And here's one of the more brilliant things that I've ever heard was from Rory Sutherland, the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, and he said, most people believe that their customers want the best thing, when in fact, what their customers want is something a little less shitty than what they have right now. Now, he was British, and he probably said that a lot nicer with a fancy accent; we can all agree that he's the epitome. But he makes a very valid point.

Mick Torbay: Almost nobody buys the best.

Chris Torbay: Anything actually, and if you think of a category, automotive is great, and it's true all the way up the top and bottom of the automotive category, right? Which is, what's the best car? I don't know. It's the McLaren (McLaren Automotive Ltd). It's the Lamborghini Aventador (Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A.) or something like that. But you know what? People who want that car, they'll buy a Porsche ( Porsche Cars North America) because it's pretty damn good. Holy cow. I can drive a car that'll do it on a racetrack. And it's like then there are people who wish they had a Porsche, but they go, “I'll take the Civic Type-R, it's pretty sporty or whatever.” Like you pick the one that you want, that's a little better.

Mick Torbay: And on the same topic of myths, I'm sure there are an equal number of business owners who believe the exact opposite of what you just said, which is that consumers are looking for the least expensive. And that's why so much marketing is about “come to me, and you'll pay less.”

Think of the major Rent-a-Car companies, right? You got Discount, you got Thrifty, you got Payless, and you got Dollar. All of them are, “If you rent from me, it will cost less money.” Is that the only thing you have to say to people? “If you purchase products for me, you won't pay as much money?” So, that's just as stupid a myth because I don't believe that consumers are ever necessarily looking for the least expensive unless all other things are equal. If they believe all other things are equal, then marketing has failed.

Ryan Chute: True. And everyone would be driving a little Kia.

Mick Torbay: Whatever's the cheapest car, I don't even know what it is, but it would be the cheapest car. And they're not the most popular.

Ryan Chute: Base-level trucks and everything. And people don't. They gravitate towards the middle. If we're talking about the masses, having worked at Ford and a lot of other major manufacturers and automotives, they're going for the midline products 80% of the time. There's a few high-end ones that are sold. There are a few bottom-line ones sold.

Mick Torbay: Which means people do understand value.

Chris Torbay: And everyone’s got their own equation. What's worth paying for? Is this the best car? Even people who are buying a Mercedes, and a lot of people would think that's the best car. No, the Maybach is the best. There's always, there's another one above that. That's why I say there's a supercar that is better than the Lamborghini Aventador, right? There's always something more, but the equation doesn't work out. There are people at whatever stratus you're on in that thinking, it's, I would pay this much more to have this, but pay in this much more to have that, which is arguably better, but it's not worth the extra money for you.

Mick Torbay: There are always diminishing returns,

Ryan Chute: There's also a really interesting juxtaposition between an internally triggered purchase and an externally triggered purchase. An identity-driven purchase, like a vehicle. You go into a dealership, and you look to find the one that's just a bit better. And then a bit better than what you have right now. So something a little less shitty than what you have now. It's newer. It's shinier. It's got fewer miles on it, the whole gamut. The exact same thing in a hot water tank is the reverse of that. The only reason you would buy something more expensive is because you're getting a better warranty. You're getting something that's going to last longer and cause you less burden. So people are transactional in that externally triggered grudge purchase. We're relational or more relational-minded, because we're feeding our identity in one, and we're feeding our identity of being a good buyer in the other.

Chris Torbay: But equally, they will change their equation of, it is worth this much money for these advantages that you just named, versus is it worth this much money for some other advantages, I don't know. That's not as meaningful to me.

Mick Torbay: And we also have experience, like we have life experience. The  famous tagline for Stella Artois, “Reassuringly Expensive.” Which I think is a great line. It really is. Fulfills all the obligations of a good tagline. Reassuring the expensive, but I have a thing that I have in my head, which is the opposite of that, which is suspiciously affordable.

If someone says to me, a water heater. What does it do? Makes your water hot. Is there a Ferrari of water heaters? I don't think so. So I should really just get the cheapest one, right? If someone said, “Hey, we got this new water heater, it's $150,” I'd be like, “Hold on a sec.”

Chris Torbay: This is my basement, what we're talking about. I got some valuables down there.

Mick Torbay: “I don't know about this $200 water heater. That sounds like a terrible idea.” Why would I, as a consumer, not want the same thing for less money? It's because all of my experiences told me that the cheapest one is shit.

Chris Torbay: It can't possibly be the same thing.

Ryan Chute: And it gets grayer when there's less available information. Boxes in basements and in garages, cooling your house or heating your water, are so much different than the overtly public of lululemon pants and Ford Motor Company F1-50s, and that has a fairly dramatic effect on how people buy. The challenge is that when we're serving home service customers, they think that they can do internally triggered and identity purchase marketing tactics, and that's just not real. That's a myth that needs to be debunked, but it's 90% of the marketing messaging that's out there about marketing, which creates a dynamic, a challenge for us.

Another really interesting myth for us is that we've seen for years and years is that the reach is the thing that you're looking to get most when your talking about media buying. When we are talking about media, we want to reach the most amount of people with our media.

Mick Torbay: And that's a myth that makes perfect sense, and that's why it sticks, because it is very easy to explain to somebody we're gonna be talking to people about your business.

Do you want us to talk to 50,000 or would you like us to talk to 100,000? Shit.

Chris Torbay: More please.

Mick Torbay: I want more, please. Whereas, say we want to talk to these same 50, we want to talk to them a lot more often. That is not as clear to me as a non-marketing expert, why that would be. It actually takes experience, or in our case, decades and decades of doing it and finding out, to find out why would I want to reach 50,000 people three times instead of 150,000 people once in a week.

Except that what we know is for the same dollars. Dollar for dollar, reaching 150,000 people once a week or reaching $50,000 three times a week, you will make money, more money, reaching 50,000 people three times a week. We've done the research, we've done the math. That's the sweet spot. You reach 10,000 people five times a week. That's down, that's now a diminishing return. There is a sweet spot. Roy figured this out. He figured this out 20 years ago. We don't have to keep running these same experiments, but it's not as intuitive, is it?

Chris Torbay: No. And it comes from something we've talked about in previous episodes, about just because somebody sees your ad, the job isn't done, you haven't ticked the box. It's not a killer ad. It is that relationship you have, especially with a campaign, right? The more you see that ad, the more you go, “I like this campaign, I like these characters. I'm following this ongoing plot.” If there's enough going on in the ad, maybe if you hear it once, you don't hear all the jokes, you don't hear all the references, you don't get all the points, you want to hear it that second time, that third time, because there's more for you to get out of it each time. The value of those repeated listens, and then the next spot, and the next spot, is about building a relationship. And you don't build a relationship by going, “I saw the ad, they heard my ad, they have internalized everything I wanted to say to them because I tagged them.”

Mick Torbay: And that comes back to measurement again. The idea that you do a mailer campaign, a direct mail campaign, and then you wait for the phone to ring. And if it does, and if the phone rings, you pat yourself on the back. And if it doesn't, you say, “I guess direct mail doesn't work.” Well, no. Direct mail's like everything else, you have to hit them over the head with it over and over and over again.

But it's I remember this time I had a client in the roofing business, and we had a really great campaign for them. And I happened to know that the first commercial ran at 6:30 AM on the first day, and somebody called my client at 8:00 AM. It had literally run once. And they called the client at 8:00 AM, and I swear to God, he said the person on the phone said, “I've been hearing your ads.” No, you haven't. You used the wrong, you shouldn't have put an "S" on the end. Like you heard the ad once, and my client sold him a $50,000 roof, and he was like, “I love this new ad of yours.”

It’s like, “Hold on, listen.” And let me look you in the eye. That doesn't happen ever. Okay. Never ever does that happen. I tell this story because it doesn't happen.

Ryan Chute: Just that one time.

Mick Torbay: That one time, and he sold a $50,000 roof, and then nothing for a month and a half because that's not how it fucking works. That's not how it works. But it was just, but God, he wanted to, he was like so proud of this message, and I'm like, “We don't know if this is a good message or not. We're gonna know in a year.”

Ryan Chute: Now you do know in a year, because you now have revenue and leading and lagging indicators that show that. But again, we're chasing these red herrings is just absolutely exhausting for business owners. It's about trusting in a system that has been proven to work over and over again. Now, I find in a lot of cases, we either have the companies that are both operationally proficient and culture-oriented that drive this home and blow up.

The companies who blame their marketing for not working are the companies who are not delivering in the operations. They don't have the capacity, they don't have the wherewithal or even the right mix to do it right. We find a lot of these folks end up going off the reservation and doing some other stuff, and then blaming the whole thing from falling apart when they didn't actually continue running the marketing system, and it's the system that works as a whole. That system is always going to be more durable, more it's going to be stronger when you're running it as a single unit rather than a bunch of ad hoc little projects with the hopes of capturing that discretionary short-term lead that you're desperate for because something broke, or a pay-per-click went off the rails, or a “whatever” happened.

All of a sudden, you're beholden to these channels, and you haven't built any foundation. You're just on a house of sticks, and there's a windstorm coming.

Mick Torbay: And very often people can draw an incorrect conclusion. I think that's where a lot of these myths come from. People will draw an incorrect conclusion, and then they'll go and spread it around, and you hear anecdotal stuff from a competitor, or not a competitor, but like a friend of yours who's in business, and they're like, “Oh, don't do direct mail. I tried direct mail, and it doesn't work.” Or “Don't bother with TV. I tried TV, and it doesn't work.” It's like, are we sure TV didn't work, or did you run too much reach and not enough frequency? What was your commercial? Was it good? Was it shitty? Was it a good ad? We don't know. They're drawing the conclusion that the medium is a failure or that the channel is the problem. And there are a hundred other variables; it might have been that the production was rubbish. It might have been that the writing was no good. That's like me saying, “Hey, listen, I tried to build a house myself outta wood. Turns out wood's not a good idea, because I built it and it was just crap. It was a crap house. Don't try using wood.”

Chris Torbay: Don't use lumber for gas sake.

Mick Torbay: “Because they were all twisted and pointed the wrong way and the rain was, nails are coming in, it was, and then it fell over.” Definitely don't use wood.

Ryan Chute: Yeah. So true. And there's, it's we poke a little fun because we care. Ultimately, what it comes down to is there's an awful lot of misinformation. There's more misinformation and flat-out false information.

Mick Torbay: More examples of advertising that fails than an advertising that really works. That's for sure.

Ryan Chute: Exactly. So we'll have more of these episodes that we talk about, the myths, because we could go on forever on this. But really, I have to find a place where we can put a pin in it.

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Ryan Chute: Marketing myths are like urban legends. They stick around because they're easy, comforting, and sound just true enough to be dangerous. The truth is less glamorous, but far more powerful. Advertising doesn't have to be an expense, but being unremarkable is expensive. Perfect attribution is a fool's errand; measure what really matters.

Instead, cheap work looks cheap. This only works if you're the cheapest guy in town. Doubling down on your budget is no promise of doubling. Your lead flow or revenue reach is meaningless without frequency and impact. Marketing takes three essential elements to work best: brand awareness, sales activation, and lead capture.

And people rarely buy the best. They buy better enough. If you want your business to grow, ditch the myths. Spend enough to be excellent. Commit to the long game and trust your proven truths instead of chasing the fables of failure. This is how you bust myths and build empires. Until next time, this is Advertising in America.

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?

Join us on our socials @advertisinginamerica. Wanna spend your marketing budget better? Visit us at wizardofads.services to book your free strategy session with Wizard Ryan Chute today. Until next time, keep your ads enchanting and your audience captivated.

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