Supercharge Your Marketing With Amazing Ads

Pat Grady is the Founder of Amazing Ads, an international advertising agency focusing on PPC management and optimization on Amazon, Walmart, Target, Google Ads, YouTube, and other mainline advertising platforms. He also founded print-on-demand companies RhinoFish Media, Just So Posh, and Regalo Marketing, which are involved in wholesale, retail, and print preview and visualization technology. Pat has a reputation of driving results with analytical skills focused on optimization problem solving, tracking, attribution, and tool-building.

Sal Conca is the CEO of Amazing Ads, with 20+ years of expertise in digital marketing and video development for performance-based advertising. He is an inbound marketing specialist who helps businesses build, grow, and solidify their potential by creating content and marketing campaigns that speak to their customers and core audiences at every step of the customer journey. Sal started his career as an affiliate relationship specialist and expanded his skill set to plan and manage integrated marketing campaigns, including Google Ads, YouTube, email marketing, content marketing, and social media. He is also an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University, where he teaches a comprehensive Digital Marketing course in their MBA program.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [02:12] Pat Grady and Sal Conca share their professional backgrounds in marketing
• [04:25] The philosophy behind the start of Amazing Ads
• [07:07] Video marketing and targeted advertising
• [11:06] Techniques for hiring and training marketing talent
• [13:31] Using data and analytics for effective advertising
• [17:45] What’s the value of working with an advertising agency?
• [21:08] Sal and Pat talk about Amazing Ads’ ideal client
• [26:48] Amazing Ads’ business model and services

In this episode…

In today’s digital age, marketing is more critical than ever for the success of any ecommerce business. However, executing effective marketing strategies without the proper expertise can be challenging — and that’s where a professional marketing agency comes in.

Marketing experts Pat Grady and Sal Conca say that by partnering with marketing agencies, you gain a wealth of knowledge and experience to help you develop dynamic strategies that propel your brand forward. Whether it’s video marketing, content marketing, targeted marketing, or PPC management and optimization, these professionals can help you navigate the complex world of digital marketing. They share their journey running an internet marketing agency to help ecommerce brands create a comprehensive marketing plan calculated for maximum impact and ROI.

In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Pat Yates sits down with Pat Grady, Founder of Amazing Ads, and Sal Conca, CEO of Amazing Ads, to discuss how ecommerce brands can thrive through marketing. They talk about the philosophy behind the start of Amazing Ads, video and targeted advertising, using data and analytics for effective advertising, and Amazing Ads’ business model.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Pat Grady on LinkedIn
• Pat Grady’s Email: [email protected]
• Sal Conca on LinkedIn
• Sal Conca’s Email: [email protected]
• Amazing Ads
• Windfall Media
• Quiet Light
• Quiet Light Podcast on YouTube
• Joe Valley on LinkedIn
• Pat Yates on LinkedIn
• Mark Daoust on LinkedIn
• Quiet Light Podcast email: [email protected]
• The EXITpreneur’s Playbook: How to Sell Your Online Business for Top Dollar by Reverse Engineering Your Pathway to Success by Joe Valley

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Quiet Light, a brokerage firm that wants to help you successfully sell your online business.

There is no wrong reason for selling your business. However, there is a right time and a right way. The team of leading entrepreneurs at Quiet Light wants to help you discover the right time and strategy for selling your business. They provide trustworthy advice, effective strategies, and honest valuations. So, your Quiet Light advisors aren’t your everyday brokers — they’re your partner and friend through every phase of the exit planning process.

If you’re new to the prospect of buying and selling, Quiet Light is here to support you. Their plethora of top-notch resources will provide everything you need to know about when and how to buy or sell an online business. Quiet Light offers high-quality videos, articles, podcasts, and guides to help you make the best decision for your online business.

Not sure what your business is really worth? No worries. Quiet Light offers a free valuation and marketplace-ready assessment on its website. That’s right — this quick, easy, and free valuation has no strings attached. Knowing the true value of your business has never been easier!

What are you waiting for? Quiet Light offers the best experience, strategies, and advice to make your exit successful. To learn more, go to quietlight.com, email [email protected], or call 800.746.5034 today.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:07

Hey folks, it’s the Quiet Light Podcast where we share relentlessly honest insights, actionable tips, and entrepreneurial stories that will help founders identify and reach their goals.

Pat Yates  0:32

Hello, and welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. Again, I’m Pat Yates. I have a great episode today, we actually have the Quiet Light marketing company of record who works with our group Quiet Light as well as works with me a little bit in the ecomm brands that I have. And they’re just amazing dudes, I tell you what, every time I go in and talk to Pat Grady with Amazing Ads, I just find out something new about marketing, I didn’t know and if not, it’s a great conversation about where your business is going. I think in this day and time everybody gets blown up on their inbox and people who want to do your marketing or send you the email, I saw a bad thing about one of your ads, let us talk to you and tell you how to make it better, it’s a way to lead to be able to go in. This is the lowest-pressure group that I’ve ever seen. Not only are they low pressure, they probably add more value in other areas, they don’t bill by talking to you about where your marketing can be some philosophies. We actually had them work with my wife on a brand where they started a brand new to be able to get the right reviews go slowly to make sure you’re doing the right things. I think their advice they can give you as always actionable. And these guys are always willing to help with marketing. Amazing Ads itself pretty much covers about anything that you could market to. So whether it’s just one segment of your company or something else, I think these guys can really help you. So I’m really excited to talk to Sal and Pat about this today. So let’s get right to it. Sal and Pat, welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. It’s awesome to have you here today.

Pat Grady  1:51

Thank you.

Sal Conca  1:52

Glad to be here.

Pat Yates  1:53

Yeah, Pat, I’ll start with you. I know that you have a lot of people that you work with, especially one of our best buyers, Mike Nunez, who I talked to passionately about your business. I want to talk today about Amazing Ads, you have just an unbelievable business. I think people always go in and out of agencies. But before we do that, why don’t you guys introduce yourselves, Pat, if you want to go first where you’re from, and maybe a little bit of background.

Pat Grady  2:12

All right. Well, I grew up in Florida. I live in Florida now. But in between my two Florida stops. I was in the Navy, I lived all around the country. I’ve traveled throughout Europe quite a bit. I work for a couple of European companies. I live at the beach now, which has always been a lifelong goal of mine. When I wake up in the morning, I can see the sun rising over the ocean. I think that’s fantastic. I’ve been doing PPC for more than 20 years, I predate Google ads. In the beginning, I was an affiliate marketer using Overture and Yahoo and some other engines that no longer exist. So I am definitely a PPC dinosaur. Still alive and kicking.

Pat Yates  3:01

That’s really amazing. So you have an unbelievable perspective going all the way back to the very beginning. That’s awesome. So Sal, what about you tell everyone about you?

Sal Conca  3:07

Yeah, so thanks again for letting me be here. I’ve got 20-plus years in digital marketing. I’ve been doing this for a long time too. Pat and I have developed a great relationship over the years, we met through the affiliate industry, which both of us still hold very near and dear to our hearts, we’ve got a lot of relationships in the affiliate space that we continue to have today with our business and so I have a background in music, I have a love for food, I have a background in film and video, as well. So and then marketing I’ve been doing forever. I have an MBA in marketing that I don’t mention very often. But I also teach MBA students in marketing as well now, serendipitously, two of my students work for us at Amazing Ads. And so it’s been a great way to come full circle in my career and everything like that.

Pat Yates  3:59

Education is a great background in my family. My mother I’ve talked about many times on here was a principal and teacher as well. My wife retired from the school system, it’s amazing people that sink themselves in education. That’s really awesome. Pat, you and I spent a lot of time together in the last year talking about marketing philosophy, getting new clients over through Quiet Light to need to improve those things. Tell us a little bit about the beginning of Amazing Ads and what your philosophy was behind the company.

Pat Grady  4:25

Yeah, I guess, about seven years ago, I just saw marketplaces emerging onto the ecosystem. And I saw a lot of people moving that way. And I’ve always been an optimizer of PPC. I consider myself not a marketing genius, like someone who would be really creative and create ads that are just stunning. I’m more of a spreadsheet analytical numbers guy and that optimization techniques, a lot of the things that I cut my teeth on in the affiliate marketing world and then on Google ads, they cross over onto multiple marketplaces, when you’re talking about using bids instead of budget automation, rules-based systems, budget allocation goals like row as an a cause and just making sure that you always eliminate wasted spend. I always think many of our clients, they have an overall goal of “I want to spend X and sell Y.” That means if I waste $1, somewhere, I kind of necessarily have to take it from someplace productive to waste it. So we think of a wasted dollar as our enemy. And we just have to go turn over every stone and every leaf and look for wasted dollars. And today, there are so many smart people competing against us, right, not only from inside of the United States, but so many direct sellers, from China, from Asia, from Mexico, and they have a different cost of living a different cost structure and perhaps a different supply chain perspective, if you are not relentlessly optimizing your advertising, you will lose. So we have a saying around here to starve the losers and feed the winners. And you need to really be cold about things like that and say like, I can’t waste advertising dollars. If I waste $1 someplace, I take it from someplace that’s a winner. And that’s nonsense, right? So I guess that’s the key, no matter what we do video advertising, upper-funnel, everything has to be measured and excruciatingly dissected to figure out how we can get more for less.

Pat Yates  6:47

That’s a great way to approach it. Sal, I know that sometimes companies can get too metric-driven, you know, I think that Pat does a great job looking at those spreadsheets, but he’s got such great instincts. That’s one thing I’ve found from him. So as you guys have evolved, Sal I know you work on some different areas in there. What are some of the top areas that you’re working on right now in Amazing Ads? How can pay off for clients?

Sal Conca  7:07

Yeah, I think that’s one of the things and you know, I’ve been working with Pat for the last two years, but that was through another agency. And recently this year, we merged so the two agencies have now come together. The former agency was Windfall Media, we’re now fully merged as Amazing Ads, and the Windfall Media side, we were engaged in a lot of like top of funnel activities, we’re on the soft skills, right? I have a background in performance. But I also have this love for video and audience marketing and all that type of stuff. So we’re doing a lot on YouTube and connected TV platforms like Mountain. So with that, we’re now finding ways to target programmatic audiences creating contextual advertising that speaks directly to a person. If you’ve ever been on YouTube, we’ve all seen those ads, the pre roll ads, you’re on, skip this ad and all that stuff, right? We run a lot of those skippable In Stream Ads. Have you ever seen one that feels like it’s just speaking directly to you? And you sit there and wonder, how did they know that about me? Right? Well, the guys like us, we know that stuff about you. Right? And that you specifically Pat Yates, but we know your persona, and who you are based on your behaviors and the video you’re about to watch, potentially, or what you’ve done on Google previously. And so we can put an ad right in front of you, that speaks to you directly. And that’s really part of the fun, right? And how many different personas we can carve up and make the creative sing. Because as Google takes more and more of our controls away, the creative is what’s going to stand out more and more. And that hasn’t been the way to write creative agencies. They’ll look at this and say, of course, the creative means something. But in the digital space where performance was King, always and it still should be, we need to rely on the creative more and more as Google and the AI takes over the performance aspects of the digital marketing space.

Pat Yates  8:59

Sal, that’s a great point. I’m gonna stick with you on this question. You and I talked a little bit about video and how things have changed. Like it’s weird because, like Pat, I’ve had the same ecommerce business for over 20 years. So I’ve watched it go from when I was doing basic Google PPC to other things to grow with and, and I think guys like me are sort of jaded a little bit to the old-school way of doing it. And as you get into new video, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, you can really upgrade what you’re doing but what kind of things in video do you think are super important other than YouTube? Are there things out there that people need to be leveraging?

Sal Conca  9:29

Yeah, we’re really in love with the connected TV platforms like a mountain. So imagine you’re watching a show on your big screen and you’re watching it through an app like your Paramount app, or, I mean, I would say Netflix but Netflix is still like a walled garden or Amazon even now has its own video advertising you could run in there. So with platforms like Mountain you’re now buying audiences so as opposed to the old days where you bought TV advertising and I wanted to buy an ad spot at primetime at eight o’clock, on Thursday night when Seinfeld was on, I’m dating myself, or buying a Superbowl ad. Instead, I’m now buying that audience. I’m following the person. So whether they’re watching daytime TV, their favorite show like The Walking Dead, wherever they’re streaming, it doesn’t matter. I’m going after that person, that person based on the data that I have inside platforms like Mountain, which is programmatic advertising, it’s not something totally new. But it used to be only used for display advertising.

Pat Yates  10:28

Right. I agree with that, too. It’s really interesting, because you and I discussed how YouTube TV is becoming an interesting opportunity, even Hulu TV for a lot of people, because that ad follows. And then you get that television semi-television preference, presence, it seems like you’re going national, sometimes you’re not. And it’s not as big a spin. So I think those kind of opportunities are really, really growing. That’s amazing. So Pat, looking back, I mean, you have an amazing team. One of the things I’m sort of amazed at your company, as I work with you, obviously, is how great your team has been, what’s been the key to being able to find some of the best marketing people that you can find in the industry to go out and work for your clients.

Pat Grady  11:06

We almost always hire people that have not run campaigns before, we train them in-house. We have a series of interviews that we have figured out like what makes somebody good at running campaigns, we tend to hire introverts, we look for high IQ people who excel at problem solving. We look for people that have a level of skepticism and curiosity that is well above average. And we just really love it, we’d like to have a background in anything analytical. Running a campaign is not that difficult today, there’s a lot of tools that you have that will help you find keywords and do day parting and just all sorts of research that you can do on competitive terms. What we need is someone who is a really good thinker, right? And so we don’t see your past experience. You don’t have to have managed campaigns for a bunch of years to be good at it, you need to be an analytical problem solver with a penchant for skepticism and testing. Our environment here, Sal and I, we’ve known each other for a long time, as I said, we worked in the affiliate industry. And we have been wrong so many times in our career, that we know that it’s more important to test and challenge the status quo than it is to have a list of best practices that everyone on the team must follow. Best practices are important, no doubt, because in some lessons, we find they are sticky, and they are semi-permanent. And they do apply to most situations. And Amazing Ads, we often hand out bonuses though, to people who tried something different, who found a new way. If I had taught them a certain way to build a campaign, and they tried something new, and their idea works better, we celebrate it, we reward it, we acknowledge it, and we shift to it as our status quo, our new status quo. This is important because the ground that we stand on is constantly moving underneath us. The technology, the pace of change in technology is probably the hardest element of our jobs, keeping up with the things that change where people shop, how they shop, how they behave, how we collect information, how we target them. A minute ago when Sal was talking about videos, I remember when the most important thing was targeting a placement targeting a keyword. Today, when you think about what Google or Amazon or Mountain knows about your location, the sites you’ve been to, in the last 90 days, the things you’ve searched for the videos you’ve consumed, the amount of information they know about the person who is about to see the ad is so much more than the simplistic view of keywords and bids attached to them. This new era of information, they can’t give us the information because of privacy reasons. Another reason they couldn’t give it to us, it would be in such volume that we couldn’t digest it or derive anything actionable from it. Today, the new era is using AI. So if you’re gonna collect this information, Sal was saying how important creative is going to be here. If you think of Google as a big black box, there’s going to be a feedback loop. And that’s half of the puzzle. The other one is what does the creative inspire and who do you aim at? You want the creative elements that are going to become more important than ever, agencies in the future will work on those two things, improving the feedback loop and improving the creatives. Why is the feedback loop so important? If Google knows all of the searches you’ve done, they know exactly where you’re standing right now, because of your phone. You’re logged into their Google Maps and Gmail all the time. And they know your history, the targeting that we used to use, the momentary keyword that I’m bidding on is such a microscopically small picture of the overall targeting mechanism that we’re doing. So with a good feedback loop, if you sold somebody something, sold them something else, and then they registered and maybe they subscribe to one of your lists or something, you actually know a lot more about them than that one purchase, assign different values to that, pump it back in and tell the AI what that customer is worth to you. Now, when you’ve piled up 500 customers, and each one of them has a profile of activities that they’ve done on the internet, and the value that they are to you. Google’s algorithms are doing 10s of 1000s of correlation studies. And they start to understand the likelihood that someone clicking on the next ad looks like one of your many customers. And remember, these customers are no longer monolithic stereotype images, right? You can’t say today that my customer is this age, and this gender and lives in this city. BS, they’re all over the place, you have multiple personas, and they overlap to a degree that is completely confusing. Give up on that, let the AI figure out thousands of correlation factors and the way that you do that let Google collect the information, they don’t have to hand it to us have a very powerful feedback loop where you’re telling the AI, what each person who transacted with you is worth to your business. This will let the AI find more customers more ad clickers. As you do this, you will watch your ad clicks. If it finds a bot, for instance, they’ll know the behavior of that bot doesn’t look like the profile, we’re looking for it and drives the cost down. If it’s someone that looks a lot like the stable of clients that you’ve acquired already, it’ll drive the costs up. None of that requires human control at all. What it requires is a very sophisticated feedback loop.

Pat Yates  17:03

Yeah, that’s really incredible. The more that I think about that and apply to what you’ve been doing, I mean, you’ve got to have really talented people to be able to mind that information out. There’s no question about that. So Pat, when you have people come in you like them, obviously said about your employees, hiring people that have not necessarily on campaigns before says you can mold them exactly like you want. Is it the same with clients? Do you find clients that will come in and they have this predetermined idea of the problems or the good things about their business? And they don’t allow it to grow well enough by listening to that feedback? Is that really kind of, because I see so many people to get so many calls from marketing agents like every day. So at some point, they distrust it, would you like those customers to come in sort of green and let you bold it is that the idea?

Pat Grady  17:45

You can be green or you can be well on your way, you’re still going to have a lot of inefficiency in your advertising. There’s just so many mistakes that can be made today on so many fronts in so many ways. That if you think about a client, and let’s say they have three years of experience advertising their own product, to me, that’s actually a very narrow view of how the advertising world works. They only know the channels that they had taken the risk to play in. In an agency, we see so many clients, so many platforms, so many experiments, that our breadth of testing is incredibly larger than any client that walks in the door, even the ones who are sophisticated and advanced. If you’re hiring in-house for a building a team like that, you better be very, very large. Because the advantage of having an agency that has seen all these different problems, Sal mentioned Mountain, as we turn through Mountain and we’ve learned how to optimize this. I’ve mentioned Google ads, Amazon, we do Walmart, Target social media, we run ads at Lowe’s and Home Depot and Wayfair. Any marketplace today, it has parts of its system that influenced the way you optimize the campaigns. Walmart, for instance, has a lack of negative keywords and some minimum bids, you have to find your way through these optimizations. If you don’t have experience with a bunch of clients at that platform, you will not have the same kind of discovery that we have. Yeah, so the idea that we have analytical problem solvers who are skeptics who challenge the status quo, they also we encourage entrepreneurial activities here. We don’t mind if people work outside of our company, they just have to disclose it with us. So we don’t have conflicts with our client. When we start having people like Sal has two Amazon brands that I know of and maybe others I don’t, many of the people on our team sell and have their own brands. They walk the walk right and they have learned a lot of this from working here. It is unusual that we train from within, we also promote from within, of our directors. Most of the people, they work their way up to T-manager, Team Leader, what have you. And when they’re promoted to a director, they have been with us for a couple of years. And they have proven themselves through and through. And again, from an efficiency standpoint, if you have worked on 20 different accounts and found success for each of those different ones, you’re well prepared for the 21st time.

Pat Yates  20:32

Yeah, I tell you what, having worked with you guys, let’s say your team is absolutely amazing. It’s just, I think sometimes it’s really important to have that kind of relationship situation. So Sal, let me ask you this, is there an ideal type of client for video, like I think a lot of people because I know that’s really and I don’t mean to just pigeonhole you on video, if there are other things you want to talk about, but I know that you’re really kind of an expert there. Are people out there that are scared to death of video, maybe they think they won’t look good, or they don’t know how to decide how to do it in a day where you can pick up your cell phone now and do a lot of videos that really work for your business. How do you really approach that? What’s the perfect client for you in that aspect?

Sal Conca  21:08

Yeah, TikTok changed the world and the pandemic changed people’s mindsets of how they perceive video, the rapid growth, right? We’ve seen this over and over again, the adoption rate of new technologies or platforms, right? It happens faster and faster now, with video specifically, I think there’s two kinds of brands, two types of companies, right? There’s the entrepreneur that doesn’t want to like be on their cell phone because they’re like, either I don’t have time for it. I’m not sure what to say I don’t think I look good on camera. All the excuses that they make about that. But for brands, right, Pat, you own brands, I own brands, our clients own brands. There’s not a person per se on camera, some of them will go hire somebody to be their brand ambassador, they’ll hire influencers, they’ll work with platforms like below to create UGC-style videos, right? That type of thing. We could find a spokesperson for a brand, right? I mean, if we think about Nike, right? There’s no face of Nike, it’s all the athletes that use Nike, right? So in the same way, as we think about creating video for platforms, if we’re trying to grow an organic YouTube channel, that’s different than trying to create ads for an ad space like YouTube advertising or Mountain. So like in Mountain, it’s connected TV, this is has to be a tight 15 Second 30 second spot professionally shot it needs to feel and look like a TV ad as opposed to a YouTube ad a TikTok app, a Facebook video ad that feels vertical more UGC style big captions needs to have a hook up front so people understand that what they’re going to communicate or the value they’re going to get from that video. So there’s different tactics for different platforms, right? So it’s very brand-dependent, depending on your goals, the nature of the brand, and what type of personality that brand wants to have in the marketplace.

Pat Yates  23:09

Such a great answer.

Pat Grady  23:10

It’s possible on a very small budget and a very small scale quick story, you know that I mean, printed on demand. This cup has my name and nautical flags. We have a line of mugs that have grandma on there, our crew went to below and they scripted out this video of this young lady talking about this grandma mug, and the story that she tells it chokes me up even thinking about her video. I own the company. I’m pretty cold about things. I use a repressor to make sure I’m efficiently entering the marketplace. I use all kinds of automation and AI to re-price things, but her talking about my grandma mug brings tears to my eyes. It’s so authentic. And that’s intricacy. That’s something that brands crave, right, Sal and his crew told me Pat, just give us a tiny budget for one of the brands I own. Let us make a couple of videos on below, which is a UGC platform where you have a high degree of control over the content curation. I would like to meet the woman in that video someday and let her know that she brings me to tears just thinking about what she said about my grandma mug.

Sal Conca  24:18

And I think the important thing about these things like platforms like below that we talked about, so a lot of people, brands, entrepreneurs, they’ll look at that and go, oh, I can just use below and create a video ad for 100 bucks. But if you don’t put the right creative brief, if you don’t take the time to search for the creator, right, like that was what we brought to the table on that project. It’s like we had to go find the right person. We created the right script, we ideated that entire journey for this person to be able to create that video, right without that creative input. You’re just what you send them up to somebody and hope for the best. Right.

Pat Grady  24:56

That’s ridiculous what he just said right? You just packing up one of your products and sending it out the door for free. And you didn’t vet them, you don’t know their audience, you don’t know their followers, you don’t know the nature of their posts on social media, you haven’t seen the videos that they have produced in the past, you’re just throwing crap against the wall and hoping for the best. That kind of strategy is the opposite of the efficiency I was talking about. You cannot waste money like that today, you cannot just without any regard to research and filtering and vetting right in this scenario, Sal and his team, they came up with a couple of different scenarios and said, What do you think about this script? Let’s go find someone who will do that the amount of pre-work they did before the UGC happened is why the quality coming out the other end is not sausage, it’s sirloin.

Pat Yates  25:49

I think it’s an amazing point. And what’s funny is the way that I hear you all talking I think the overriding thing here, even if you have a new business, and it’s growing, you could spend a lot of money figuring this out before you actually have any success, and go to someone with some knowledge makes a lot more sense. And that sort of leads me to my next question, Pat, my wife, Sandy has a small brand that we were doing as a startup as she retired, just, for her to go out and do this. And we came to you after me being an Amazon seller for like 20 years or 15 years, whatever it’s been that I’ve been on Amazon, and you gave me a whole different perspective how to launch a brand. And some of it really didn’t have to do with monetizing your old side of this. It was how do you start the business the best? How do you make the best presents, go out and get the right reviews? Do you look at it from an analytical standpoint where someone is and then say let’s set a plan that doesn’t necessarily have to involve PPC advertising immediately. But these things can have an impact? How far do you go with that when you’re working people are Amazing Ads?

Pat Grady  26:48

Pretty deep at first, many of the marketplaces they are momentum plays, because of reviews and the nature of the feedback loop and social awareness, you can’t just jump in the deep end of the pool and find success right away, you have to plan for it, you have to take advantage of timing with inventory. Pat in your business, we actually consulted with you on logistics and shipping from overseas. Now, most PPC companies are just going to optimize your campaigns and leave it at that we don’t stop there. Right? We make videos for our clients, we want to make sure if you can trim money out of your logistics pipe and you can sell your product at a little bit lower price, you can compete a lot better, right? Anything that helps us when we want to talk about? Yeah, so it’s just incredible how many different topics we will talk about, even on our marketplace is you know, we actually have two teams advertising and then everything that isn’t marketplace services, and they’ll do everything for you file trademarks, there’ll be with compliance help you get things through import taxes, situation, even we do consulting, sometimes on company structure, financing, I mean, things that most agencies won’t touch. And that’s because we are all entrepreneurs here. We’re just walking it, talking it, living it breathing it, I currently have 12 companies, one of which is Amazing Ads right? I love this stuff. I love talking to our customers, I don’t care if they’re talking about PPC or any other aspect of winning, I want to win.

Sal Conca  28:27

I was gonna say Pat and I were having this conversation the other day, I was like, well, we position this Amazing Ads and we’re this performance marketing agency, but it’s like, boy, we really need some sort of like business consultancy fractional side of the business that gets carved out because we are offering clients so much more we’ve been down this Pat. I’ve had a food brand before, right a CPG food brand in the past like Pat has 12 businesses like we’ve walked and done all this stuff before where you understand exactly what it takes. And so the advertising when somebody comes to us for the advertising, it’s like yes, I can drive traffic to your page all day long. But is your business ready to compete in the marketplace? Do you have a value proposition like the things that make it a business because some people jump in the deep end is Pat put it because they think about shows like Shark Tank are amazing, right? They make the American Dream thrive. But there’s people that watch that without the context sometimes you just think well I need to. I could start that business without any business knowledge and that’s why so many startups fail. We know this — so many startups fail.

Pat Yates  29:40

It does seem like it’s so easy in theory and different in practice. It’s really incredible. I know we again I’m with Sal Conca and Pat Grady with Amazing Ads. Pat, can you tell me a little bit maybe tell the listeners the scope of services and you don’t have to get too deep into it. But if you want to give them an overview of all the things that Amazing Ads can do, because I’m sure I’d leave some things off the list if I gave to them.

Pat Grady  30:02

Yes. Trying to figure out we could just start naming channels, but it’s really the type of person that we serve. So if you’re an ecommerce and you sell and marketplaces easy, we do that. If you are brand building, and you’re doing lead generation, we do that. If you are throwing webinars and events, we do that if you are selling educational services, or info products, if you are on the financial services side legal services side, if you’re selling big products, customized products, we do that. I’m trying to think of the things we don’t do, I guess we don’t do porn or casinos. No problem with that. I just think like, I don’t like regulated industries. That’s one reason, right? But we don’t really put limits like that Pat, people call me and they’ll say I’m trying something different, I have a new idea. And I’m wondering if you’ll engage with me if it requires advertising and promotion, if it requires modeling, if you’re spending money on services to drive your company, and that includes a lot of them, I think that we would want to take a look at your advertising aspects first, by the way, some of the services we provide, we only engage with people on these other services when we are managing their advertising. So there is a limit to what companies can do and be to all people, we cannot be like a listing company on Amazon, we don’t just build lists. If you want to engage with us to optimize every aspect of your ecommerce business, then we can work with you on your listings, if that makes sense. Sal did you have anything else to add there? Who do we not serve? Or who did I leave out of what we do?

Sal Conca  31:54

I think it’s the performance-based aspect of what we do. And also taking risk and going along for the ride. So if we identify businesses that like I said before, that don’t really have their value prop straightened out or other things, there’s a lot of investment there to help somebody build that, like if they’re assuming that the advertising is going to fix their business, it won’t fix the fundamentals of their business, right. So you need to have a fire built and understand there’s a proof of concept we’re the gasoline.

Pat Grady  32:25

I will say, though, that I often tell prospective clients that when I review your PPC, I’m hoping that it’s a train wreck.

Pat Yates  32:35

You want it to come in bad. So you can make it look really good.

Pat Grady  32:38

I mean, there’s so and frankly, if it’s good already, we’re probably better served to just hey, on my 18-point checklist, you’re missing this one thing, go do that have a nice life, whatever agency you’re with, think about what it takes to interact with an agency to grow trust with an agency. I don’t like people who are just changing agencies because it’s a new year or something like that, once you find people that you can communicate and trust in, you should check once in a while to make sure they got all their bases covered. But if someone is largely, serving your needs, you know, that’s why I say I think if I was going to do one thing for our customer, and the results were gonna only marginally change, just stick with who you have, and go do this one change thing. So this does happen. I can remember a very good friend of mine, named Dale, he had me review as PPC and he was like, you’re not gonna take me on as a client. And I was like, no, you don’t need me. And he was like, I always thought that thing you said about turning clients away. I always thought that was BS. I’m the one you’re gonna say no to. I was like, dude, your PPC is perfect. There’s nothing wrong with it. Go look at the other parts of your business, but it does happen. Sal I feel like we’re leaving somebody out.

Sal Conca  33:55

There’s, we do SEO and we do email.

Pat Grady  33:59

The channels. Social media…

Sal Conca  34:02

Outside of advertising. But yeah, so I mean, you know, listen all in if you’re looking for an agency that can understand the full customer journey of a business, we can fill those parts of the journey with different channels and traffic.

Pat Grady  34:17

And how your channels interact with one another right? One advantage to having an agency looking at these things or an agency that is performance-based is they’re looking to maximize the performance of every channel, not just their channel. We don’t look at things in a silo, we look at things holistically and then we break them down into silo goals and budgets, but that is a critical part of who we are for sure.

Pat Yates  34:43

Having watched it from a low level, starting out with a business literally started at zero we threw to you to say hey, how do we do it? And I check my ego at the door and said hey, tell us what we — what I don’t know because maybe there are better ways to do it. You did some giveaways. We did a lot of things to be able to build reviews and all of this stuff tended work so I’ll be honest, I can talk all day about marketing. I know you guys could, but you know, the listeners out there may get bored with us chatting all the time. But so Sal and Pat, tell everyone how they can get in touch with you. Sal if you want to go first give me your contact information where they can find you.

Sal Conca  35:13

Real simple [email protected]. You can visit our website, which is amazingads.com you can find me on LinkedIn at Sal Conca happy to answer any marketing business questions. As always, I give a lot of free advice to people all the time. So anybody that if you just have a question, I’m happy to answer it about Mountain YouTube, etc.

Pat Yates  35:34

Pat, before you do yours, I really think that people need to understand philosophy too, how you talked about it being sort of like a little different. And you guys are entrepreneurs. That’s exactly how Quiet Light is. That’s exactly why I think that it’s such a great thing. So Pat, tell everyone how they can reach out and get in touch with you.

Pat Grady  35:49

Yeah, [email protected]. And if you misspell it, it’ll come to me anyway, Pat, Patrick, Pat to all sorts of versions. Just so you know, Pat, our tagline is dare to be different. So we realized that we are different, hiring people and training them to be who we want, we often don’t have contracts and durations with our clients. We’re very performance oriented. You won’t hear many agencies say the things that we say, here’s an example, hey, your branded traffic, probably not the area you should spend heaviest on. It’s partially incremental, where we really want to compete is on the unbranded traffic, let’s make sure we never mix those two things together. And let’s make sure we put budgets and goals on each of those and treat them like they’re two separate advertising mediums which they are right. A lot of agencies will just ring up the cash on your brand name traffic, and they’re happy to do so and not much more. To us, brand name traffic is like shooting fish in a barrel. It doesn’t take long to build that doesn’t take long to manage it. In any case, the interesting part for us if you’re someone who has type A and likes to win, you’re going to spend most of your time on unbranded traffic acquisition. And that’s what grows a business. That’s what powers it for. And that’s what makes sure in good times and bad that you pull ahead of your competitors.

Pat Yates  37:20

I think the great thing about your agency first of all I was it’s such a calm when I’m talking to your people it’s really everyone we do a meeting there’s six or seven people in there it’s not like one person you’re talking directly to because you’re getting perspectives on everything. I think the job you guys do at Amazing Ads is just incredible. I keep using the word amazing. I can’t use it too many times. But I think if you listeners are out there thinking about your marketing, these guys will take you top to bottom and take and make sure everything is branded the same all these things little things that matter add up but guys, I really appreciate you taking time to come in here. I hope everyone reaches out to you and Amazing Ads and if you need any information on Pat and Sal you can always email me too at [email protected] guys appreciate you taking the time to come in the Quiet Light Podcast.

Pat Grady  38:01

Thank you.

Outro  38:04

Today’s podcast was produced by Rise25 and the Quiet Light content team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcast subject or guest, email us at [email protected]. Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. And subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.