At one time, Charles Tichenor was a top 100 advertiser on Facebook.

On the platform, he frequently manages 7 figure budgets per DAY! 

In the early days, he managed FB ads for Apple, New Balance, major automotive brands, and more. Facebook gave him test budgets ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 per day to test new features and Betas.

In this episode, Charles and I dig into what’s working now, what mistakes he’s seeing, and a bit of his framework for success.

Here’s a look at what we cover:

• How Facebook Advantage Plus ads give you an unfair advantage - and what you should do about it right now.
• If you want to win more customers, you have to BE your customer.
• How chasing “what’s working now” with Facebook creatives is likely to make you a second-rate advertiser - and what to do instead.
• The AI Charles was using before Chat GPT and how you should use it.
• Creative ways to use Chat GPT to speed up your marketing process.
• How TikTok is different from all the other platforms.
• How to win with TikTok organic and paid ads.
• How to land on the right creatives for your brand.
• Plus MORE!

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Mentioned In This Episode:

• Charles Tichenor (LinkedIn) ‍
• Charles Tichenor (Twitter)‍
• Charles Tichenor (Instagram)  ‍
• Disrupter School (Website) ‍
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)
  ‍

Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution Podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today we are talking with Charles Tichenor from disruptor school.com and we're talking about Facebook ads and social and AI and all kinds of crazy fun stuff to help you grow your business. And quick background, I met Charles first at Geek out c Diego. I was speaking there, shout out to Nick Shackleford, met Charles there. I was like, whoa, who is this crazy, crazy smart guy. And so we met there and then Blue Ribbon, also San Diego, separate events over time. We met there because you were speaking with my buddy Jeremiah Allen, and so we really connected and hung out there, I think over the cigar party potentially. But anyway, Charles and I were chatting. We're like, dang, this is a podcast episode. Let's do it. So here you are. So Charles, what's up man? And I want you to shed light on a couple things and I got a couple of intro questions for you, but all right, let's listed as Top 100 Advertiser on Facebook. Yes. You've generated a billion dollars in revenue from Facebook ads. These are some crazy, crazy statistics. What do you attribute that to? How have you become this monster maybe that some people don't know about on Face with Facebook ads?

Charles:

I think it really comes down to three things. First off is luck and timing in that I basically was spending seven figures a day before there was a Facebook pixel. So the fact that I was supervisor at Omnicom for the Resolution Media, the performance marketing division overseeing Nissan and CBS and Henkel working with Act Division and Levi's and Apple back in like 20 13, 20 14, just right place, right time. So that's always a key place of things. There's nothing you can totally beat that. Totally. I think a second thing was that I did get a very strong background in data science and analysis. So I have an MBA from a Harvard Business Review, and what that really helped me do was when I was spending that money, I was always doing case studies. I was always doing very aggressive testing. And what that meant was, back at the time there was one rep at Facebook for everybody west of the Mississippi River, and nobody wanted to talk to me because Facebook was this ugly redhead stepchild of a thing that everybody in the room was all about Yahoo,

Brett:

Nobody understood it.

Charles:

So me and this guy became best friends and anytime there was a new tool or they were building up a new team or new ad type I had a seven figure budget to test it. One of the first big wins we had was I launched the first lead gen ads on Facebook. So not only did I have huge budgets, but I also had master's degree education on conducting case studies and data analysis for marketing. So I kind of became that Chuck Yeager of Facebook ads, one of, not the only one, but a few of them just kind of test piloting a million things. So by the time other people got to see stuff, Facebook was funding me at 10,000, $50,000 a day sometimes on new tools. And that still happens to this day which has given me tremendous insight in how the platform was developed, the tools, how they're being designed, the product teams behind marketing and messenger and measurement, how they all were actually working together.

And I've seen those teams evolve over years. And I think the last thing is that I had the luxury of not learning how to run Facebook ads from somebody that was good at email or search or programmatic. I kind of came in fresh, which meant that I have a huge advantage over most people or I did. And I try to teach that advantage because I look at Facebook not as a version of Google display or of email, and I don't value the same metrics in the same way that most other people do. And I've always looked at it through the lens of business results and that has made me a really bad agency employee. But ultimately when I got to the side of vendor and made me one of the best, I'm on my fourth eight figure business to a nine figure exit in the last five years that started as a low end seven figure business. Dude,

Brett:

That's not bad.

Charles:

It's not luck eventually it's a process.

Brett:

Do that once and that's cool. Yeah, yeah, for almost on your fourth, that's fantastic. But it's such an interesting point though. We all and just realizing we all come to whatever we're working on with a paradigm. So you came to Facebook ads, but really not with the paradigm of Google or TV ads or something like that. If I were to approach and try to dig into Facebook, I would totally look at it from the lens of Google ads on YouTube because that's what I know. That fresh perspective is useful. And I think, like you said, you can kind of unlearn that a little bit and force yourself to have a fresh perspective, which is pretty cool. So amazing ways to learn seven figure a day budgets and Facebook linear via an alpha tester beta test or things like that. That's awesome. So fast forward to today. Quick shout out to Triple Whale and RAA Mutual friend of ours, you were just nominated for a Whaley, which is brand new, that's Triple Whales award they give out in the d c industry. Sadly, you did not win, but it's still a happy story. So talk, what were you nominated for and how did you finish in the final rankings there?

Charles:

So they had a lot of awards best, most innovative brands and communities and all of that. I was nominated for the last award which was Best Operator which was tremendous. I mean, it was an amazing award to be recognized like that. And sadly I didn't win, but Renee from Marine Laer did win and top. If I'm going to lose to somebody, I'll lose to that woman that is doing 200 million plus retail locations. Hey, look, it's Triple Whale. She's the bigger whale than me. I'll come for her next

Brett:

Year.

Charles:

And

Brett:

Phenomenal brand 12

Charles:

Months, just a closer. So it was an honor, and if you have to lose losing to the best feels really good. Yeah,

Brett:

I hear you man. We'll, kudos to you to become runner up for the inaugural whales as best operator. It's like their best picture if we're going to compare this to the Oscars. So well done. And tip the hat to Marine layer for sure. Awesome, man. Well let's dive in. So we're going to talk Facebook and TikTok and social and AI and a lot of fun stuff, but what are some of the changes that have happened with Facebook ads over the last six, eight months that maybe some people aren't aware of yet?

Charles:

I think the biggest change that we're seeing is the unfair advantage that Facebook is giving to Advantage Plus campaigns right now, which is a certain style of running an ad, it's a certain campaign type that that's an option. I was doing some of the tests about a year ago where they were giving us about 10,000 a day to test it, and it's a slight change in the way that Facebook is using their data to target the right people to get results. Historically, once Facebook introduced the conversion pixel, which again I remember when that was, was a greater, that was more traumatic to the industry than iOS 14 ever was which was just wild. Like iOS 14 was a roadblock, a speed bump, what I mean in comparison to the end of

Brett:

Days. But the conversion, well that was traumatic and mostly in a good way for Facebook advertisers. It was traumatic, maybe the rest of the industry.

Charles:

And no I saw so many agencies refuse to adopt the conversion objectives. They really dove into P P C and Facebook, to be fair, was designed to compete with Google Display. And when they refused to adopt machine learning, there were folks that bought into it that were really successful. All the brands that got really big in 20 16, 20 17, 20 18, because Facebook ads are really easy adopted it. There are other agencies that fought it that lost floors in their Manhattan office. It was a massive either you were on one side of that divide or the other. And to bring it back to Advantage plus, we're seeing a very interesting piece come in where Facebook is underpricing the attention specifically to invest in a change in consumer behavior. They've done this previously with dynamic product ads, carousel ads. Before that there was no carousel, and those are the ads where you swiped through left and you just see all the products.

There was nothing like that beforehand. And what Facebook did was they gave a discount on how much it cost to reach people, specifically making the investment to change consumer behavior. To be fair, they also did with Canvas ads, which failed miserably. And Hey, look, I made a lot of mistakes with Canvas ads. I completely bet on it, and failed miserably and Call of Duty was still the number one game that year. So kind of shows you how that works. And we're also seeing them make the investment in shops, but a lot of people running Facebook ads have noticed that there's like a 20% off on the shop side, and that's Facebook making an investment to take some of their profit to change consumer

Brett:

Percent off on your CPMs. So you're running an ad to

Charles:

No 20% off like the purchase, it was 20% off the purchase price, people getting massive discounts up to like $20 off buying something. But Facebook was just refunding the user. It wasn't actually coming out of the advertiser's bottom line.

Brett:

Oh,

Charles:

Interesting. And that was to get people used to using shops and the really invested in changing consumer behavior. So with Advertiser with Advantage Plus, they're investing heavily in getting the advertisers to change the way that they're using the platform in a slightly different style. And best practice for years now has been broad targeting, dynamic creative, define your best ads and letting that run at lowest cost Auto placement, which is now maximized conversions or whatnot or I remember it was they keep changing the name for the same stuff but what we're getting with Advantage Plus is they are giving advertisers better results merely because they're using that tool because Advantage Plus does three things really well and different than other platforms. Number one, normally the way

Brett:

A phrase explain what Advantage Plus is to those that don't know. And maybe you'll wrap up into these three things, but yeah,

Charles:

Yeah, absolutely. So Advantage Plus is a type, it's an option when you're running a conversion campaign to tap into the Advantage Plus style way of running the algorithm. And what it does differently than a normal conversion campaign is three things. Typically Facebook spends money on ads because the end user has a good experience with that ad. And then our job is to make sure that the ads that get spend also drive good business results. An advantage plus, it's not only saying the end user, but also that person is directly in market to make a purchasing decision, which is a slight nuanced change, but it's more or less even at prospecting, we're still kind of retargeting people that might very well be in another company's funnel where at Broad, for instance, I used to run New Balance and we did initial testing around advanced matching, and we found that up to two thirds of our budget was spent on people that had clicked on our competitor's ads and been to their site in the last week.

Advantage Plus is basically cranking that up. It's a way more aggressive version of that. Second thing is that it's not allowing for dynamic creative, so you have to put in your best ads and third, only good ads are getting spent. So you can put in really bad ads and push the budget to the moon and you might not get any delivery at all, which is very similar to big caps and cost cap. So Advantage Plus is basically forcing advertisers to only put out the best ads and to prioritize or isolate those best ads and spend the most amount of money on them so that they get the best results. And really what Facebook is doing is they're putting their thumb on the scale of the market economy so that advertisers are encouraged to make the best form of content so that Facebook users have the best experience. And that is a tremendous change, and we don't know how long that'll go on for. Eventually those costs will come up, but the folks that are taking advantage of it are seeing astronomically just tremendous performance above the baseline. And to give it a small example, I was testing it at 10,000 a day, maybe six months ago, a year ago. I'm now at 35, 40,000 a day on an ad account where I'm spending 80 to a hundred thousand a day. And that's a huge piece, and be fair,

Brett:

It's 30 to 40% of your pool spend is going to,

Charles:

And we have to understand that part of the way it's doing that is predicting what people are going to do. So it can't be the majority of your traffic because if all of your people are taking predictions, eventually you run out of data to make good decisions with, and that's a whole other thing for another day, but it's

Brett:

Doing very interesting. So let's dive into creatives just for a minute. I do. I want to kind of underscore something because this is interesting, something I didn't know about Advantage Plus, but so Facebook is rewarding you for just running the best creatives, and in fact, they'll only show the best creatives or good creatives in some ways. That's kind of what Google did early on with their quality score. They were incentivizing you to create a good ad. So they look at click through rate, they look at keyword relevance, look at your landing page, and they'll actually lower the cost for you. They'll make it more attractive for you as an advertiser if you create a great ad. So cost will always go up, right? That's going to happen, but probably going to be some elements of that stick around for Facebook, which is interesting. Yeah, and

Charles:

Cool.

Brett:

So let's talk creative. Yeah, go ahead.

Charles:

Oh, I was going to say, and that's how Facebook's always work. This is just a far more aggressive nature than what we've used to seeing sort of how TikTok is the most aggressive content suggestion engine ever. It's sort of like the YouTube suggested video, but on steroids with a nuclear bomb attached to it, sort of the same thing.

Brett:

Got it. Nice. That's awesome. So let's talk creatives. So what creatives are working right now and or what are some of the creative mistakes that you see brands making right now?

Charles:

Yeah, I mean I think probably the biggest mistake, let's start there. Let's tear it down and then build it up. I think the biggest mistake people are making and brands are making is they think that there's a best kind of creative, and so they're constantly chasing whatever that screenshot they saw. What I can tell you this, I'm working with a brand in the clothing business, apparel and accessories. They'll do over 150 million this year and they run only square static images. I also personally am partner in a clothing business and we spend 75 80% of our money on videos that were kind of designed for reels. Some of it is U G C, some of it's highly produced, some of it isn't. The point there is what does work is what you do well and how people are used to hearing from you. Almost every brand that has an identity, I'm been sipping on this liquid death. So Liquid Death is great around branding,

Brett:

Unbelievable.

Charles:

If Liquid

Brett:

Death, you dunno the Liquid Death story, you got to pay attention. Yeah.

Charles:

Now if Liquid Death, what they've done is they basically took the Warp Tour, Oz Fest, all of that type of vibe, and they turned it into a water business, which is great. Now, if they came out with an ad that felt like a Gap commercial because everybody else was winning with it, that ad wouldn't do well. Now it might work for everybody else, maybe that works for Dasani and it works for all the other brands on the shelf next to them, but it wouldn't work for them. And what's most important is figuring out how you can communicate with Inspire trust in a relationship with your target customer base, and then ultimately continue to hammer that home and think of all the different types of ads that you've seen on television, all the different commercials over the world. And we still have the Geico, we still have flow totally from Progressive. We still have the m and ms, we still have the polar bears at Christmas for Coca-Cola. Know what you do well and leverage that as much as possible. That's the greatest hat to create it. The worst thing you can do is try to respond to other people are

Brett:

Doing. Okay. One second, Charles, I think I lost video and I just want to make sure. Are you seeing your video?

Charles:

Yeah.

Brett:

Oh, there you are. You saw your video that whole time? Yep.

Charles:

Okay, I see uploading It's like 97. 99. 99.

Brett:

Okay. Okay, cool. For whatever reason, your screen, your portion went black for a minute, but it should be recording on your end and uploading, so we'll probably be fine. Okay. So you just finished with, I think when I interrupted, you just talked about Coca-Cola at around the holidays and stuff like that, so that's the greatest advantage. Yeah, but I love this what you do well and how people are used to seeing you, what generates trust, and then go all in on that. But yeah, what are your other thought?

Charles:

Yeah,

The most important thing to do in creative is figure out what is your unique positioning in the marketplace? How do you define your own little piece of the pie? And then how do you make that pie bigger? That's really the trick. I will tell you this. If your strategy is to chase what's working, you are only going to ever be a lesser version of 80% of the market. If you want to be elite, figure out your identity and stick with it. If you change your clothes and the way you talked every single day and went out into the world, you have no friend <laugh>. Like it's the same thing.

What you're looking to do more than anything in any business is ultimately have relationships with people and direct, especially in direct consumer and e-commerce, what we're trying to do is acquire profitable customer journeys with multiple sales in a long-term relationship for great L T V. That happens because of identity and because of trust. So figure out what you do and then continue to do it. What you do well matters. And so figure out what you do well and continue to do that versus chasing all the other things from everybody else because you're only going to ever do a worse than the person you're trying to copy.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that. You'll only be, if you're just chasing what works, you'll always be a second run type of deal. And I make a lot of sports analogies, but to compare this to sports, I coach basketball and so if someone said, Hey, what's the best basketball move? Well, I don't know. What are you good at? What fits you? Are you a post player? You guard, you got speed, you got size, you got jumping ability, you great outside shooter. That's what matters. And then do what you're really good at. And that totally makes sense when it comes to career. Well, okay. Steph

Charles:

Curry versus Michael. Yeah, if you did Steph Curry versus Michael Jordan. Well, the completely different player, LeBron James just scored the most points, but he's also shooting 50% more free three pointers than Kareem Abdul. I think Kariba Abdul-Jabbar has three attempts behind the three point line.

Brett:

Well most have to check the dates most of all of his career that the three point line didn't exist, so he could couldn't even do it. So yeah, different eras, different everything, but super interesting. So get understand what you're good at and then key on that. Any advice? So if someone's kind of stuck in that rut of I'm just chasing what's working, I'm hearing this new ad type or this type of U G C or this, and I'm just lurching how does someone understand what are they good at, and then so they can double down on that?

Charles:

Yeah, I think it's always good to test stuff. It's always good to be uncomfortable and to lose. And you should always have part of your efficiency as a business baked into loss. If I'm breaking even, I'm probably losing money because it means that I can't test, I can't get better. So I try to bake in the idea of a five or 10% loss as normal operating procedure. And hey, look, if you have a retail location that would be returns and theft and all of that stuff, that's just baked into business. What I think people need to do starting off with, is everybody has an identity on how they communicate. Some people are great copywriter, lean on it, some people look great on camera, lean on it. Some people are great graphic designers. How do you get attention? I think there is far too much focus on figuring out how to build the best ad for your business and not nearly enough attention and time and effort put into how does this business already make money? Why don't we just do more of that? And sometimes the easiest ways to turn a struggling seven figure business into something on a nine figure run rate is to get rid of every effort that isn't honest and true to who the business is. If you have a beautiful product, just show me a picture of the product I brought TX to market, and if you just took a picture of it, the most beautiful pictures in the world will never sell it. We had to do a video.

Brett:

Is this, sir, what is tx?

Charles:

The workout equipment from the gym, the yellow bands. So I brought that to market. A picture wouldn't do it. We had to show a

Brett:

Picture of a paint rubber band. What do you do with that? Yeah, yeah.

Charles:

There was no concept. So the best way to get somebody's attention, and this even when you're trying as a business owner trying to sell the product and get people interested, what are you doing in person? How are you communicating? You can't just say, Hey, look, here's some military grade rope. Great. Am I supposed to buy that? What am I supposed to do? Instead, you can show somebody what's going on and all of a sudden it clicks. Being able to figure out how you can earn somebody's attention and then monetize. It has very little to do with the kind of ad that you run. The ads that you run are an appropriation of that knowledge, but if your business isn't successful enough to have cash flow before you run ads, the ads are never going to make you successful. And I think that's one of the biggest pain points people have is they think the only thing missing is good ads.

They think, I've got a great business, all I need to do is get on Shark Tank and have somebody give me money. That's not the way that it works. You have to have something that works so you can pour fuel on that fire. Facebook ads is just fuel on the fire. It amplifies your existing business model. So the easiest thing for a business to do if you want to learn how to make the best ads, is look to how you already make money. What do you do well, and then appropriate that for some paid version of attention. Otherwise, you're going to waste weeks, months, or years of your life just being dishonest with yourself and with your customers and failing.

Brett:

And people feel that right when you're not totally honest or you're not true to who the brand is or who your product is. People feel that it comes out in some way in the A. Yeah, and it just kills the believability and the effectiveness. And I love how you broke that down. It's very simple, but very powerful is how do you best get attention? How do you best get attention for your product? And then how do you best demonstrate it and allow that story to come to life? And if I'm selling artwork, maybe just a picture of that is all I need, or it's a really unique piece of clothing, maybe just the picture of it is all I need. But if it's workout bands a picture of, that's not interesting, compelling at all. So showing the workout and showing the results and showing all of that super interesting.

And so really comes down to identity and who are you and how do you get their, and who are you are your customers? How do you get their attention? And how do you show why your product is awesome? Anybody? And I know this is a bit of a dangerous follow up because you just said, Hey, don't just chase the best because then you're going to be a second rate version of that. But I do think there's, so there's value in getting inspiration. There's not value in copycatting but anybody you would recommend that we pay attention to that just does this exceedingly well where we should try to be remarketed by them or check out their Facebook ad library or something like that. Anybody that's done doing this really, really well.

Charles:

Yeah, I am. And I get this question all the time. And what I would say is this, find the people in your business that your competitors that are better than you everybody has 'em. Go be a customer. See how they treat you. Go to their website, add things to cart, shop around, take an idea of what their store feels like. If you were to start a grocery store today from scratch, you're going to build off of every time you walked into a grocery store, the Publix or the bonds or the Piggly Wiggly that you're used to going to, right? There's a format, there's a style. So there's an old saying that I love, you're only as good as who you steal from. And the idea of that is you have an identity, but you need an in order to really evolve that. All of the identities that we have is appropriations of inspirations that we've had. So my best advice, and I'm actually not a huge fan of Ad Library, I think it's a wildly overvalued resource because it doesn't give you context. If

Brett:

This was a good ad, a bad ad, or somewhere in between, you just see that it's an ad. That's all you can tell, right?

Charles:

Yeah. If you want context, go be a customer of your competitor. If you were to spend, I was doing this when I was building three 10 nutrition years ago. I literally went to all of our competitors and I bought their products, I joined their communities, and I got to understand the words that people use, the messaging that came across the content types. My Facebook feed was full of ads, my emails were full of ads. I had gone through the experience of the person that I'm trying to reach and understood what they're doing so that I could then go be with them in that stream and just give them an alternative. Coming in, just assuming that you deserve any attention from anyone is well, it's a losing battle. And so my best advice is go out there, experience the world like your consumers, and if something inspires you, you're like, wow, they're just doing better. Go try it. And what I found is when you're inspired by somebody, you'll appropriate what they're doing in a way that feels more like you than hiring whoever they hired to do that job for you. The Harmon Brothers got a million people wanting to work for 'em because of the pooping unicorn at, right?

Brett:

Right. Yeah. They've only worked for Squatty Potty

Charles:

For Squatty Body, right? Yes, they're great, but you can't use that ad format for jeans. Just doesn't work,

Brett:

Right?

Charles:

So that's my number one piece of advice is if you want go out, be your customer, be your own customer in the world, and see what inspires you, and then just appropriate everything possible and have an allowance for failure. And that's where I get some of the best things ever is somebody built a better mouse trap, I'm going to build it my way. And some of those ads will last forever. I've got ads that were like that where, and in my women's clothing business, I literally just got ads from Victoria's Secret that I was like, this is amazing. I built a version of that ad and it spent nearly 2 million in the last year.

Brett:

Wow. Wow.

Charles:

Great. I'm not reinventing the wheel, wasting all the money. Make one more analogy and we can move on. Cause I know you love analogies, and this is one of my favorite, McDonald's is the only fast food restaurant that researches locations, burger King and and everybody else puts them selves across the street from McDonald.

Brett:

Ha

Charles:

Just be Burger King. Ridiculously successful,

Brett:

Right? And Walmart, or, I mean, McDonald's has got the cash and they've got the method and they're more of a real estate business than anything else. A lot of people don't know that if you watch the movie The Founder, that their McDonald's is more about real estate than anything else. So makes sense that Burger King and the others just, yeah, go where McDonald's is. Yeah, I love it. Awesome. So yeah, let's such good stuff. We could drill into any of that and have a blast, but let's transition a little bit. So let's talk Facebook or let's talk TikTok. So what are some of your thoughts on the short term near term for TikTok, both organic and on the ad side?

Charles:

I love that. I think it's a really interesting place. What I can say with TikTok and with Facebook, YouTube, any optimized CPM platform, I want to set this table here real quick. And remember that ads are nothing other than organic content that you pay for people to see and they run on the same algorithm. So if something does well organically at earning attention, it will almost assuredly do well as paid media, it earning attention. Now, whether or not that attention that you earn is monetizable is something completely different. But with that being said, TikTok is the most aggressive content suggestion engine we've ever seen. And if

Brett:

You use TikTok and what does that mean? It's the most aggressive content suggestion engine.

Charles:

Yeah. So if you were to use TikTok for an hour or two and just swipe on things that you don't like and the things that you do, you're going to only have a feed full of things that you enjoy and you can program tos. I've done it once where I was working with a business and what we did was we made a dummy TikTok account and we only went through all of their competitor and liked and watched all the videos, all their competitors. Now whenever they open up TikTok, it's merely just an inspiration machine. And so the point of that is it's extraordinarily personalized. It knows what you're watching and wants to show you more content like that with a million different data points that they're looking at. And I think that that is something that no other platform can do because it's not really in the nature of that platform to do it.

YouTube rabbit holes we all know about that works on a slightly different thing. YouTube Rabbit Holes is more about the topic of the conversation than maybe the style of the delivery, the keywords and all of that stuff, which is great. And then in Facebook they show you content based on what you like to see based on all the websites you've been to and all the places that you've been and where you spent money that time of year or what you're in the market for. Chat, TikTok is very much about, this is what gets somebody to spend five seconds of their eyeball here. We're going to give you that as much as possible. And with that in mind, I don't think any other platform will be fundamentally able to make TikTok obsolete because it would be out of their core user experience to do so. I think that probably the closest we will get is Instagram reels or maybe even Facebook reels that are inside the app because those don't have an identity as much yet other than trying to be TikTok. When it comes to TikTok ads I think that if you hit on creative that does well, you can do exceptionally well with it. There is a huge issue with TikTok or a difference between TikTok and Facebook. There are two huge differences. Number one, a good Facebook ad can run for years. Anybody that says insists that ad fatigue is real misinformation. I've had ads that have run for 2, 3 40 years that I've ads that I've built four, five years ago that every now and again I still see in my feet

That stuff happened. The longevity of a Facebook ad is basically forever. And same with YouTube,

Brett:

TikTok, same with YouTube, same, we've got YouTube ads we've run for years and spent millions of dollars on the same ad and just keeps cranking.

Charles:

My buddy Sean Cannell from Think Media, he's got an affiliate video of Father's Day gifts. And every year, every year in June he makes, he gets an extra couple million views and a big check. It just happens. Like Clark, he made that thing in like 2013 or something like that. It just happens. It's Evergreen,

Brett:

<laugh>,

Charles:

TikTok though, maybe two weeks. That's all the ever long, that's all however long it'll work because TikTok is also part of that suggestion engine is also new. The aspect of new as a value point is extremely high. Now, you could maybe run something again in a couple months and it'll work rate, but it means that the churn rate of content is massive and that churn rate has far more to do with time than with money could. That ad might last for two weeks. If you're spending 50 bucks a day, it might allow us for two weeks if you're spending 20,000 a day. So there's a big issue there. And being able to consistently deliver that quality of content that's monetizable. And the other side of TikTok ads is it'll never be as smart as Facebook, Google or Facebook or Google. And it has far more to do with the fact that Facebook and Google have a leg up of over a decade of communication and location and transactional data. So I think there are places where businesses can leverage TikTok is their unfair advantage in the marketplace to scale. I think ultimately though there are few scenarios where TikTok is an evergreen isolated growth and acquisition channel at scale, it just won't work because yeah,

Brett:

Totally makes sense.

Charles:

Other places are better at acquiring cash flow in a more stable fashion. So it's just too hyperbolic and honestly just not smart enough and it can never catch up because as fast as it gets better, everything else is getting better faster.

Brett:

Right. Totally makes sense. Love it. We could drill into that too, but we were, we're running out of time, so I want to transition and talk AI for just a minute. So how are you using chat, G P T or other AI to help give you superpowers or give you an edge or help make your marketing better?

Charles:

Yeah, I love it. I mean, chat, G P t's the latest version of the ai. And to be fair, I've been using Facebook's version of that for years. It's called Dynamic Creative. And I don't actually don't spend a single penny on Facebook without having ads tested and proven and created through Dynamic Creative, which is Facebook's version of chat G P T. And so that's a superpower in that I literally will only ever test in that environment. I never having a single account with a single penny spent on anything that's not developed that way. And for Facebook, I use something called the 3 22 Method, which is three creatives, two headlines, two sets of copy, and we can dive into that forever. But the point of is that's giving the AI the best opportunity to create the best user experience so that ultimately I'm buying the lowest priced attention for the highest quality user in targeting the individuals in the most sustainable way to attract the most consistent type of attention.

And from then, it's my business model that monetizes it. Using tools like Chachi PT to handle the copy side of things, I think is something a lot of people are using. As a very light end, I, I'm using Chachi PT to develop YouTube titles and email headlines to see what gets good open rates and checking against IQ keyword scores. And to be fair, those are also really, really great for my Facebook ad. If this a gets lot of clicks on YouTube and a great email open rate, well you better believe when I've dropped that on a Facebook ad, it's going to crush. Absolutely. I think it's also really important to use chat G P t though as a way of understanding how consumers behave. So you can put in there like give 50 reasons why somebody has this pain point and use that to understand concepts in market research.

My friend Sarah Levenger has a great way that she's using chat GP to effectively extract psychological data points on users and using that as a tool, something like that. Yeah. So what she's doing is she's taking in, for instance, say all the comments from Facebook, from an Instagram, say an Instagram post went viral and it's got 30,000 comments. We can grab all of those comments and all of those words that are being used and throw it into chat G P T. One of the things that I love to do is say, Hey, tell me the 10 most important things in this 5,000 word article or something like that 5,000 character piece. And it'll break it down for you. And if you want to do that in even a more really actionable way is say you've got a 30 minute YouTube video, get yourself a transcription of it, drop into chat G P T and tell me what are the 10 most important things mentioned here.

And then you can literally tell it to tell me more about line item three, four, and five, and then boom, you got a 5,000 word description and mini ebook done like that. And it takes no time at all. The point is you can use all of these things to understand what's going on. What I will say is, what it does that I'm very bullish on and I'm a huge fan of is that it can do the collation of data and the sorting of data at scale in a way that tremendously saves you time. Ultimately, you're still going to have to qualify and use insight to appropriately take what it's giving you and take action on it. Yeah, people know when they're reading something written by ai, I wouldn't use it as a co, I don't think it's going to the best for seo on like I'm just building up, blasting out blog pages.

But it can give you a great insight to be a way to inspire your thought process and to also take huge sums of data and make it very simple to read. And I think that's, at least in the way that I'm using it right now, some of the most powerful things. And Sarah Wenger if you don't know her, you should absolutely check her out. She's, she's a stud. She's the best at consumer psychology, and that's one of the things that she's doing a lot of, and I was really inspired by her with that. But just the idea of using AI to take insight from the written word is tremendous and also inspire different ways of thinking and a way that gets you out of your own head. I think those are some of the most important things. Yeah, I love it so much. You can use it, Laura.

Brett:

And I think it really comes down to a lot of what you described comes down to two things, asking the AI better questions. You only get good results if you ask good questions and if you give it good data, like, Hey, look at all these comments. Tell me the top 10 takeaways. But then being able to quantify and qualify and say, yeah, but it's really these things, right? Or This doesn't really make sense, but this does. Yeah. So yeah, I love it, man. I'm super excited. We're using it as a team and really just playing around with it. I think that's a key too. Just play around with it and see what you'll learn and new ideas will be sparked as you go. So let's do this. Charles, I know we got a hard stop in just a couple minutes. I know you're very active on TikTok. You're a great follow on TikTok. Good follow on Twitter, LinkedIn. Where can people connect with you and then out on the socials, and then talk about how they connect with you at Disruptor School?

Charles:

Yeah, so I'm at ct, the disruptor on all socials and at disruptor school on all socials. And you can go to the disruptor school.com to check it out. If you are on a social media account, well, you're not seeing me, let me know and I'll make sure to add it into the flywheel. But I'm literally everywhere, all day, all the time which is sort of my unfair advantage. I love making content and talking to people. I think my wife would wish that I put my phone away a little bit more, but hey, look, that's my life. These are the problems that I have. And

Brett:

Then, dude, you're very good content.

Charles:

Yeah, yeah. Sorry, keep going.

Brett:

Well, I was going to say, yeah, I think there's a bit of a delay as we're recording this. We'll get that cleaned up in the edit, but I've, TikTok being aggressive, you're grateful on TikTok. I'm not an avid TikTok user, so I'll just put that disclaimer out there. But I have been trying to use a little bit more lately. And for whatever reason, TikTok thinks that I love, Tiser because I see you all of the time on TikTok, which is actually great.

Charles:

Well, thank you so much, man. It's nice to know where those 200 views are coming from. It's just breadth all day

Brett:

Long. Tell me it's You're welcome, huh?

Charles:

I love it. I'll take <laugh>.

Brett:

That's awesome, man. So I'll link to everything. I'll link to your socials, we'll link to the Disruptor school, so definitely check it out. And Charles Tichenor, ladies and gentlemen, man, you crushed it. Thank you so much. I can't wait to schedule another one because there was so many things that we didn't dive into. Oh, yeah. Need to. So round two is coming, buddy.

Charles:

I would love it. And anybody watching this and listening an, anybody listening to this, if you have questions on any of this stuff, right back to Brett. And maybe we can just do another, maybe a mail bag, show something, dive in deep. We went an inch deep, a mile wide today. Let's go a mile deep and just make it really fun.

Brett:

Do a little, ask me anything. Yeah, fire those questions away. Send them my way. And then we can get Charles back in for round two. Charles. Thanks, buddy. I know you got a split, but really appreciate the time. It's a ton of fun, man.

Charles:

All right. Thank you very much, man. I appreciate it.

Brett:

And as always, thank you for tuning in. Let us know what you like to hear more of or less of on the show. And yes, if you got questions for Charles firing my way or connect with him on the socials. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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