Adam Torres and Skip Wilson discuss advertising.
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Show Notes:
Is it possible to forecast advertising success accurately prior to launching a campaign? In this episode, Adam Torres and Skip Wilson, Founder & CEO at DRAFT Media Partners. Explore DRAFT Media Partners and how its helping businesses owners achieve advertising success through careful planning, execution and forecasting.
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About DRAFT Media Partners
DRAFT Media Partners, an advertising execution company that now serves over a hundred clients across four locations. They help businesses forecast advertising success before they spend a dime and when the campaigns are active, they help them understand their real-time analytics to get the best results possible.
DRAFT Media Partners build the tools and tech to help marketing professionals and agencies execute, manage, and plan advertising campaigns in a more intelligent way.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters.com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So did I have Skip Wilson on the line? And he’s. Founder and CEO over at Draft Media Partners.
Skip, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, man. It’s an honor. All right, Skip. So we, we got some fun to talk about today. So forecasting advertising success before you spend a dime, lots of individuals, a lot, a lot of business owners, entrepreneurs, and executives that watch this show and advertising is a big, big topic.
So excited to get into your, your methodology, how you’re doing what you’re doing and and what exactly We are doing an advertising, so we’ll get into all of that. But to get us kicked off, we’ll start this episode the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute.
So skip at mission matters. Our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s our mission. Skip. What mission matters to you? Our mission is we make dreams come true through advertising and that’s whether we’re working with a business, helping them obtain like what their goals are.
We mean that internally too, for our employees, trying to help them get to whatever their goals are. And then a lot of our business is actually through like referral partners and other eight ad agencies and things that. Use us for fulfillment and it’s helping them accomplish their goal. So Using paid advertising paid reach specific message to a specific audience to make dreams come true It’s awesome Love bringing business owners and founders on the show to share why they do what they do how they’re doing and what we can Learn from them.
So great having you on and I guess let’s just start there Like were you always an entrepreneur? Was that always kind of in in the cards for you? Yeah So I, yes, but I didn’t realize it. I mean, I very much had in my mind that I started out when I was, 16, I was working as a copywriter, mostly to impress a girl.
And who’s now my wife, by the way, but it works. So obviously you write good copy. We’ll start there. Go there. Exactly. But yeah, I w I wanted to be a writer cause I thought it would impress her. And so the only jobs were, were. In copywriting and things. So I, and then that morphed into me doing freelance web design and things like WordPress was just becoming a thing.
And so, and so I sort of didn’t realize it at the time, but I actually had a pretty successful freelance business. It was just me and freelancing, but I did that all the way up through college. And then but I always had it in my mind that I need to be a big, a part of a big company. So. I didn’t even, maybe no entrepreneurship was a thing or like an option.
It was just like, you were just making money doing what you like doing. Well, my dad, my dad was a business. My dad owned a, my dad was in commercial real estate, but he lost his company when I was pretty young. So just to me, the idea of having now as an adult, looking back on it, like, I mean, it was a hundred percent his fault, but the the poor choices, all that stuff, right.
But yeah, the but that I was, so I was sort of had it in my mind that that’s. Too risky. I don’t really want to do that. You know, the only thing that’s sure is, is getting in with a big company that working my weapon then, and then, you know, I did that, but then when I, but even when I was working in larger companies, whether it was time Warner or then at I heart, I was a department head.
So I was building out my own department, my own teams, my own processes. So it’s like you’re an entrepreneur in that sense, like in all those, yeah. Exactly. And it, which is, you know, I didn’t really realize it wasn’t until really, I was getting until probably about seven or so years ago that I started realizing, like, wait, I should do this for myself because, you know, built what became like a 22 million division of the company.
And my pay stays the same, right? Yeah, I’m like, wait a second, that’s something, something’s off on that. And so when you, was it like was it like a, was it a gradual progression? Was there a moment in time, like, take me to that moment when you’re like, Oh man, I’m going to take the leap, like to actually go out there on my own and do it.
Like, what was that? Like, that’s always scary for me, even me thinking about it. When I’m asking you the question, I’m thinking about my own story. I’m getting a little nervous over here. What was that like for you? It was by far the most. The hardest decision ever looking back on it. It shouldn’t have been.
I had really a core customer base that I was going to be able to start off with. So I wasn’t starting from scratch. It wasn’t starting at zero. I, cause I’d built, you know, so many good relationships and things. So it shouldn’t have been as scary as it was, but yeah, no, I was, I was absolutely terrified. It was the hardest.
I mean, I’ve got, I’ve got three kids and a mortgage, you know, and I love it. There’s some responsibilities to say the least. Exactly. You know, it’s not just my life I’m putting on the line, right? Like it’s, it’s, you know, I’m taking a whole team of people down with me if I go down. So it was it was absolutely terrifying.
And what’s funny is that I didn’t really think the stuff that I thought would be hard ended up being. Easy things like taxes and insurance and those types of things were the things that scared me from going out on my own. Then when, then once you actually take the leap, that’s actually fairly easy, right?
You just hire it again, just do what they say and those types of things. So, but you don’t know, you don’t know at that time cause you didn’t deal with it. Yeah. It was the little I was a couple of weeks out on my own and I bought this printer and I couldn’t get this printer connected to my computer and I said it took me like two and a half hours and that’s what I had like my I had like almost like a breakdown couldn’t call it.
Yeah, exactly. Just overcome with the awareness of like, oh, it’s just me now. Like, yeah, there’s no I. T. Department. There’s no that’s so. It did make you great. Did it make you? I went through some similar things like that when I left corporate America and it made me really like more appreciative of those systems.
And even the people not saying I didn’t appreciate them, but I took them from some of them. I took for granted. I’ll admit it. Like I just thought, Oh yeah, can you fix this? And people were doing their jobs like, but I didn’t really understand the value of being able to pick up the phone to that. So I took it for granted.
And then after that, when I was in that same situation, I’m like, Oh man, I miss it. Exactly. Yeah. The stuff that’s almost, almost annoying as an employee or like funny as an employee, like things like a, like a handbook, like, like an employee handbook. It’s like the minute you get that at a job, like that’s going straight in the trash, right?
You never look at it. You never read it. But then when you realize. But then, you know, when you’re having to build those things and you don’t have any of that infrastructure, you’re like, Oh, wow, we actually need to figure out like what happens if there is like an HR complaint, what if the, as if, you know, like having to do all that stuff, all the things that I thought were like silly and dumb, it’s like, Oh, wow, that’s actually really important stuff.
Yeah. It’s so interesting. What about the like, what about the people around you? Like, I always, like, for me, I left. From I had a big career change. So when I went from finance to media, like that was like, people thought I was crazy, of course, because that was a huge change. Sure. You like, what was that like when people were like, ah, you’re going out on your own, you’re going to like, are you sure you want, like, what was your system?
Like, how’d that feel? There was a lot of, because I was, it almost felt like a breakup of sorts leaving the department that I had been so invested in building and things like that, it was very, there was a lot of. I mean, honestly, I feel like almost pan like I was getting a lot of like, please don’t go.
Please don’t do this. You know, please that you know, in types of phone calls and those types of things. And then and that coupled with my own internal fear is like a hard thing to like, and then, but then once actually doing it. With the exception of those little moments, like with the printer, it is so much better.
Even though I’m working longer hours, I mean, in corporate America, you can have those days where you get in charge of your own schedule. Now you don’t work 60, you work a hundred. It’s great. Yeah, exactly. But it’s like, it sounds so, yeah, it’s like on paper, it makes no sense. It’s like, that’s in my iHeart days, I could have just like coasted for a day if I really needed to, that’s, I could have just had like a.
Okay, day, but when you’re doing it, when you’re doing it on your own, it’s like, yeah, but it’s, it’s so much better. I mean, even though it is objective, like looking from the outside in, you know, like, how is that a better thing? Yeah, it just, it is for some people, I understand it’s not right for everybody, but for, for, for folks, for some folks.
It very much is. Yeah. I’m, I’m still figuring it out. I don’t know yet, Skip, but we’ll, we’re going to jump around a bit here. So let’s let’s get into advertising. Let’s talk some, some ad talk here. So now you’re out on your own. You’re thinking about like, obviously you had, you mentioned you had some, some, some individuals and some, some clients you wanted to serve, even as you were going out on your own, like talk about the methodology and what you wanted to bring to draft media partners in this concept, like what made it so special?
For you to want to go forward with it. When, so I was, I was going into, when I was launching my own, my own business, I was adjacent to what I was doing. And I, I mean, I heard it was, it was very much an advertising, like all digital advertising. When I started draft, the goal was actually to create a Martek.
So somebody like I heart would have actually been like our, was one of our ideal client prospects. And because we, one of the, when I had a meeting with my financial advisor, several, a couple of years prior to that. And he put three plans in front of me and he was like, all right, this plan is like high risk, but could, you know, we’ll likely produce something like, I’m just making up these numbers.
Yeah. This will produce like 12 percent return. This one’s very middle of the road, but we’ll, is a lot safer to do 7 percent and then this one’s, you know, whatever. And I was like, why doesn’t that exist in the advertising world? Cause we know like that a landing page should convert at about the best Three to 5%.
We know that, you know, a a radio campaign, about 1 percent of the, of the QM should respond to the ad. It’s like, we know those objective things. Yeah. Why can’t we forecast that? Cause we always say advertising is an investment, but unlike most investments, it’s kind of a, when it comes like, Hey, if I give you a million bucks, what can I get in return?
It was always met with like a. I don’t know, but an invoice, definitely an invoice. And so I just didn’t like that answer. And so you know, after at that point, 15 ish years of giving him essentially that same answer, I was like, you know, there’s, I had sort of the poor man’s version of it, like my little, like spreadsheet of industry averages and those types of things.
And I was like, you know, there, we just need to turn this into a, into a platform, into a software. So if it’s a roofing company in Des Moines, Iowa, then, and they need 50 appointments a month or whatever. It can build out the plan from that. And so that was, that was the original idea was to create a Martek media planning software.
And then of course, no one bought that. And which is okay, because what I didn’t realize is that our target audience, media companies, midsize agencies, fractional CMOs, they don’t have any money. And so the last thing they need is To be paying for like another software as a service. Right? Interesting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we, we pivoted after about six months or so we had to pivot to being we just kept getting these requests of, Hey, you built this plan. That’s great. Can you got, can you just execute it? And so we realized that that was actually the bigger opportunity. And so that’s, that’s when we pivoted to being a ad execution company.
How do you realize that it only took six months? And I love that concept of you being able to pivot and you actually doing it. Many business owners and businesses, a lot of times they may fail is because they don’t, they’re not listening to that feedback of like, will you do it for us? Like, and that, and that, that’s the thing.
Sometimes we’re the biggest gold is for us. I’ll give you a quick example. We, we, when we started this, we didn’t, we had no intention of launching shows for other, for other individuals, other podcasts hosts. And, you know, at some point I, we just said, yes. And now we’ve launched over 200 shows that wasn’t even in the plan.
That wasn’t like, I didn’t, we didn’t, we had no idea we were going to be in that business. And that ends up being one of our our most interesting things that I believe we do. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that’s, and that’s, that’s the thing I was actually kind of trying to get. Out of the, you know, my goal was to sort of get out of the advertising world.
And it turns out that that’s actually exactly what was needed. Cause there’s so many ad agencies that are great at coming up with great copy or coming up with great taglines and those types of things, but then they’ll forget to check the box that makes sure that it runs in the right market. You know, you’ve got like all this plan, you know, or something like that.
The actual execution was where everything was falling off. And so, But that’s the kind of insight you don’t get until you do start and you just listen to the feedback that you get. I mean, that’s, it’s the same thing with an ad campaign too. The idea of a campaign failing is kind of old hat. That shouldn’t be the case.
Like that should be, that’s almost impossible because you get such instant feedback if it’s a longer than four to, you know, if it’s a four week or longer campaign, you should be able to figure out, okay, our ads not getting clicked. Or people aren’t searching us after they hear it or whatever, see it. That means our ad stinks or we have the wrong audience.
So tweak those things, or it’s getting the right traffic. They’re coming to our page. It’s not converting. Well, that means it’s either an offer issue or the landing page issue. If you stay on top of the feedback you’re getting, then. The idea of the whole thing failing is kind of impossible. It’s like that ad may fail or that landing page may fail or that whatever may fail.
But the idea of sending a specific message to a specific audience doesn’t fail. Like it’s just, you got to figure out which, which audience and which message. Yeah. Talk, talk to me a little bit more about the, about the science or the forecasting aspect of this and how it works. So for some that watch this, maybe this may be a new concept because maybe they are, they, they’re listening to the same thing that you mentioned you were giving people for many years, which is I’ll give you an invoice.
Right. Yeah, exactly. That if you, so a good, a good sort of rule of thumb. Is some, so some cocktail napkin numbers every, every industry is different. Every plot, of course, of course. Yeah. But if you’re, if you’re just trying to sort of cocktail napkin, something else, something out, you’re looking at about a one ish percent click through rate or higher on search and social, you’re 0.
1 percent in display, and then you’re looking at about a 5 percent conversion once they come to your site. Wow. The other media also has those same metrics, but that’s a little bit more complicated, like percent of reach response and stuff. So most people listening to this, we’ll just keep it digital for right now.
Cause digital is easier. Although just know that those metrics are out there for other platforms as well, but that’s a good rule of thumb. So if it costs you about five or six bucks. To get someone to your site, know that it’s going to cost you, you know, about 20 or so people to your site before you can get a good lead.
So you have likely a acquisition cost of around a hundred bucks. That’s a good sort of cocktail napkin number. And because usually, especially small business owners will fall into two categories. When they’re looking at an ad campaign, they either view marketing as a necessary evil. So they don’t really care to track any of it.
Yeah. Or they view it as some sort of like magic money machine. And so they think they just pull, they just gotta pull the right lever on the right campaign and everything’s gonna be fixed. Exactly. If they spend a thousand bucks, it’s not Vegas people What? Yeah, exactly. You know, if you spend a thousand bucks, you’re not gonna get a thousand good leads, and it’s, you know, there’s not a platform that can do that.
Right? Yeah. So it’s, you want to make sure that that math works within your, within your, within your industry. And so one of the things you mentioned was platforms and work and keeping it digital. Talk about just the types of different advertising that you’re doing, like just like platforms, things like that.
Yeah. So, I mean, draft, we focus just on paid media. So there is. There are some things that I won’t talk about things like SEO search engine optimism, which is just basically showing up organically when someone searches you in those types of things, more guerrilla marketing tactics and things that you have less direct control on paid advertising is like a light switch.
Like you can turn it on and you’re instantly at, if it’s Google, you’re at the top of the page or not, and then you turn it off and you, it’s like you never existed. And so there’s good and bad to that. But everything with us is paid media. So when we talk about paid advertising, it’s. Radio television, you know, print, that’s sort of the traditional media then you’ve got outdoor, which is everything from park benches to the backs of buses to Times Square billboards, right?
And then there’s what’s called OTT or over the top television, which is things like Hulu ads. Prime video ads, all of those things. And then there’s display ads, social ads, and search. And then there’s direct mail which is anything you might get like in the mailbox and then draft you cover all of those.
We do. Wow. And that comes from listening to, we didn’t originally. Yeah. My, my personal experience, most of my background and most of our, even our, even at the three employee level at our, at our first sort of core team, we were pretty much only digital. Because that was our, all of our expertise, but because I really wanted to build, once we pivoted to being an ad fulfillment company, I wanted to be purely platform agnostic.
In other words, I wanted to be able to say, Oh, okay. You’re wanting to get this anti smoking campaign out. Then you really need traditional TV. Traditional radio and Spotify advertising podcast that you need. I wanted to be able to offer the solutions without a preference from one over the other. So that’s great.
That’s not easy, by the way. That’s great. Yeah. We structured our, we, we really in our sort of second year, going into our second year, structured our mergers and acquisitions to build that out. So we find a really great direct mail company, buy ’em. We find a really great media buyer, you know, bring that, bring those people into, into our, so that was how we were able to sort of build out those verticals.
Yeah, that’s great. That’s because now you’re not, because sometimes what you, if you go to a direct mail company and you ask them what’s the best the best answer for their campaign, nothing against direct mail, by the way, everybody watching, I’m just, but, but what’s probably the tool they’re going to offer you for your campaign.
It’s going to be direct mail if that’s all they got. Right. Exactly. And, and I, I also wanted it to be that where our own incentives were equally spread. So I, we priced everything out so that our profit margin is the same across all platforms because that’s pretty fair too. Because it doesn’t have to be.
Yeah, exactly. Usually there is like one sort of like For example, if it’s a TV, if it’s a production agency, they’re making way more on video production than anything else. So of course they recommend video tactics, right? And whether that’s right for the client or not, it, well, and in fairness to them, it’s not even like it’s a, it’s just that that’s what they’re trained on, right?
It’s not even a conscious decision. It’s, it’s, That’s the tool they’re used to, not necessarily, if that’s the tool that they’re trained in, they came up in, they know like the back of their hand. Well, of course, they’re going to recommend what they know the best, because that’s what they feel is going to be the best.
They don’t know the whole industry. That’s why I think draft is so unique is by being able to have expertise in all these different like areas. You kind of get, I don’t know if I should use the word of fair shake, but you’re going to get a better view on possibly what’s going to make the most sense.
Like that’s, that’s pretty cool to me. Yeah, we do. I mean, we, the plans are built by algorithms within the industry and within past learning. So because of that, it kind of takes like the human L now every time a person will, you know, like whoever the account manager is on that account, we’ll make sure that it makes sense.
But for the most part, if it’s a dentist in Philadelphia or whatever, that’s it’s building the best plan in that market for that industry. And it doesn’t care which of those products it is. And then we figure out, okay, this has got some of this in it. So, Hey, you’re doing our media buying for this, or, Hey, this has got some of this in it, so it’s Facebook and so it’s, it’s your, so we divvy it out internally.
Yeah. So that, you know, cause not, not everybody’s an expert at everything. I still pretty much keep toward to digital, but in terms of the actual execution stuff, but our robots don’t, our robots don’t care. Exactly. What what are some of the niches of the industries that you, that you work with, you mentioned dentists, you mentioned a couple of others, like what, what are some of the industries that you, that you favor or are you agnostic?
So we, because we mostly work behind the scenes, I mean, 80 percent of our business is behind either other agencies, other media companies, or fractional CMOs. They all, most of them will have like a specific. Like, you know, so it may, like, for example, one of them is a real estate focused agency and all they do is real estate.
Another one is healthcare, but because we’re behind the scenes of them, we don’t really have an industry preference. There are some that we can use past learnings from and others that we don’t, but for the most part at this point, I mean, we have 100, we have. We have 130, yeah, 131 active clients. And so just, you know, like right now.
And so they really span. So you’re busy. That’s awesome, man. That’s great. This is a big, to find a shop like yours and to be able to do that, like that, that’s special. That’s good. And that’s good. That’s a great client base in there. They’re obviously coming back. Right. Yeah, exactly. That’s the, that’s the big thing.
Most people don’t know, you know, in average, especially the way we’re, you know, Any advertising, you’re usually not making much money the first month. Cause you’ve got so many hours in the creative and everything else. It’s everyone wants the campaign to do well because we don’t really make money until like the third or fourth month.
Usually. Yeah, no, that’s it. That’s that, that’s the numbers. We tell people that all the time, that’s the numbers that then that’s fair. And that’s just the way the industry is set up. That being said, I’m MarTech, obviously there’s a lot, a lot of different techs out there and otherwise. What’s. What’s interesting to you?
And because you just have a unique vantage point, you came from obviously very large companies like I heart you’ve been doing copyright. And since you were writing your wife, love letters or your girlfriend in the beginning, and you’re trying to learn how to write so you could woo her. Great. You won there too.
Now you got a great agency doing well. What interests you in terms of like. What’s out there? It could be technology, it could be delivery, whatever. Like what interests you right now in advertising? What’s exciting? One of the things that, this doesn’t sound exciting, but it’s exciting for like us as a business, but one of the things that I think is particularly in interesting is that about eight years ago, one of the biggest problems is where there, there were massive layoffs in the me, in the advertising space.
So you had. Companies that had maybe a team of 30 people in the marketing department are getting shrunk down to like six or seven people. Yeah, that doesn’t sound interesting or exciting. I’m just, I’m just joking. What’s exciting. A lot of people were laid off. Hey, it’s great.
Write me a letter on that question. No, go ahead. But, but, and that stunk and that was bad. That was an objectively bad thing. The, but where, what came out of that was that you had one, you know, a T a team of five people that are still having to do the jobs of 30 people. And now it’s almost really since the past two or three years.
Now there’s that same group of five or six people is now working for multiple companies. So it’s not even one company is one team is stressed working with one company. It’s one team work that’s stressed. Doing the job of what would have been like 150 people. It was like three or four different businesses.
And I think that’s a trend that’s going to continue in the industry and why that’s exciting to me. Even though it doesn’t sound like it’s exciting, why that’s exciting to me is that that’s going to force a lot of automations and. That a lot of innovations and automations, part of that will be, I think, directly beneficial to companies like ours.
And that’s part of how we are is we can help alleviate some of those pains. But so that’s, that’s nice from a business standpoint, but I think it also to marketing is very much an art. Like there’s a lot of art to marketing. Advertising really isn’t, it really is more of a objective science. And I think by having such small teams.
It’s going to force a lot of that object, like objectivity. Cause it’s just going to require so many things to be automated. Yeah, that, that is exciting. And the, and the winners ultimately are the business owners and the people that are doing great work. So the people that do approach it as a science, like this is going to, the industry is going to skew more and more to individuals that think just like yourself, which will obviously be a win, like for you and your business and for the business owners that work with you.
I mean, so it’s win, win. Yeah. Exactly. It’s, it’s good for everyone. And while it may mean that some folks are having to wear multiple hats and those things, and there’s goods and that’s life now, as far as I’m concerned, after the pandemic, if you’re not wearing more than one hats, then I don’t know. Yeah, exactly.
You’re at risk is what I say. You’re at risk. If you don’t have another hat on, I don’t care how long you’ve been at a place. That’s, that’s exactly right. Yeah. It’s going to cause folks to have different varying skill sets and varying connections. And it’s right. There’s a certain amount of freedom to that too, that I think will come for the individuals.
So in other words, you know, there’ll be more people working from home and those things. That’s all, it’s all good stuff. I agree with that. Well, we’ll skip what’s next, man. What’s next for you? What’s next for the company? You’re growing, you’re doing great work. What’s next? We, we just moved out. We’ve been in sort of stealth mode.
I really wanted to like our, we spent our first, we’re going into what will, well, we’ve been three years, we’re going into our fourth year and we really have been. Fairly quiet. In other words, we pretty much only grown by, you know, referrals and organic growth. And so we are sort of just now letting the world know we exist, things like this podcast that we’re only a couple of months into sort of making our presence known.
And so that is the big that’s the, that’s, that’s the big shift for us, even our website and those types of things. Everything’s been sort of in We knew we needed a site. Nobody really goes to it because it is all referral. So nobody really cares about a website when you’re, when it’s a referral business.
And so all of those things, revamping those things, building those things, truly getting our you know, truly having a focus on we’ve been solely focused on the product side and building a great platform and product that now it’s all about. See how far we can scale that. Amazing. And if somebody is listening to this and they want to follow up, they want to learn more about draft.
What’s the best way for them to do that? Skip you can, so info at draft media partners. com or info at draft advertising. com. Same email, same place. Start out there. We do our, that planning platform, our business center, all of that stuff is we don’t charge for any of that. So feel free to use that, build plans in it.
You can request plans, we’ll build plans for you. And There’s no charge for any of that unless you decide to run the campaign through us, which obviously that’s the goal for us is that you’ll say, yes, do it. But but yeah, we’ll, we’ll build the plan and then anything for for free, man, that’s great.
Skip. And and for everybody, and for everybody watching and listening to this, we’ll put all that information in the show notes. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t hit the The subscribe or follow button yet. This is your invitation. Hit that button because we, this is a daily show each and every day.
We’re bringing you new thought leaders, new business owners new executives, and we don’t want you to miss a thing. So again, hit those buttons and skip. This has been so much fun, man. Thanks again for coming on the show and congrats on all the success. Awesome, man. Thank you.