219: Answer Your Customer’s Problems with Robert Brill

Robert Brill, CEO of Brill Media, is driven by a passion for business growth and personal development. His entrepreneurial journey is fueled by a desire for success and resilience, inspired by his modest upbringing, relentless drive to improve, and love for the “game” of business.

We learn about Robert’s journey from four failed businesses to founding Brill Media, where he excels in media buying and digital advertising. Robert thoroughly explains his two versions of the Meta Framework, which involves mining niche problem statements, testing to find the most relevant ones, turning them into solutions, and combining them with matching imagery. He also highlights the integration of AI to enhance marketing effectiveness and the importance of persistent testing and adaptation in advertising strategies.

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Answer Your Customer’s Problems with Robert Brill

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast and my guest today is Robert Brill, the CEO of Brill Media, an expert in media buying in the areas of connected TV, streaming services, digital audio, digital out of home, display, search, and social media. Robert, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Steve. Appreciate it.

So, let’s start with your entrepreneurial journey through, I hate to say that four failed businesses, but finally founding and growing a three times fortune, five times the business. That’s a real American success story, isn’t it?

Thanks. Yeah. So, when I started Brill Media, I started four different companies. One was an influencer marketing company. One was me being the influencer in the food space. One was a consulting firm and one was a social media company. And I didn’t have any real level of expertise in any of those. At that moment in time, I had spent about 10 years in the advertising business. And the thing I was the best at, my zone of genius, as it were, was media buying, running ads for corporations Sony, Disney, Capcom, Bacardi, Toshiba, PetSmart, etc. ConocoPhillips, fortune 5 company.

And it took me a few years to realize that the thing I need to be doing is the thing that I do the best, which is media buying and media buying is another way of saying advertising. Share on X

Advertising is when you spend money to deliver your message. So, if you’re spending money with Facebook or Hulu or X or LinkedIn or TikTok or Google search, you’re advertising. If you’re not advertising, it means you’re posting on social media, you’re doing search engine optimization, whatever the case might be. I started a bunch of companies and the thing that was the best for me is media buying. And once I really focused on media buying, I fundamentally realized that where I need to focus my time and energy is where I have the most competitive advantage. I have an unfair advantage because I’ve been doing this for so long for so many big companies. And once I really focused on that, things started to fall into place. It was never easy. None of this is actually really easy. But I think what’s interesting is when you determine that you’re going to do something, then even the problems you have, the solutions start to come to those problems. And for the longest time, I tried not to deal with the problems of going into the media buying business, which is, I didn’t know how to sell, and financial risk is a big thing. It’s a big part of the business. So I didn’t want to deal with that. And as a result, I put it off. And when I started to deal with those challenges, solutions came into focus.

Yeah, that is so true. I think it’s Tony Robbins who says that where attention goes, energy flows. So it’s basically, we are infinitely resourceful. If we have to solve a problem, we do. And I think the great entrepreneurs are the ones who are willing to put themselves in harm’s way and into very stressful situations and force those reserves to come to the surface that are latent in all of us. So that’s great. So you’re in this business now. So, tell me, how does this connect to your personal “Why”? What is your personal “Why”? Why are you doing what you’re doing and what drives you as an individual?

Right. My personal “Why” is a few things. Number one, I really enjoy the business. I really enjoy being in business. I really enjoy having opportunities to grow, having opportunities to become a better version of myself. And all of that is going to be really valuable for what motivates me. I had this vision when I was a kid, when I say kid, I mean like in college in 21, 22, 23, et cetera. And I really wanted to make sure that I was successful. And being successful to me meant not having to deal with struggling with money. And not having to struggle with money meant that I had achieved enough and I was valuable enough to organizations that I was worth getting paid a living wage, basically. And I thought, man, how am I gonna actually do that? Because my parents, very modest, lived in an apartment their whole lives, emigrated from Europe, Romania specifically. The luck of the draw, they never bought a home, et cetera. My dad was a civil engineer. My mom worked in the dental space, working places that made crowns and bridges for teeth and all that stuff. I was like, man, there’s no like fallback for me. There’s no position where I’m gonna inherit anything and it’s gonna cover me. It’s like, I have to do this. And so I think that grit and tenacity and/or fear and/or holy cow, there’s no safety net, whatever you want to call it, all of that wrapped into this concept of, I’ve got to like figure out a way to make it work. And as I think about why I became an entrepreneur, I’ve always just wanted to be better. Like I never would have had the title of CEO, had I not created one for myself.

And I like the game. The game is fun. Even when I'm losing, the game is interesting. Share on X

I hate losing, but we all lose sometimes. And it forces you to become better. And it’s like a mindset thing, right? Like either the loss or the fail is a reflection of who I am, or the loss or the failure is a reflection of what I need to learn to build muscle to become better. So I choose to see the world that way.

Love it. Yeah, I find this fascinating. I didn’t realize your parents were from Romania. We actually moved from Hungary over here.

Ah, very close.

Next door neighbors, as it turns out.

Just interestingly, my parents grew up in, or my mom, my dad grew up in Bucharest. They met here, not in Romania. They grew up in a town called Hermannstadt, which is a Sibiu. And apparently in over the course of hundreds of years. Sometimes it was part of Hungary, sometimes it was part of Romania, sometimes it was part of like the Iron Curtain with Russia. So you have like this amalgam of different languages. And Hungarian, I think my grandma, who just passed away, she spoke Hungarian a little bit.  She was a polyglot. She spoke English, Hungarian, German, Romanian, four or five languages.

Yeah, that’s insane. Lots of talent in this part of the world. Out of necessity. So again, necessity is the mother of invention. The harder the circumstances, the more resourceful the people are. So, let’s switch gears here and let’s talk about the framework that you developed with Brill Media or maybe even before. This is a podcast of frameworks and I was very excited when you told me about the meta framework. Tell me what the meta framework is all about and how do you use to buy media and target your advertising route.

Yeah, so I’ll tell you the version 1.0 and then I’ll tell you the version 2.0 because there’s a version 2.0 since the last talk. The version 1.0, which is still valuable and is still in deployment, three steps. On meta, you want to target broad audiences, age, gender, and location. So, step one, target broad audiences. Reason for that is meta is really good at finding who your best customers are. And the more limitations you put on meta, the less likely it’ll perform effectively for most campaigns, especially if your campaign needs to be always on, like you’re going to need sales tomorrow and then five months from now, then 12 months from now, et cetera. So you want to train meta’s machine learning algorithm to find who your best customers are. First step on that, broad targeting age, gender, and location. You don’t want to do narrow targeting. So narrow targeting is interest targeting, keyword targeting, lookalike targeting, or retargeting, serving ads to people who recently went to your site. The reason for that is because when you do the broad targeting, Meta does all that for you. And I’ll give you an example of how that works. If you’re selling shoes, for example, if a user goes to a competing website and puts a shoe in the cart and abandons cart, then Meta will know that and serve your shoe brand instead. So, it does all that stuff for you. It’s really powerful. So, the first step, broad targeting. The second step is a creative testing framework. And the creative testing framework is this idea that you’re going to create five ads per month. And five ads per month are going to be comprised of a headline at the bottom, image or video in the middle, and then primary text at the top. Those five ads, you’re going to disassemble them and combine them in all the different possible combinations, which will yield 125 possible ad variations. You’re not going to run 125 ads, that would be too expensive and take too much time. Instead, you’re going to use control and variable testing. You’re going to use science powered by Meta’s algorithm to identify which are the top ads out of the 125. So in a day, you’re going to go from 125 ads down to 20. And then for the next two to three weeks, you’re going to optimize to leads and sales or sales, depending on what your business needs. And you’re gonna use dynamic creative. And then you’re gonna basically run those ads until one ad emerges as the winner. So you went in one month from, you’ve created five ads, you had 125 possible variations, and you know which one ad is your all-star ad. And you cycle through this process monthly. So that’s the process. And the third step is the result of it. You understand the products, services, audiences, and discounts that resonate for your customers right now. So that’s the version 1.0 of this process.

Wow. That’s already complicated enough. What is the last one? Products, services.

Offers, discounts. Okay. So that’s the version 1.0. Now, the version 2.0 is actually a lot easier. So the version 2.0 of this process starts with understanding who your customers are. And the way you understand who your customers are is you look for problem statements. Problem statements are the things that people say when they’re in their heart and soul, they just feel dissatisfied with something and they need a solution. So how do you get problem statements? You get problem statements by listening to your customer service calls, listening to your sales calls, or going to social media to identify what people are saying about businesses like yours in the industry and the problems that they’re facing. So whether you’re talking about interior design, or shoes, or marketing, podcasting, whatever the case is, what are the problems that people communicate about that? And then you’d run $25 tests to understand which of the problem statements are the most intense for your customers. And you look at data on meta to understand that. And then you cycle through a bunch of tests and you start to understand the problems, the solutions and the imagery that works really well to compel your people to spend money with you. You never stop testing. And this is a lot simpler of a test as well because it’s more understandable. It’s like people understand what problem statements are. It’s just easier. And the result of that is you lower lead costs. You lower the cost to acquire a customer because you’re telling people exactly the problems that they’re facing. And the best part about it is you’re not waiting for your customers to tell you what their problems are. Because customers don’t often know what their problems are. And they aren’t usually able to express what their problems are in a way that’s meaningful for your business. So instead of doing a survey, you can go to social media where you have people who voluntarily actually tell you what’s in their heart and soul, the problems that they’re facing in language that you can use for your ads. And that’s gonna far more effectively resonate.

So where do you find them? Where on social media do you find these problems?

Reddit, X, LinkedIn, you go to ChatGPT. So for example, for digital marketing, right? We’re doing this for ourselves. I’ll give you one problem statement I have up. One problem statement that really resonates is, I need a partner who can handle big campaigns so we can target larger clients confidently. Another one that does really well, the biggest problems I see in my agency are due to people. This impacts growth. Remember we’re targeting, so I didn’t say this, but we’re targeting agencies. We’re a white label advertising partner for agencies. They do the creative work, we do the ad buying. So I’m saying, what are the problems that agencies have in order to grow? And I can say all kinds of things. What I say is grow your client relationships and earn more revenue without having to deal with staff. But that doesn’t sound as interesting as the biggest problems I see in my agency are due to people this impacts growth.

That’s fascinating. So if you’re talking about the Meta framework 2.0, you mentioned the three steps to understand the customers, the mind, the problem statements, and number two is around the $25 test to find the most instance problem statement. So, is this the same way as you do in 1.0 that you create five variations and then 125 permutations and then you narrow it down or that’s a different approach?

No, it’s a different approach. So what you’re gonna do with your ads on the version 2.0 is you’re going to create 10, 20, 30 different problem statements. You run them as ads, you run them as traffic campaigns, so you’re getting a lower cost per thousand impressions, so the cost for the impressions is lower, and you’re looking for at least a 1% click-through rate and a 50 cent cost per click. There’s variation to that, but that’s a good rule of thumb. And you’re running about 400 impressions. And when you’re doing that, you can say, like, the ones that have a very low click-through rate just aren’t that interesting to your audience. The ones that have a higher click-through rate are interesting to your audience. And so then, and you’re running like I said, 10, 20, 30 different ads. It might cost more or less than $25 depending on the situation. And you’re constantly cycling through this. So then when you have a problem statement, like the one that’s the biggest problem I see in my agency are due to people, this impacts growth, then you test problem solution statements, which are your headline, like scaling up where your media buying crew, expert media buying solutions without the staffing hassles. Right. So, now I presented the problem, I need to find an image that works, and then I have a headline that solves the problem.

Yeah.

And then you take all the language and you put it into your landing page. Because now you don’t need to write marketing copy, it’s been written for you, because you know what resonates with people. And then you cycle through a variety of tests with your landing pages with the same thing. And then you create an offer. What do people who are having staffing hassles, what do they want to see? Well, they may want to see a breakdown of all the money you save by not hiring a media buying partner, for example.

Yeah, this is fascinating. So obviously, you’re a very systematic thinker, and I love how you put this together. And I particularly like the contrast of the problem statement and flipping it into a solution statement. And then you basically test your problem statements before you flip them. So what are the most powerful problem statements? Find the solution statements, test that as well. So it’s two levels of testing. And then you add the imagery, which is the third dimension to it. And then you rinse and repeat. So every month you do the same thing?

No, every day you do the same thing.

Wow. So these ads have a short shelf life, but they need to be refreshed all the time?

No, no. So the testing, you’re doing the test continuously. You never stop testing. As your funnel, as your purchase process gets more refined, you don’t have to maybe test as often, but you should continue testing. But this is a rapid-fire way to get started on any business really quickly. But the ads that you build have the possibility to grow your business and to have the possibility to remain ads that are gonna be relevant for you for years. So, the ads are gonna be there, but you’re constantly testing more and different.

So, you keep testing, you don’t sit on your laurels, even if the ad is working well, you keep finding alternative.

More ads, different ads, and then you test. So like you take your best ads and then you continue to test them. So, there’s a little bit of a combination of version one in there as well, where once you know your best ads and you let them compete, who’s gonna be the best? And then you still do the broad targeting, right? So there’s a little bit of nuance there. So basically what we’ve done with this, if we’re doing this at, we’re like a $900 sprint, basically, the idea is conduct a bunch of sprint tests, interview your audiences, or listen to your sales calls, or listen to customer service, anything that you have, and or go into social media and get the problem statements, or go to AI and get the problem statements, run those as ads, and at the end of the $900 sprint, like the effort that we do for you, you will get at least one complete ad that you know works, that you know resonates, and then you’ll get a plan of action for how to scale that even further.

Okay. You also talk a lot about how does AI get for marketing effectiveness. So is this the main use of AI for you to find those problem statements?

No, it’s not the main use. It’s one of many uses. So here’s a few ways that we use AI in this process, in general processes. So number one, in this, we’re going to use AI and we’re going to say, pretend you’re a market researcher, act as a market researcher, and identify the problems that types of people will have. Marketing agencies who need a white-label media buying firm. Identify the problems that those people have and state the problem as an I wish or I need statement. I wish white label media buying companies did X, you know, that type of thing. That’s one way. But I’ll say that Reddit or general social media does better than AI in the tests that we’ve run. But that’s actually not true that we have other clients, like I’m thinking about our business. I know how to structure language in our business that makes it far more compelling. But when I do it for other clients, I find that AI does really well. We’re doing an interior design firm right now and AI is kind of killing it right now. Another use case for AI, generally writing ads. We have a client right now that is, they sell printed homes, but it’s for like the backyard. It’s not actual, what’s it called? Granny flat or ADU. There’s no plumbing in it. It’s just like if you want like-

Like a shed.

A shed, a she shed, a man cave, all those things, they’re selling that. So we use AI for that and that does better than ads that humans write on Google search. So we have a chat bot that we created or a chat agent that we developed on top of ChatGPT, which understands copywriting fundamentals, understands the type of ad specs that we need and understands like how to scrape websites to understand how an advertiser talks about itself. And we use that to do copywriting and it’s discoverable on ChatGPT, the marketplace on ChatGPT. Just search, probably you could search for Brill Media and you can find that copywriting bot.

Wow. That’s crazy. So your copywriting bot is public?

Yeah, it is public. Absolutely. I’m happy to share a link to it.

Wow. So why would you share it publicly?

I don’t know. Why not?

You implement faster than other people can copy you?

I’m not worried about people copying me.

That is pretty cool.

Yeah. If you go to, if you search for Brillmedia.co, you can find it’s called Copywriter Pro.

Okay, I will definitely search it. Alright, so you have the system, how to iterate the advertising, how to find the problem statements, how to flip them around into solution statement and then test them, and then test the image. You put together the ads, you refresh it all the time, you use AI to write copy for you, to do market research for you. That is pretty crazy. So it sounds a little bit overwhelming to be honest. It’s supposed to, I guess.

By design.

Because it’s a complex topic and it took you a couple of decades to figure it out. So, if someone would like to learn from you or hire you or figure out what you do, where should they go for more information?

Yeah, go to brillmedia.co. Reach out to us if you’re interested in the $900 print testing. That’s a good first engagement for us, and we’re happy to do that. It takes about two weeks. You can get your first amazing ad in two weeks, and you’re gonna start to understand what customers want from you. And so we’re happy to get started on that.

Wow, that is amazing. Well, Robert Brill, the CEO of Brill Media, expert in media buying and actually creating advertisements that work as well. So, thanks for coming to the show. And for those of you out there listening, immediately subscribe because this is pure gold that you get from people like Robert and you don’t want to miss any episodes in the future. Thanks for coming and thanks for listening.

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