Transcription
We cut our ad costs by 57% in just eight days. It was the craziest test we've ever run in our company. And it was actually a competition that we did where my employees made ads for our company. And in those eight days, we cut ad costs like we've never seen before.
We spent over a million dollars a month in ads that month, which means we were testing a lot of creatives. But we were testing creatives that were found for. I was in the videos. We had a lot of the same stale ideas. And so, we just asked our employees, there's over a hundred of them now, "Hey, give us your best ad ideas. The most successful ads get a massive cash prize."
Each employee got two submissions, two ads that they got to make, and they could do literally whatever they want. And we put ad spend behind them. After a few days, we saw the ones that didn't perform at all, turn those off, and double the budget on the ones that were succeeding.
After a week of spend, we spent about $76,000 on ads that we'll never use again, and they didn't work. But the winners paid for all of it. Some of those are still running six months later and have had millions of dollars of ad spend behind them. And they were ad submissions that no one in our marketing team expected to work. It was just so far out of left field, something that we never would have thought of. The employee presented and literally changed how the company's marketing works.
Two big lessons here for me. One, you have to pay to lose before you can actually win. Two, most businesses have way smarter employees than they think. And if you just give them a little bit more credit for improving your business, they'll probably make you a lot of money.