Operators Titans E004: David Herrmann, the Media Buyer’s Media Buyer

Summary

Podcast Summary: Operators Titans E004 – David Herrmann, the Media Buyer’s Media Buyer

Podcast: Marketing Operators
Hosts: Connor Rolain, Connor MacDonald, Cody Plofker
Guest: David Herrmann, Founder of Herrmann Digital
Date: October 16, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode features David Herrmann—often described as "the media buyer’s media buyer." With nearly two decades of experience and over a billion dollars in paid ad spend, Herrmann has managed campaigns for brands ranging from non-profits to D2C giants. In this wide-ranging, candid conversation, he shares his journey, lessons learned from deep industry experience, thoughts on creative strategy in 2025, and tactical advice for marketers at every level.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Herrmann’s Unconventional Approach & Backstory

• Eschewing Personal Branding: Herrmann maintains just a one-page website with only his name and a contact button.
  • "I just don't really want to have a website. For me, it's like I've kind of bucked the trend of trying to have this big personal brand showing off." [00:06]
• Early Career: Started in the music industry, worked for a city chamber of commerce, handled marketing across non-profits, corporates, and D2C brands.
• Grassroots Digital Marketing:
  • Experienced the power of online communities as early as the 2008 recession, collaborating with thought leaders and future company founders (e.g., Honest Company, Tom’s Shoes, viral movements like Kony 2012).

2. Mission & Values

• Against Trend-Chasing: Herrmann rejects the “hustle/Ferrari/Lamborghini” cliché in marketing.
• Mental Health & Realism: Strives to provide solidarity for marketers, advocating transparency about challenges and the isolation of digital marketing work.
  • "I'm just, I've been doing this 17 years and I'm still clicking buttons in Facebook. It's frustrating, lonely...that’s always been my core mission with other marketers." [00:32], [19:32], [20:53]
• Impact via Community: Regularly receives messages from peers expressing how his openness on Twitter has steadied them during stressful times.

3. Turning Points in Career

• Laid Off – A Gift in Disguise: An agency let him go but supported his transition to entrepreneurship, giving him time and resources to start his own business.
  • "They knew that I was unhappy...laid me off, gave me the computer, gave me six months, like, hey, we know you want to do your own thing, so we're actually just going to let you do it." [13:31]
• Client Acquisition: Early clients included local boat slip rentals and nonprofits—emphasizing that strange, high-ticket items (e.g., MRI machines) can also be sold online. [02:04]
• Growth Fueled by Relationships: Built his client base via local outreach before transitioning to nine-figure D2C brands.

4. Marketing Thought Leaders and Learning

• Gary Vaynerchuk’s Conceptual Influence:
  • "It was the only one at the time talking about buying attention online and figuring out how to do these things." [15:50]
• John Loomer’s Technical Training: Purchased Loomer’s Power Editor courses early on for Facebook ads operational know-how. [18:19]
• Scarcity of Early Resources: Digital marketing experts and content were rare in the late-2000s and early-2010s.

5. Building and Scaling Herrmann Digital

• Boutique Over Bloat: Prefers selective client relationships and small teams over scaling into a large agency.
  • Never grew beyond 5 team members, even during COVID-19 traffic surges, emphasizing fit over volume.
  • Experiences “organized chaos”—balancing deep brand immersion with the stress of rapid scaling. [26:40]
• Team Structure: Shares brand management duties with key team members, switching roles to maintain fresh perspective.

6. Changing Industry Demands (2024–2025)

• Media Buyers = Creative Strategists: Today, agencies must handle creative strategy, execution, planning, data analysis, and more—often simultaneously—due to shifting brand demands and compressed budgets.
  • "The media buyer team has started to have to do a lot more of the heavy hitting on the creative side...It just becomes a lot more stressful." [33:04]
• Creative Bottlenecks: Brands now need not just “great” creative but high volume (think 60+ pieces of content, not 8).

7. Effective Team & Agency Structures for Modern Brands

• Multiple Creative Partners: Top brands often juggle 2–3 creative agencies—some paid on percent of ad spend, some on a flat fee—to ensure both volume and experimentation.
  • Proof-of-concept and persona-specific work goes to variable-compensation agencies; reliable evergreen execution to flat-fee partners. [36:33]
• Role of Internal Teams: Internal teams often focus on launches, lightning-fast iterations, and high-value projects, leaving scale and persona testing to agencies.

8. Marketing Mix & Channel Prioritization by Brand Stage

• Early-Stage Brands: Focus on Meta (Facebook) + a dash of Google, then scale up with channels like Applovin as spend grows. [40:58]
• Larger Brands: Typical split is ~60% Meta, ~10% Google, ~10% Applovin, rest split among TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, Connected TV—channel allocations vary by vertical.
• Emergence of Applovin: Applovin has rapidly overtaken platforms like TikTok/Snapchat for many D2C brands, praised for easy scaling and performance.
• Pinterest is for Intent, not Direct Conversion: Used as a top-of-funnel, planning/awareness channel; tracking success by CPC and time-on-site rather than direct conversions.
  • "Pinterest is entirely not a performance channel...It's a walking billboard in front of people that are planning." [45:12]

9. AI in Creative Production

• Small Teams = AI Leverage: For startups, AI-powered creative (Gemini, GPT, etc.) generates weekly assets for rapid iteration, with minimal focus on polish.
  • "Creating a creative agency out of AI, I think for the smaller brands is a no brainer at this point." [39:18]

10. Creative Diversity & Algorithm ‘Untraining’

• Warns Against Sameness: Too much of the same UGC-style creative can overfit Meta/Applovin’s AI; mixing in high-production DSLR, static, stop-motion, and diverse creators is key.
  • "If I look at my motion in my top six tops, top spending ads all look the same. I'm running red flags..." [55:14]
• Sometimes Must ‘Untrain’ the Algorithm: Willingly run divergent creative—at a loss if needed—to break the platform out of its learned groove.

11. Tactical Insights & Quick Takes (Titan 10)

• Desert Island Dashboard Metrics:
  • 1. Time on site
  • 2. Conversion rate
  • 3. CPC
• "Time on site, it can make or break you at the end of the day." [66:04], [66:18]
• Leadership and Business:
  • Most important leadership word: “Accountability” [70:23]
  • Most important business word: “Clean dude.” [70:31]
• Most Overrated Tactic: The “inflated bid cap strategy” on Meta—setting huge budgets with low CPA caps (very risky, breaks easily).
• Most Underrated Tactic: “Patience.” Campaigns need more time to mature, especially as conversion windows lengthen.
  • "We're not in the era anymore of people just spending, spending, spending...We're in the era of waiting, waiting, spending." [72:33]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Authentic Community:
  "You got me off a ledge. I was stressed and I saw your tweet about that and you helped calm me down for the weekend. I'm like, I did my job." — David Herrmann [00:58]
• On Website Minimalism:
  "I'm so in demand, I have to de-optimize the site. No SEO. Hard to find, hard to contact. That's how you're vetting your clients. I like it." — Host [06:44]
• On Creative Fatigue:
  "There's no creative in that...you're just, you know, it's boring. Now you get teams that get excited, pushing them along—like, what can we do?" — David Herrmann [55:14]
• On Iteration and Patience:
  "Having more patience with your ad campaigns...Give it more time. Resist the urge to click a button to turn it off." — David Herrmann [72:34]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Segment | Timestamp | | ---------------------------------------------------- | ---- | | Introduction, Minimal Website Philosophy | 00:00–00:30 | | Strangest Thing Sold Online (MRI Machines) | 02:04–03:55 | | Building Brands with Eclectic Experience | 07:30–13:09 | | Early Influences: Gary Vee, John Loomer | 15:50–19:05 | | Social Media Openness and Mission | 19:07–22:55 | | Launching Herrmann Digital, Boutique Approach | 26:11–36:04 | | Creative Agency Models & Modern Brand Structure | 36:04–38:18 | | Role of AI in Creative for Startups | 38:18–40:23 | | Marketing Mix by Growth Stage | 40:23–45:12 | | Pinterest as Top-of-Funnel, Incrementality | 45:12–49:40 | | Applovin: Creative Porting and Channel Strategy | 49:40–53:49 | | Algorithm Overtraining & Creative Diversity | 55:14–58:56 | | Big Brand Creative – Divergence and Recalibration | 58:56–62:04 | | Titan 10 Quickfire Questions (Metrics, Leadership) | 65:39–73:54 | | The Case for Patience in Modern Paid Media | 72:26–73:54 |

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Conclusion

David Herrmann pulls back the curtain on both the technical and very human realities of modern media buying. His advice is grounded, tactical, and shaped by a career spanning nonprofit work, D2C hypergrowth, and everything in between. Core themes: authenticity, adaptability, and patience. If you're a media buyer, performance marketer, or brand-side operator, this episode offers both tactical playbooks and a north star for staying grounded in a frenetic industry.

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For further tactical breakdowns and access to resources mentioned, visit the Marketing Operators podcast page or follow David Herrmann directly on social media.

Transcript

[Host]

We've got maybe the most famous media.

[Co-host]

Buyer in the world.

[Host]

You have a one page website with your name, contact button, and that's it.

[David Herman]

Why? I just don't really want to have a website. For me, it's like I've kind of bucked the trend of trying to have this big personal brand showing off. What's been happening this year, in my opinion, has been the media buyer team has started to have to do a lot more of the heady hitting on the creative side, acting as the creative strategist, the data analyst, planner, as well as testing and all these things. So it just becomes a lot more stressful. We're not in the era anymore of people just spending, spending, spending. People on the era of waiting, waiting, waiting, spending, spending money. I've been doing this 17 years and I'm still clicking buttons in Facebook. It's frustrating, lonely. I think that's been always my core mission with other marketers because I always felt like there was nobody talking like that. It was always, let's go for the Ferrari. Let's go for. You know, I meet people all the time. They're like, hey, man, like, you got me off a ledge. I was stressed and I saw your tweet about that and you helped calm me down for the weekend. I'm like, I did my job.

[Host]

What is the most underrated tactic right now?

[David Herman]

I would say patience.

[Host]

All right, this is Operators Titans, brought to you by Applovin. Today we're joined by none other than David Herman, founder of Herman Digital. David has been named one of PPC's influencers. You need to follow. He's a paid media extraordinaire with over a billion dollars in managed ad spend. He is a known Dodger fan, car aficionado, a beloved D2C Twitter poster, and he drops a bunch of great knowledge on this episode. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. You've marketed everything from housing for the homeless to products for Christian mega influencers. I'd like to know what is the strangest thing you've ever sold online?

[David Herman]

An MRI machine.

[Host]

A simple answer. All right, give me some backstory here.

[David Herman]

Yeah.

[Guest or Panelist]

What.

[David Herman]

What's the aov? It was me and a previous business that we worked with. Not going to name the name of the company, but it was a previous agency that I worked with and we were tasked with selling an MRI machine. And.

[Host]

And. Sorry, was it. Were there multiple MRI machines or just a single one that you guys.

[David Herman]

The idea was it was just like, hey, can you guys actually sell an MRI machine? Online and, and MRI machine and yeah, my business partner was really good at figuring things out that way. And we sold it through Twitter.

[Host]

What was the rose on that?

[David Herman]

So remember, I don't even think they had the, the revenue on there. It was just like you have to call the person. So he, he was. That was like the biggest, most random thing that we'd ever sold online.

[Host]

Is there a second? I thought you told me when we first met like six or seven years ago, weren't you crushing it with a brand that was doing calendars? Oh, I guess that's not as weird.

[David Herman]

But that was cool.

[Host]

Massive calendar business.

[David Herman]

Yeah, yeah, it was a, it was a family calendar and it was like this massive wall size calendar and just crushed for just a couple weeks out of the year. Right.

[Host]

Like towards the end or the beginning.

[David Herman]

It was like, yeah, six weeks of the year. Yeah. And we also did. He sold a planner that we started selling in August and we ran it through usually February. That was the crux of the business. Every year it was just like, all right, let's fire up in August and turn the business off in February. And that's what it was.

[Host]

I love those businesses. How big was it? Just roughly.

[David Herman]

It got to be really big. And then I think they, you know, when I stopped working with them, I think they started to try to do other things. Tried to figure out how to make it more of a year round business. But I think planners are planners. People only want to. Yeah. 100. Right.

[Co-host]

So.

[David Herman]

But yeah, no, I, you know, I sold trying to think now. Obviously did a lot. I did a lot in nonprofit world. So we sold random weird widgets and things like that. Like you know, fundraisers for like, hey, every time you click this piece of pizza on this image, somebody will donate a dollar to help homeless. Homeless organizations. So we'd have people like literally just clicking it all day because it was a one to one match. Things like that. You know the old school, like pre 2015 Facebook ads. Yeah.

[Host]

Unoptimized e comm landscape. There's just like lots of fun stuff.

[David Herman]

Just, just clicks. Just get as many clicks as humanly possible. Yeah. Widget, you know, not fun, boring widgets. I don't sell a lot of these days. 100%, you know, nobody really wants to try anymore. Yeah, yeah.

[Host]

Well, higher CPMs, more competitive AD markets. There's lots of reasons why, you know, I don't know, you got to have a little more optimized of a business. I think that's a good, good way to get into it. We want to get into some more of the backstory behind you. David, you're the media buyer's media buyer. I totally agree with that statement. We've got maybe the most. These are the notes to the side quote, unquote, famous media buyer in the world.

[David Herman]

I don't know how you feel about that. A lot of.

[Host]

A lot of David Herman Glaze, to start this out, you have a one page website with your name contact button. And that's it.

[Co-host]

Why?

[David Herman]

I just don't have. First off, I don't care. And second, I just don't really want to have a website. So that's Google website. Because I have a domain. Herman, from my email, they're like, we're just gonna create a new website for you. That's what it was. I actually started getting all these like inquiries through it that I didn't even know were happening. And I felt bad because people were like, hey, can we work with you? I just never responded to any of them. And so one day I just went through this whole list. Yeah, I.

[Host]

You're so in demand.

[Guest or Panelist]

I can't even find this website. By the way. I'm on his LinkedIn. I can't get to it.

[David Herman]

Well, it's funny because, like, you know how meta has like their agency reward, you know, awards and it's like, submit your website. And I'm like, I. I messaged our partner up. Do they really think that they're gonna look at my website and think that's gonna help win an award? No. Like, what do you want me to do? I'm not gonna sign up for these awards, you know? Yeah, it's. I don't know, it's. It's never been a thing for me to have a website.

[Host]

It's very like, maybe I'm weird.

[David Herman]

I've got.

[Host]

I've got two things here. One, it. It's almost like you have to. You're so in demand, you have to de. Optimize the site. No SEO. Hard to find, hard to contact. That's how you're vetting your clients. I like it.

[Guest or Panelist]

I did find it, for the record. You found it?

[David Herman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great, isn't it? With. Literally, it's. Yeah, it's awesome.

[Guest or Panelist]

I like the motion the most, I think is what I really like, actually. It's. I could watch this for like 10.

[David Herman]

Minutes and then so like, I had to like repay from my domain and I didn't even know how to do it. I'm like, I had to call like the guy who literally set it up for me.

[Co-host]

He's like.

[David Herman]

I'm like, I don't know. Like, that stuff I just. I hate doing. I won't do it. So I always just pay other people to do it because I just hate it. I'm very not technical on that stuff. That's out of the Internet. So, you know, I use my brain for other things.

[Guest or Panelist]

Yeah.

[Host]

Awesome. Okay, so we'll get a little bit into your backstory here. You didn't have a conventional ad agency route. You, Bachelor of arts. You were cum laude. You were dean's list. You came out of a private university, private Christian university. You are marketing intern for the Minnesota Twins. Now you jump forward a couple years. You're running social media for the Redondo Beach Chamber of Commerce. And now you're doing, like, the biggest nine figure D, 2C businesses. You've dabbled in music videos and video projects, even coordinating events. I'm curious how your eclectic early experiences kind of shape how you approach marketing.

[David Herman]

Yeah, I would say, you know, I was very lucky to be kind of in this online space right when it was getting started. Right. So it was, you know, we were one of the first schools to get Facebook back in 2004, right on the west coast. And we kind of dabbled in the social media space back then. And I was interning in the music industry first and, you know, obviously kind of got a dabble into the community aspect of it. Right. So I've always been at the forefront of just understanding how to speak to people online in whatever community it is. So if it was music or if it was moving into working with city governments and trying to run local campaigns to help things to, you know, selling MRI machines online, like it was. It's always just been this very eclectic mix of marketing, but at the end of the day, it's still the core. It's always the same marketing message offer, you know, coming up with that kind of combination and building it. But yeah, I mean, it's. It's. You know, it's shaped me a lot because I've been through, you know, I was. I was working in digital marketing during the 2008 recession, right. So I watched online when all that was going down and I had to basically work in. I was working in an e commerce business where everybody was basically laid off but me because I was the cheapest marketing employee. They're like, hey, like, figure it out. And I didn't know what to do, so I just naturally went towards building mom blog community. And at the time, we had just built this Like, I just started talking to moms online because I was so bored. I worked at a cubicle in Torrance next to Wilson park, if anyone knows the area just completely like, just barren of anything fun around. Like, it's just that it's a corporate wasteland over there. And I just started like, connecting with mom bloggers. And it was interesting because through that I met the CEO or the owner of Honest Company. And because that's what they were doing is they were building that too. And so we started doing all these collabs together and that was like we. We did a. We did a couple collabs with Honest Company at the time, right when they were just getting started. And that was when I first kind of started to understand that element of marketing, of like, hey, like, we can build grassroots efforts to sell things online and build these movements utilizing this. And, you know, that's kind of how it's been. But I've. I was, you know, my roommate back in college was part of. I don't know if you guys Remember that Coney 20. I forget. Oh, of course, yeah, yeah, Video. Remember that? That was. The guy lived right next to me was part of that and helped build that. And so like, I was part of, like, watched how that whole chaos went around and then, you know, been part of like random things like that throughout the years of these, like, viral videos and viral parts of, you know, different businesses. And I, you know, I had lots of friends that work for Tom's Shoes back when Tom's went crazy busy. So it's like I've seen, you know, the. The big and the small. I was part of Costco and helped launch their Pinterest. And you know, I was working at an agency and we were like, kind of like their in house, Costco's in house creative agency or media buying agency. And you know, kind of going there and seeing the. Going from polar opposite world where it turns from, you know, we can kind of do whatever we want to. Now we have this corporate, you know, board of directors that you. If you want to submit a post, you have to print it out and take it to them to get approval. And it was this whole different world. And then, you know, then obviously 2012, 2013 comes and I get kind of into like the e commerce space and start kind of selling things online. And I was working for different companies. And then I met Andrew Foxwell. It was like 20, 2014. And then I got connected with Marcus Lemonis from. He does like the show the profit and things like that. And I Got started kind of going that route where I was like, now I'm running like all these E commerce businesses for his TV show. And like, then that was when I got fun because I started to see not just one brand, but all these brands and got to play around with them. And you know, I met, you know, Taylor from Feels member fields.

[Host]

Oh yeah, of course.

[David Herman]

So Taylor was also part of that whole thing. Like they. There was a whole episode. I'm sure Taylor wants to forget about it at this point, but like, you know, he got brought in, like it was just kind of this community of like all these guys of like Southern California, Louisiana, San Diego. And then, you know, Andrew was really instrumental in like bringing me into his crew and getting to meet all these other guys down in like La Jolla and places like that. So that's where they were really kind of dabbled into like direct consumer brands. But before that it was, you know, government, nonprofits, corporate entities. That's what it was. I think through all of it, I'd kind of been able to work with all different types of, you know, people and groups and demographics of who I've worked with. So I think that's largely shaped kind of how I am today.

[Host]

It's a very, it's a very cool backstory going from like kind of obscure online Internet communities and behaviors and then slowly kind of zeroing in on direct to consumer. I think it was 2015 when you started your first advertising agency previous to Herman Digital. So what was that jump like when you decided, hey, I think actually there's like a business to build here?

[David Herman]

Yeah, so what I. Right around that time I. So 2012, I was working at an agency, the in house agency with Costco. They knew that I was unhappy because I was like, I always wanted to do more. And they, they laid me off. They gave me the computer, they gave me six months, like, hey, we know you want to do your own thing, so we're actually just going to let you do it and give you a head start. Like one of the best things that ever happened. And I, you know, dabbled in it, started doing it, but then I was still trying to figure it out. So I needed money. So I went and worked for back in the music industry, getting paid, basically beans helping. I was running digital advertising for pretty large bands on Universal Music Group and again getting paid nothing. And I'm like, all right, if I can get one client to pay my salary, I'm quitting tomorrow. And I literally went down to redondo beach. This is 20 was it 2011. 2000. No, 2013. And was just like, hey, would you ever be interested in working with me? I'll help sell boat slips in your marina online. They're like, hey, we need that.

[Co-host]

Sure.

[David Herman]

And then I'm like, They're like, we'll pay you $3,000 a month. I'm like, that's literally. Think of this in 2013. That's what the company was paying me full time, $3,000 a month to work for them. And so I was like, all right, this. That's what sells salary already. Let's go. And so I did that, and then I just started finding clients left and right that were local to Redondo that would be willing to work with me. And I just started building a little core group of. Of businesses down here selling online. And that's how it started.

[Host]

So, you know, boat slip rentals would have been a good number, too, behind an MRI machine.

[David Herman]

It's true. Yeah. Yeah. The. The honest community. I will straight up say the people that live on their boats in just a straight up.

[Host]

Different.

[David Herman]

Different vibe. Different vibe surprise me at all.

[Host]

You mentioned a couple key characters in. In the path. I'm curious if there's one person who you. Who you would say was, like, the most influential in shaping your view on marketing. Now, let me caveat that a little bit, because there are people who influenced your, like, your path of how you got into it, but I'd also love an answer. And maybe it's different, like, how you view marketing today more from, like, a conceptual perspective.

[David Herman]

Honestly, it would probably be Gary. Gary Vaynerchuk, just. Yeah, I think, you know, it was. It was. Again, I was. I was not the YouTuber that, like, watched his content, but I got his books, and I always felt like he was the only one at the time talking about, you know, buying attention online and figuring out how to do these things. And it was very unique. And I felt that what he was. What he was able to communicate and build in his communities, I was. I was like, all right, I get what he's trying to do at the time and kind of build that. So I would definitely say him was probably the number one.

[Co-host]

It's so interesting because I couldn't imagine, like, further personality differences. I know you and him are like, yeah, complete opposite ends of the personality spectrum.

[David Herman]

Yeah, I, you know, I. Obviously, I haven't watched this content in. In ages, but it was as early days when he was. It was the. The wine business that he was selling online. And then when he started kind of building out past that, you know, going on, sort of away from that and kind of building his content through, through YouTube and places like that. That's when I kind of started getting.

[Host]

It's also funny because there were so few people talking about digital marketing like 10 years ago, 12 years ago that like, we all have very similar answers. Like Terry V. Is.

[David Herman]

Yeah, yeah. Because it was like that was. It like there wasn't, you know, there was like the Seth go to Neil Patel and you know, Neil Patel's. I. Yeah, yeah. It's true though. Like it just wasn't a lot. It was, you know, we were just, we were hungry for content, you know. And like half of I just remember, you know, going to, going to like the library, the local library. I'm like, all right, let's see what kind of marketing books. There was nothing, right? And so it's like you have to naturally go online, but there was, there was really nothing. And Gary was the only one putting videos on, on YouTube about this stuff. Other than like some rando dude out there. It just wasn't really a scene yet. Now it's like I don't even know how people find people when there's too many.

[Host]

Some great podcasts out there.

[David Herman]

Yeah, apparently.

[Guest or Panelist]

Was Gary's content ever technical? I. I don't know. I don't remember ever being technical. Cuz that was the other thing is like Gary was probably the best at talking about it conceptually, but none of them were technical. So it was like, great. You still need to go find like another category of videos to figure out like how to navigate the ads manager and create an ad. But that was a totally separate story.

[David Herman]

Yeah. And I would say like Gary Vaynerchuk mixed with John Loomer was probably the key. Right. So I remember buying John Lumer's Power Editor course because I was like, I need to figure out how to use Power Editor. Back when Meta was running Power Editor and it was his course that kind of got me there. So it was like that kind of combination of having those practical. So it was Gary's like, you know, big, big picture. And then John's like, I don't know if you guys know who John Loomer is, but he was like the OG of Facebook ads. And he was like the most detailed and like, you know, he'd have these like in his videos, you'd hear him like drinking a beer and like that. He'd like kind of talk about his kids and his baseball. I was like, I love this guy. Like, this guy is great. So he still does it. I know. You know, so it's kind of fun.

[Guest or Panelist]

Awesome.

[Host]

Okay, cool. So my next question for you, David, what is, do you have a mission that, that drives you? You've been doing digital marketing, media buying for a very long time. At this point, you're waking up every day and talking about Facebook ads and tweeting about it and, and getting everybody all riled up. What's, what's, what's the mission behind that? That drives you?

[David Herman]

I would say probably just, man, I don't even know. It's a good question. I think that for me, it's like, I've kind of bucked the trend of trying to have this big personal brand showing off and all that kind of stuff. I think for me, it's just like, hey, like the other day, all just clicking buttons online. It's frustrating. It's lonely. Here I am to give you a mission of like, you're not in this alone. You don't have to, don't have to have this, like, leg of, you know, this massive lifestyle of like, you know, the Tai Lopez's with the Lamborghinis and that. It's like, hey, man, I'm just, I've been doing this 17 years and I'm still clicking buttons in Facebook, right? And I think, like, the end of the day, it's like we're all just trying to figure it out. Like, I think that's been always my core mission with other marketers because I was always felt like there was nobody talking like that. It was always, you know, totally for the Ferrari, let's go for, you know. And so it's like, that's kind of how I look at it. And, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's obviously resonated with people, so that's why I've always kind of continued to do it, you know, And I, I, I meet people all the time. They're like, hey, man, like, you got me off a ledge. I was stressed, and I saw your tweet about that and calm me down for the weekend. I'm like, I did my job. So that's kind of how I look at it.

[Host]

I think it's a great answer. I think it's totally true. I've known you for a really long time. I think you absolutely nail that. Was it, was there a point in time where you realized, like, there was a need for that message?

[David Herman]

So for me, I'd been on Twitter since 2008, and I was marketing in 2008, and I didn't have anybody at my, at the office I worked at to talk to. It was a Korean company and so it was the CEO, it was me. It was a salesperson, it was a creative arts director and then a warehouse staff and then everybody else was in Korea or China. And I had nobody to talk to at that company all day. Eight hours just sitting at a cubicle. No one to talk to. So I started just tweeting my, my like questions out in the ether. No one responded. No, you know, it was just like, it was just an outlet for me to go, hey, am I crazy here? Is this, is this what everyone else is seeing? And, and I think that it just continued. I never change. I never stopped doing what I've always done on Twitter. And then, you know, 2014, 2015, people started randomly following me and engaging with it. And then you kind of turned into that. And that's kind of how it's been since. And you know, it's like never really pay attention to who followed me, who engages as just. That's what it is. I've just not, you know, men has asked me to be quiet at times and platforms like, hey, you know, shut up. But I'm just like, no, I mean it's, it is what it is. I'm just gonna, not gonna, I'm not trying to badmouth people. It's. It's more like. It's just frustrating. It's frustrating. You can't duplicate. Use the duplicate button on Facebook.

[Host]

Yeah, it's 2025.

[David Herman]

Why is this so difficult? Right? And I think it's just like it, it's funny because lots of people at Meta get it. They're always like, yeah, we, we actually use your tweets to. Proof of concept is why we need to fix certain things. Like, hey, that's my job. If I could do that.

[Co-host]

Cool.

[David Herman]

Right? So, yeah.

[Guest or Panelist]

Was it Facebook related tweets from the jump or was it marketing related?

[David Herman]

It was marketing related.

[Guest or Panelist]

Okay.

[David Herman]

Yeah, it was always been marketing at the time. It was, you know, Facebook ads weren't a thing then. Yeah, it was just anything in marketing because again, I was running, you know, I was doing insertion orders for magazine publications. Right. It's like placing insertion orders and parenting magazines and, and so that was the early days of, of marketing where I just asked people questions. I, I followed random marketing people on Twitter at the time because I felt like Twitter in 2008 was very heavy. It's always been a kind of a marketing thing, marketing and business. And so you just follow random people and Half the people I don't, you know, know, don't even tweet anymore that I was following back then. But yeah, it was a lot of like corporate people.

[Host]

Do you have any.

[David Herman]

So do you have any idea how.

[Host]

Many times you've tweeted, David? This is. This chat. GPT gave me an answer.

[David Herman]

Can we guess? Can we guess?

[Host]

I don't have a. I don't have an exact number. I've got. Gave me a ballpark if you guys want to take guesses.

[Guest or Panelist]

I want to hit 100,000. All right.

[David Herman]

I would say over 100.

[Host]

Cody, are you under over and you can't be searching it right now?

[David Herman]

I don't know. Can't.

[Co-host]

All right. I haven't looked. I was trying to because I think you can see.

[David Herman]

He steps, he shoots back.

[Co-host]

I feel like now I just have a hundred thousand miles.

[Host]

You just got to go over on the bar.

[Guest or Panelist]

I don't know what. I would take a big swing.

[David Herman]

Okay.

[Host]

Basically everybody went over. Chad, GPT only told me 100k plus and I was like. And at first I was like, that doesn't seem right. I'm not going to say it. But now you bring up starting tweeting in 2008. I'm like, actually that. That's very. Well, that's plausible.

[David Herman]

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. It's a lot to me.

[Co-host]

I thought there was a way to see. Maybe you can just see on your own.

[Host]

I checked earlier, I don't know. So I couldn't find it.

[David Herman]

Yeah, there's. You think that'd be something that they would provide. But.

[Guest or Panelist]

The only new channel hexclad has spent more than seven figures on this year is Applovin. That's also who's helping us bring operators titans to you. Applovin is The S&P 500 mobile gaming ad platform and it's opening up its self serve ads manager Axon for the first time and offering you $5,000 in credits when you spend $5,000. But you have to have an invite only URL plus a code to get access. Hexcloud has been advertising on Applovin since 2024 and we are really planning to ramp Up Spend this Q4 with any new channel. We are always validating the channel by running a holdout test and proving without a doubt that these channels are driving incremental first time orders. We have run three separate holdout tests on Applovin and every time have seen it drive incremental orders. We are not the only one. I know Jones Road Beauty has been very Diligent about running its own holdout test to prove out this channel. Many other E Com brands have done the same thing and Applovin now has a pretty robust list of case studies proving that this channel can work for multiple e comm brands and multiple product verticals and achieve what most e comm brands should be focused on, which is incremental first time orders. If you want to get that five thousand dollar ad credit, go to 9 operators.com forward/applovin. You'll also get access to a live operators mastermind. We're run plus our playbook to scaling across channels. This is sponsored and Hexclad is spending our own money to run ads on Applovin and the rest of the operators are too. I would recommend you do the same. Now back to titans.

[Host]

All right, I want to jump into really the start of Herman Digital 2017. We got the backstory, we hit the community, we hit you. Getting into Ecom and D2C and learning from Loomer and Gary Ved.

[Guest or Panelist]

Love it.

[Host]

At Herman Digital you began landing really large D.C. brands. Everybody that we've heard of Ridge has been a client in the past. You're spending hundreds of millions of dollars in this period. What was that rapid scale up like from the driver's seat?

[David Herman]

Chaos. It was, it was a couple of things. It was, it was, it was. I call it organized chaos because I said no more than I said yes to working with people. And I just, I think for me it was always much I aligned with, hey, I have to do this whole day with, with people, not the, necessarily the business. And so it was like if I liked you as a person, I was like, yeah, let's do it. But then on the back end you're always like, hey, okay, you have to actually do the work. And so you know that always have to like it always be this rearranging of things where it's like, hey, if, you know, if this brand comes on then either a. I need to figure out how to make the back end work. So it was always this like jigsaw puzzle in a way because again, I never wanted to take on. The thing was I never wanted to grow to be a big agency. Right. I'll never forget Taylor from the CTC hit me up. He said, hey, you want to come work for me? Like no man, like I, I'm good, you know. And that was, that was like right when they were kind of in their growth stage when you know, Andrew was there and a couple of those guys, it was like, I love you guys, but I don't. I don't want to go work at a big agency again, right? And so I kind of maintained that I just, like, I wanted to work on the few brands that I was confident in growing and kind of go from there. And so that was the plan. And then obviously, Covid hit. And then, like, that whole first few months, it was just everybody hitting me up, and I was working with Thinx, the. The women's underwear brand, and their entire company was in house. I remember the CEO hitting me up is like, hey, you know, this is crazy. You're like, the one thing that's like, hasn't changed, you know? And I was like that. Like, I felt like, okay, this is my purpose now is to, like, just keep these companies afloat while they're trying to figure out their work from home things. And so I was kind of managing all this stuff, and then. And then my mom passed away suddenly in September of 2021. I was kind of left in this. Okay, Now I'm by myself trying to figure this out. And that's when my. The guy that works for McTanner, Duncan, stepped in and was like, hey, yeah, I can manage things where you go, take care, take care of business. And then he just kind of came in and helped for about two months while I just kind of took time off. And then, you know, here I have this assistant slash, you know, partner now, and his, you know, he was young and eager and ready to go. And so we naturally, like, all right, we can probably take on a couple more brands now than. It's just me. And then we just started to build this little boutique thing, but again, maintained my whole thing was never grow beyond what we can't do and never hire too many employees. But then it becomes too much. And so, you know, to this day, we have, what, five people total that are working with me? Um, you know, it's one analytics guy. It's a two ad builders, and then it's Tanner and I, and we manage all these brands, and, you know, we've been able to kind of build it in a certain way where it's like, either Tanner's day to day on these four brands, and then I'm day to day on these three brands, and then I'm higher up on these other brands. So it's like I can have a different perspective on things, and then we'll switch things around, right? So it's like, you know, suddenly now I'll kind of get in the weeds on this brand. Well, he goes high level on this brand. So it's. It allows us to kind of always be kind of mindful of. Of each brand and how to look at things. Because obviously if you live in a brand day to day 247 and don't have anyone else looking at it, you lose the perspective. So it's always helpful to have others look at the accounts. And so that's been helpful. And then, you know, through that process, I've had, you know, other assistants, like, know Kyle who works for Hexclad now and other brands. Like, he was working for me and he kind of. I trained him how to do this stuff and he's kind of, you know, worked with a bunch of. He works with like Honey Love and Hexclad and Couple. I don't know who I work with these days, but, you know, that's how it's been. And, and again, it's. It's. It's been a. It's. It's been a very smooth yet chaotic adventure in a way because, you know, navigating Covid was, you know, just feast, right? Everybody was just wanting like, we'd have VCs hitting us up, hey, can you take on 12 brands? Like, no, dude, I cannot take on 12 brands. Like, okay. And then like, obviously this year things really slowed down to where it was like nobody's, you know, wanting things, but then everyone's hitting me up because they're get getting rid of either their, their internal growth team or they're getting rid of their big agency. And I was that, like, middle ground. So then people were hitting us to do that. And then it was like, okay, like, yeah, I can help consult or audit on the side and get you going. But then it's like, it just kind of felt like there's never really a right answer. And I think like, you know, every brain has to kind of operate very differently. And you know, you guys, especially with, I mean, obviously I know the Ridge team. How you guys do it, I think is, is. Is great because it's like you have this really core team that's been in this together and it's. I think it's still like the best way of doing things that I've seen. And it's like, you know, having these outside agencies is. Is. Is tough. I think this year it's been tougher because of the creative and just kind of all things that have shifted specifically in. In Metaland. And it's like we're all, we're all at this point kind of figuring it out together, right? And it's like there is not really an expert at, at trying to understand all right, what, what's going on here and how are we figuring this out. And I think that's been really tough. And I've talked to a lot of agencies this year that felt like either a, their, their scopes of work got so out of hand because they were kind of forced to have to do a lot more figuring things out and do things and they felt very stressed and all that. And then you have the in house teams that are feeling unhappy with the agencies because they're feeling like they're not getting what they is. It felt like just this year was a lot of, just kind of infighting of just trying to figure it out. But I feel like it's at this point now kind of people know what the lay of the land is and they're kind of moving into the next phase, which is good. But it's been very much a, I would say this year of, of all of it has been a very difficult time.

[Co-host]

So you said everyone's trying to figure out right now. We're all, that's why we do the podcast. We're all trying to share, we're all learning, trying to figure out together. What do you mean by that? Like what are you seeing? Like what are the agencies having to do that they didn't have to do in years past? Or like what are you seeing that brands are figuring out, are learning and doing?

[David Herman]

I think the big ones has always been, I mean most of the businesses that I work with either have in house creative teams or they have other creative very. What I found is in media buying and in general agency work, you either have a really good creative team that's a, that's separate from the media buying strategy team. But what's been happening this year in my opinion has been the media buyer team has started to have to do a lot more of the heavy hit, heavy hitting on the creative side which has added a lot more complexity to the work because suddenly now you're actually acting as the creative strategist, the data analyst, the creative, the, the like planner as well as coming up with the like plans of testing and all these things. So it just becomes a lot more stressful. And this year especially it's like I've kind of taken on the creative side because that's my background. You know, I went to film school. I, I have that element. And so it's like it's been just a lot more of like trying to like, hey, how do we mixing create a strategy with day to day media buying and then still kind of coming up with all of our testing strategies and then planning for the future as well as working on like, hey, let's do this for the test, let's come up with this idea for this. Let's do this. And I think that it's been really tough to kind of plan your week now with all those different things where everyone's kind of looking at you for the creative side of things because, like, for a couple of brands I work with, like I'm running creative briefs as well as doing all the creative strategy, that's like six to eight hours of work just, just to do that element. And you know, this just gets to be a lot when it's not. Wasn't originally part of your plan because the creative teams just weren't adapting that we saw to what was happening with Meta and they were still stuck in this old mentality of like, hey, we're going to get you, you know, eight pieces of content this next week and they're going to be this beautiful, you know, whatever it may be, you know, and it was like, that's not what we need now. Now we need, you know, 64 pieces of creative that has this Persona that does this. And they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're not going to be able to do that. How do we, how do we get to that point? And for me personally, it's been just figuring it out along the way. And you know, that's the thing about us is we have a scope of work, but we've never. That's kind of one of our bread and butter is we just kind of get in the weeds with whatever brand it is. Right. So like, there's some brands we work with that we're literally helping them on, like logistics, planning, like it just depends on whatever you need because we've seen so many E Comm brands, so we can actually give them some, some, you know, some guidance along the way. But over and over, every single one, it's been creative strategy, creative strategy, creative strategy. That's what we need the most of. So that's what we spent probably more time than even living in ad accounts is just running creative strategy.

[Host]

I'd love to talk about that a little bit more. So original setup that you would say is good is internal creative teams producing eight great pieces of content, working with external media buyers that up until some point in time was a pretty good way to structure the organization.

[David Herman]

Yeah, okay. Yes. It felt to me that that was the, the best. It felt like it was the easiest thing to get what you need without having to wait long periods of time and then also putting ownership on, you know, each element.

[Host]

Now we're at this point that everybody's figuring out where you need more creative is what you said. Now we need 60 pieces of content, et cetera, et cetera. That creates tension between you and your external media buying partners. Do you have a perspective on the best way to structure the organization today, considering how much more content you need?

[David Herman]

Yeah, I would say that one of the elements that I've seen work for brands has been having, you know, two to three different creative agencies in there. You know, one or two on a percentage of spend model that you can kind of monitor that. Because obviously there's the agencies out there that are producing volume, but they're going to charge a percentage of spend and then having one or two agencies that are flipped are flat, fixed rate that way, you know, like, okay, for these you send to the fixed rate guys. What we found is we're going to send not proof of concept, they're the ones that are going to try and true, we know what we need. The percentage of spend model guys, they're going to be focusing on proof of concept stuff, Persona stuff, because at the end of the day, and hopefully none of them are listening. But it's like at the other day you're like, hey, I rather not burn a ton of spend on something that I that's unproven. So I'm going to fix the cost on that one versus the fixed cost on the, you know, the proof of concept. That's been to me, what I've seen work the best. But almost every brand I work with, minimum two to three creative agencies that are working with them at this point. Super interesting.

[Host]

Okay, so we're at this point we're creating more content than ever. I want to ask you about marketing mix.

[Co-host]

So hold on, can I ask a follow up question on that? So, and is that still in addition to in house and like, do you think if so, do you think there are certain things that you find like the best in house teams focusing? Like for us we have our in house team very focused on launches. We have like a launch every two weeks. So like it's much easier to kind of have a really tight, you know, feedback loop there and like do statics and videos for that. And so we'll have like Persona stuff or new swings. Like we'll have the agencies kind of like tech testing new angles for our existing stuff. Like how, how have you seen that, yeah, if a team also has internal.

[David Herman]

Yeah. So like the, obviously the, the bigger, the brands that I work with still have their internal teams that are doing that like they often are doing. Like hey, they'll do like the licensing drops. They'll do the stuff that's tried and true because they don't want to pay for a creative agency to have to do that stuff. They'll just do it in house also. The stuff that they do in house typically is like a lot of the iterations and things like that that are going to, you know, break the bank and that kind of stuff. So that's what I typically see. The brands that are kind of in that mid range spend, not like, you know, two, three, four million dollars a month, but like 500k to a million range. We're definitely seeing it's pretty much all out external, not internal at all. And that's been kind of what I've noticed the most. And then the smaller brands. So I work with two startups that we. One of which I'm not going to get too in the weeds on it, but it was me and the founder started the brand in, well, he's been kind of on and off but started in June on this one. And the creative, we have one creative agency but him and I are also just making tons of AI ads like him and I just, literally I just input them. I think I did a tweet about it was like I throw our top performing ads into Gemini and then I basically get the logistics down. I asked for it to give me the headlines, I grabbed those headlines, I throw it into GPT, I make a couple static headlines and then I throw it in the flow and make a video version for 9, 16. And I'm just inputting that every single week. And that flow has taken us from $0 in spend to we've spent 20, up to $23,000 a day more profitable. And that's like, that's been what's worked. And it's like we don't care about how good it looks. It's like as long as it gets the message across of what we need, that's all we care about. And that's how we've, that's like again for some brands it's not going to fly, but for this one it does. So it's like that's worked and so it's like creating, creating a creative agency out of AI, I think for the smaller brands is a no brainer at this point. If you can pull it off in Gemini, especially is a really good creative strategist that you can train it. Right.

[Host]

Okay, great.

[David Herman]

So I love this.

[Host]

You know, David, you have, you have really good insights into both sides of the spectrum. You're working with, you know, multibillion dollar brands. On one end, you're starting a brand from scratch this past June. So you're like, you've got the full, the full stack and all the stages. We just talked about creative how on the smaller end maybe you can generate a lot of content with AI. On the higher end you need two.

[David Herman]

To three creative agencies.

[Host]

What does marketing mix look like at those stages? I'd love to hear just briefly talk through maybe like 0 to 20, 20 to 100, 100 plus.

[David Herman]

Something like that would be great. Yeah, so I'll use the startup brand. It's literally Facebook with little hint of Google. That's literally it. Right? Nothing else. Doesn't need any more than that as soon as we start cracking the nun on that. So like for us, we are getting on Applovin for the next stage because obviously this is the kind of brand that we've now gotten to that point where it's all right. We've spent up to 25 to $28,000 a day max on Meta. We should be able to be able to get some more success on things like app love it and kind of go to the next route. And when you look at the marketing mix for us, it's like, you know, we can do, you know, TikTok we don't really want to do right now because of all the chaos we got on TikTok and then the audience doesn't make sense for us on Snapchat. We've tried it. It just doesn't make sense. So Applovin is the natural next place to go for this as a brand. So like that's the marketing mix for that, like that 25, 30k range of spend. As we kind of gravitate up, you know, we're continuing to aggressively scale. Meta is still 60 ish percent of media spend. Almost every brand that I work with, it's still kind of the mix. And then you have like Google which is kind of. It's interesting with Google is like we've seen most brands actually kill off branded completely or just like limited to basically nothing. And so it's just like demand gen, PMAX, maybe YouTube and that's like maybe 8 to 12% of media spin. And then what we've seen is applovin at like 10 to 15 media spend and then that like last little 8ish. You know, I'm not doing the math right, but like, you know, that last little percentage of spend is a mix of TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest and then connected TV. Like, that's kind of been the mix that we've seen. We've had some brands that are, you know, will ramp up their connected TV to be like 20 to 30% of their media spend kind of going into the second half of the year. I've got a couple brands that we're spending pretty big on, Pinterest because it makes a lot of sense for the brands and then a couple other brands that just, they do crush it on Snapchat. So it's like, it kind of depends on the verticals from what we've seen. But generally, generally it's 60% meta, you know, 10% Google, 10% AppLovin, which is AppLev is crazy to think about because it's like this was not a thing a year ago and now it's like it's already morphed past the TikTok, Snapchats and Pinterests of the world. And the thing about it is, you know, for a lot of brands we work with, it just, it's actually the best performer. And so like, we've, we're starting to consider like, okay, does it make sense to actually drop meta spend down and really scale up app love and see like, where the mix is there and like, where is the, the line that we can get across where we start seeing diminishing returns? You know, because I think like, with things like with Applovin, you know, they've got that. I forget the name of it. It's like that dynamic thing now where you can put like 10 ads, 10 static images, landing page together. And that's crushing for us for almost all the brands we work with on that, because he's just kind of throwing everything in and going like, all right, do your thing. While on Meta, we're like super hyper focused on landing pages and all these things. Like, all right, Applobin is our safe place over here. We're just trying to get revenue. Facebook's a place where we're just hacking the crap out of the thing. So that's kind of been. I feel like that's the marketing mix that I've seen work best right now. But yeah, I mean it. TikTok as a whole has been the furthest drop of all the brands, of all the social networks that we've worked with in terms of like pulling back spend. Like TikTok has been the one that's dropped the furthest.

[Host]

So I have a question for those like, who are on the brand side, they want to scale up. They're at the point where they need to be expanding channels. You said for your startup, for the startup brand you go into Apple event partially because the audience is there. And on Snapchat you said the audience is not there. So I'm curious if you could expand on that at all or if there are general heuristics as to what types of brands have opportunities on what channels. And I guess one of my questions would be if it's male centric. Instead of going Applovin and Pinterest, are you going to Reddit and Twitter or like, do you have any guidance for people?

[David Herman]

Yeah. Right. So the way that I look at it is, is twofold. One is ease of use to get started on right now. And the quickest thing that I can scale, right? And I found that Applovin is the easiest thing to scale fast. And for this particular brand, we scale fast. That's, that's how we've done it. So like, that was like sort of the reason why we chose App Love. And it was nothing to do with demographics or anything like that. It was like, all right, that's a channel that I feel like we're going to have the best bank for our buck on. But when it comes down to it, like why I do, like why I have a brand that spends a lot on Pinterest. They're, they're, they're in the general crafting niche, right? So it makes a lot of sense to be on Pinterest. We're with a fashion brand. Pinterest makes a lot of sense for that. But the thing about Pinterest is, and when we look at Pinterest is entirely not a performance channel by any means. And we're looking at that channel as a complete top of funnel running gift guides running, you know, elegant, beautiful looking images that, you know, it's not meta ads, right? And that's, that's, I think the biggest concept misconception with Pinterest is we go, hey, as long as they make a purchase, we're focusing on the cost per click. That's what I care about here. And then I'm measuring it, I'm like, is the cost per click? Are they sticking around? And if they're sticking around the site for longer than two seconds, I'm like, okay, that's a win, let's move on. And so it's like, that's, it's really just for me. It's a walking billboard in front of people that are planning. And so that's how I do that channel. Wait, Dave, can I see a question about that? Yeah.

[Guest or Panelist]

So you're saying you don't see a lot of realized revenue in Pinterest or whatever measurement methodology you're using. So you're using CPC and then tracking like time on site by like Pinterest utm and you're basically saying like they're spending above average on site. They must be a high quality person that's browsing. Are you doing any like incrementality product? Well, I guess you'd have to run like a longer tailed incrementality test, right?

[David Herman]

Yeah, yeah. Like three to four weeks to get it going.

[Guest or Panelist]

Probably even longer for like super high price point like Hexcloud or other home goods, like furniture and stuff like that.

[David Herman]

Yeah, Like, I think the thing that people get wrong with a Pinterest is they put everything into a conversion campaign and that's it. Right. It requires a lot of like top of funnel traffic campaigns and other things kind of moving into it. And I think that the channel is really best when you're, you know, for you guys it makes a lot of sense, you know, for, you know, for you on Pinterest. Ridge. I don't know. You know, it's like wallets is more of an impulse buy where people aren't necessarily planning it, but hexclad because of the value. The thing about it is I would build Hexclad into the elements of what you're trying to do. So like, are people buying kitchenware during. I don't know, they're looking at rebuilding their house or whatever it may be. Like, when are they buying kitchenware? And then I would apply that to the pins. And so like when they're searching for things, they're going to routinely see Hexclad as they're planning for these big purchases so that they get that intent going. It's all about intent. And so that's how I think people get wrong is they're just like, oh, like they should just be buying right now. It's like no one buys on Pinterest. They're looking at things on Pinterest. Like I rebuilt our house and, and like I spent six months on Pinterest just looking at things. One of those was a Thermador fridge with a, you know, the paneling on front. So it maxed the rest of the cabinets. I didn't buy on Pinterest. I went to Ferguson and bought the, bought the Thermador. Right. It wasn't through Pinterest.

[Host]

But did you, did you at least answer the post purchase survey?

[David Herman]

David? No.

[Co-host]

No. That poor marketer.

[David Herman]

No. No.

[Guest or Panelist]

I can't believe you. I can't believe you.

[David Herman]

Sorry.

[Guest or Panelist]

You know, I, I filled out one of those. What are the God, what's that? Nielsen sent me a survey. It was one of those surveys. You fill it out, email it back in, they send you a Chris, you did that $10 bill and I, I, I got it in the mail. I'm like, I like fundamentally have to do this. Like I feel like it would have been bad aura if I just threw it away. So I, I filled it out, got my Chris 10 and it was a great experience.

[David Herman]

Yeah, I, dude, this is, this is.

[Guest or Panelist]

Not the first time you've told me this by the way. I think you said the same thing to me a year ago when yeah, you're on one of our early shows and it's like under my, my paid media rocks for 26. It's like number two is Pinterest ads. Because I, I am with you. I think we can because we finally have the content flywheel to like produce that really, that style of content you're, you're talking about. So yeah, I'm, I'm really excited about that channel for us next year.

[David Herman]

Yep, it's a great channel.

[Co-host]

We have a six week test launching October 1st. Very essentially what David's suggesting. Follow up episode, high amount of spend, it'll be almost all mid, you know, funnel trying to reach audiences. So yeah, I, I totally agree but we'll definitely follow it with that. Dave, what about Applov and Creative? So like I agree with you that it's like there's a lot of scale there where like a lot of these channels you could spend like a grand or two a day but like Applovin, if it performs you could scale. And it's also like what I've seen and we've done is just take our best meta video right. 9 by 16 video, import it over.

[David Herman]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

Do you do that, do you have, do you experiment with any like specific creatives on Applovin?

[David Herman]

So the only thing that I'm experimenting on is the, is the end cards. So like, you know, I think that the, the hardest part for app loving was always the HTML end card. Like don't want to do this. And so when they insert, when they allowed you just to throw up in images, I was like, oh sweet, now I can do this all day. So now I'm inserting like you know, one video with like six end card images and then seeing what comes back. That's been working really well. But again it's. Yeah, it's the same. It's meta. It's the top meta performing videos that I throw over there. And that's been. But with. But the crazy part has been with Applovin is we have like ads that just miserably failed on Meta are crushing on Applovin and then we're just scaling the heck out of them. And like there's like there's one ad for a company I work with that we've been running it since like February and it's still the top performer. And like every time I turn that ad back on a meta, it just fails again. I'm like, I don't know. No, I get the breaking over here. But yeah, that's.

[Host]

Anybody here experiment with the intros for the vertical video ads on Applovin. You get the five non skippable seconds. This is what I talk about with my team all the time where it's like you don't really need hooks or the hooks need to be different. You have to assume you get that, that those five non skippable seconds and then how are you like retaining that attention even further?

[David Herman]

Yeah, I don't right now. I think that the hard part is we're still, I mean even doing two to three creative teams. Like everybody's like doing multiple videos of multiple things. It just gets to be a lot I think is as, as we scale these channels, specifically Apple Oman, it's going to be time to have a full on dedicated team to building that. Because like I was talking with Jess from fireteam, you guys know Jess, but he was like why are we not creating ads that are just all gamified? Like showing like Words with Friends as the ad and then like in like break into it as like, you know, it's like if you look at it, Words with Friends is like one of the big placements, right. So it's like makes sense to create some gamified looking creative to match it.

[Guest or Panelist]

That's like native to that, that's native.

[David Herman]

To like gaming, right? Because if they're playing a game, right, it kind of makes sense. So kind of having some fun that way. So like we're going to start trying some of that to see if that works and see what the attention's like. But that's again that's, that's how I think about all these platforms is like you just have to get as native as possible. But I think like yes, in theory that's great but in, in actually pulling it off is really tough because like, all right, are we gonna dedicate all this time to that one channel and one piece of creative that we're not gonna be able to use on Meta? Probably not. If you know me, you know I.

[Co-host]

Love two things, incrementality and ad credits. And I'm about to hook you up with both of them. Operators Titans is brought to you by Applovin, The S&P 500 mobile gaming ad platform. Applovin is opening up its self surf ads manager Axon for the first time and offering you 5k in credits when you spend 5k.

[David Herman]

But you have to have an invite.

[Co-host]

Only URL plus a code to get access. Applovin has been super incremental for us. Every time we've tested we have two proper house geo lift tests under our belt and Applovin has been very incremental is there's a lot of channels where you can spend like small amounts of scale and spend. We've been able to spend pretty significantly on Applovin each time we've tested it. We don't find that we hit diminishing returns right away. And so it's just, it's just really effective because you know, you don't want your team trying to test out these new channels where they're barely going to make a difference for your business. And I love that. There's actually a lot of scale potential.

[David Herman]

There if you get it working.

[Co-host]

And again I've seen it be very incremental for brands. The other thing is I'm all about being high leverage. We've talked about this on a bunch of marketing operators podcasts. The cool thing about Applovin, you don't have to go and shoot any new creative, you don't have to go find any new agencies. Just take your existing 9 by 16 stuff that happens to be working on channels on your main channels and just port that over. It's super easy, super low lift and highly effective. You need a code, you need an invite, own URL, but that's where we.

[Host]

Can hook you up.

[Co-host]

So go to 9operators.com applovin but don't delay cause I'm sure they're going to go fast. And that's not all. You'll get access to a live operators mastermind that we're running. Plus you can see our entire playbook for how we scale spend across new channels. So whether you're hearing this or seeing this here's a link. Go to 9operators.com applovin.

[Host]

I want to talk now about like you hit nine figures and you work with many nine figures brands and how your approach to their creative strategy or media mix planning has changed over time. So I'm curious my, my underlying question here is what's something you used to push for with nine figure brands but have since changed your mind on? One thing you said recently, we've all been fans of the raw UGC style ads for a long time and you came out against the grain a little bit advocating for maybe we need to go back to DSLR ads. Maybe Meta needs high quality stuff and we need to, we need polished ads and that ugly ads are out. Is that a big change or what else would you put in that bucket?

[David Herman]

Yeah, I think the way that I'm looking at it is not that it needs to go away, it's just that we can't have that make up 80, 90% of the accounts. Right. At the end of the day it's like I'm looking at everything like I'll grab motion, I'll open up motion and I would be like if I look at my motion in my top six tops, top spending ads all look the same. I'm running red flags because I'm like, all right, it's too similar, I need, I need to change it up. And so that's how I'm always looking at things. So it's like this, it's this ebb and flow, right? Having like professional video content that was high end mixed with, you know, ugc, but making sure it's not all from the same type of creator. Like I don't want, you know, nine, 25 to 34 year old females that all look the same, talking the same in there. I want one and I want, you know, different ages and different ethnicities and things like that to bring diversity into it. But then in addition to that, it's, it's just a mix of as many creative statics as I can get that all materially look different and then that allows me to just do different placements and different, you know, collections, ads, all that kind of stuff. That's kind of where I feel like I'm at with this stuff. What's also interesting is the more we've experimented with diversity, what naturally seems to happen is the creative team start to see spending going towards other things and it almost like it sparks them to think differently because again, it's like I feel like there was this kind of like three year, three, four years where we was like, get us UGC video. Get a CGC video. It's like, there's no creative in that, right? It's like you're just, you know, it's boring. And so now it's like you're getting these teams that you actually get excited and so you start pushing them along of like, hey, what? What can we do? And like, you know, Jess from Fireteam is a great example because I work with them. Like, the stuff that he comes up with is so crazy and out of the box. You're like, I don't even know where you came up with that, but it's great, let's go. Right, so it's like that's kind of how I'm looking at it. When I mentioned like, you know, Rob, you know, DSLR versus ugc, not literally taking a dslr, just, you know, filming a ugc, but like, like thinking outside the box of like, hey, let's script some stuff out, let's build some stuff. Hey, let's try stop motion. Let's try different things to see what works. Because at the end of the day, you're playing in. You know, the way I look at it is. And I'm just going to reference Meta and Applovin because I think they're very similar in the approach. Right. They're all built off of an AI, right? And the way that they're bidding and serving your ads is based off this AI. And the same thing goes with ChatGPT. If you just train chat GPT to do one thing over and over and over and you start asking it to think differently, your. Your first results are probably going to suck. You have to train it to go a different route. I think the same goes with Meta and Applov and from what I've noticed is when you just treat, when you just keep training them the same way, the system's just gonna go towards the same people. But if you start really fishing it with just everything different and almost confuse the heck out of it, it almost makes it have to retrain and refocus and re go a different route. And sometimes you have to calibrate that a couple times to get there. But that's like the core focus is trying to do that. But we have, you know, we have brands that we work with that are just stuck with one format because that's all that works. And then it's hard to kind of think differently. And I think those are the ones where it's like, what do you do? Do you just operate at a loss and this creative for, you know, a month to untrain it. I'm kind of starting to lean into. Yes, you kind of have to because you got into this pit of just doing the one creative for so long and now you have to get outside of it. And so you're trying to dig yourself back out of like this marketing message that you've been hammering with these UGC creators for so long. Makes total sense.

[Host]

Cody, I think we've talked about this a bit. Wouldn't you say what David just described around, like over training the algorithm around a certain piece of content is similar to what you guys are going through with now untraining the model around the age and demo you want to be targeting?

[Co-host]

I think so, yeah. We struggled hard and we would hear creative diversity, creative diversity, we would try and maybe it wasn't good enough. Creative diversity, like, I think that's also probably part of it, but. But where we would produce stuff that was different and like, that would never perform. And even if it did, it would just deliver to like same ages. And so we finally got it. I don't know if it was just persistence, if it was style. Like, we're doing way more partnership ads with like creators. And so I don't know if there's learnings there, but yeah, I mean it took, honestly, it's taken like six months to get it there and it's taken a long time. I mean, it's.

[Host]

I am sure it's really hard to tell the difference, but there's a matter of, okay, you just forced Meta to spend against a younger demo for longer until it figured it out. Like, do you think that's part of it or would you attribute it, attribute a lot of it to the new creative and like the more dedicated landing pages you guys have been testing.

[Co-host]

So I thought it was the former at first because we were doing a lot of creative. It was still delivering older. So we actually like forced spend to younger audiences. We actually ran a conversion lift, found the same exact performance. So I was like, see, meta's wrong. Like it should have delivered here.

[David Herman]

And then I realized like after the.

[Co-host]

Test, after like a month after us, like it was actually delivering outside of the age targeting that we set. Like, apparently those are just like soft suggestions now. So it's like, so. So I'm like, all right, maybe not. And so now I think it's. It's probably largely that. And it still did deliver differently and it did deliver younger with those. But I think the biggest unlock for us has been this kind of like, combo of Partnership ads that we're doing to, like, these Persona funnels, I think, you know, and I tweet about us about, like, the landing page stuff. Like, it really wasn't until we changed the landing pages and got very specific with the Persona on landing pages, built new pages, that we started seeing delivery change. I think, you know, obviously, like, meta has so much data at various levels, but I do think a lot of it was actually at the landing page level. We had like, two core pages that we had like millions and millions of spend on and millions of purchases. And I almost feel like those got deleted. Like, the same way everyone's, like, creative as a targeting. I feel like the full, like, funnel got bucketed. And so I would just experiment with every lever. Like, we, we. It was on the table to test a different pixel, to test a different ad account. Like, those would have just been later on. But yeah, don't roll out landing pages as well.

[Host]

Love it. So, David, on the point of creative diversity and thinking out of the box, I've got two questions. I'll start with the first one. What's the craziest thing that you've seen a brand try? And it works.

[David Herman]

The crazy like, like. And her, like, advertising.

[Host]

Or maybe the. The most interesting in terms of, like, you brought up Jess earlier scripting out some crazy ideas and he's posting them all the time. I'm curious. Or, you know, I think about some of the old Kizik stuff. Maybe like, like, yeah, just an example of a brand thinking out of the box.

[David Herman]

And yeah, I mean, Kizik is a great example. You know, we. We interrupted a. You know, we got. We got. We basically built that brand pretty quickly. And Alex MacArthur and Brett Swenson and, And Blake and those guys, like, they're just very creative dudes that were able to create. You know, they took what they did at Purple and then, you know, we started creating all this, like, really hilarious content around shoes. And it was all this, like, hands off the shoes kind of video stuff. And then, you know, I kind of put, you know, fuel to the fire on that. That was a fun one because we. We interrupted the shoe industry and got everyone talking, right? I mean, Skechers notoriously copied. Copied Kizik to a tee. So it's like, hey, I mean, we got the biggest shoe company to copy us. We must have done something right. You know, I think another one is, is wobles. I always mentioned the Wubels just because I love the brand. You know, Sean originally connected to them back in the day, and it Went one of my, you know, like my little fun brand to work with. Because it's like we literally created a category. There was no such thing as crochet kits. They created it and now there's all these knockoffs and things like that. But it was like if you go look at crochet in the search terms on Google, it's like flat. And then as soon as like woobles came along, it's just like. And that one, it was like, how do you get people to be interested in crochet? And it was like we again, we focused on really funny videos, bucking the trend on who is crocheting. We have a video that we did last year that's it's a poker night where it's like all these dudes are sitting around as the woman leaves, like, all right, you guys ready? And they pull out crochet kits and they start crocheting instead of playing poker. And the woman forgets her purse thing walks back in and it's the look on their faces of like, oh my gosh, we got caught. And it's just that hilarious sort of like quick cut video that just resonates so super well on meta during like peak buying season that we've been able to do a lot of that kind of stuff with. And I'm a huge fan of, of higher end video content launching in Q4 to really drive home the brand. And so like the woobles. We have a new commercial coming out in a couple weeks actually. It should be ready this week. That's kind of, it's, it's, it's. I won't, I won't talk about too much, but I'll show it to you guys when, when it's done. It's hilarious. It's, it's like, it's basically it, it's around just like it's a television commercial that's playing into our niche audiences and who they are and like they will remember there's a lot of nostalgia involved in it. And so like that's the whole point. It's like we just want to generate conversation because at the end of the day, you know, we. The only way to really do marketing in my opinion and performance marketing in general is just getting people kind of going back to the Gary Banner truck, right? You're buying people's attention as much as you possibly can. And so if I can buy people's attention any way I can through, you know, getting them to social chatter and tag their friends, that's a win. It might not be. They may not buy the product today, but that's why you have to have your margins in order and be willing to, you know, have that just Steady Eddie on the, on the daily. But that's how we do it and that's how kind of how I did a lot of the brands that we've worked with, obviously every brand can't be that way. There's, there's obviously, you know, margins at play and things like that. But that's what I've seen work. The best from a crazy stuff is, is just these really expensive high end production videos that we just blow a budget on and we just go, go to town. So yeah.

[Host]

All right, cool. We're going to close it out here, David, with what we've been calling the Titan 10 standardized tactical questions, some resource recommendations, not quite rapid fire. Feel free if you want to expand on any of these, but we'll try to get through them somewhat quickly. Number one, you get a desert island dashboard to manage your business. What three metrics do you take with you?

[Guest or Panelist]

Gosh.

[David Herman]

Time on site.

[Host]

Cost per 1,000 unique accounts reached.

[Guest or Panelist]

No, no, he opens with time on site.

[David Herman]

I love it.

[Guest or Panelist]

I can't wait to hear what number two, what number two and three are gonna be.

[Host]

Love it.

[David Herman]

Conversion rate and cpc.

[Host]

I like time on site. Highly, highly underrated.

[Co-host]

Very unexpected.

[Guest or Panelist]

I love that stack. That is so good. I thought you're going to go. I thought you're going to go web sessions at that last.

[David Herman]

Here's why. If I can. I mean again, it's just basic math and CBR and cpc, right? And it's like I'm always optim. I, I find myself more and more within meta looking at CPC as my main driver to drive conversion. That's what I'm looking at for better ads. And then obviously I'm like, okay, CPC is really low. Oh, it's reals nem. Okay, is it feed? Oh, now we're getting into something interesting here. So I'm always looking at that as sort of a cross between, you know, how to do certain things. But time on site, it can make or break you at the end of the day. And if you're, you know, and I think like, you know, I'm always pushing it to. I wish there was. I don't know if there's a way like we do it through Google Tag Manager where it's like it'll fire if someone scrolls through that Facebook ad and they scroll on the site for like 1 minute, 3 minute, 5 minute. I don't know if anyone's getting more detailed than that. That's kind of how I do it right now.

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[David Herman]

I love it.

[Host]

Look, it's. It's a simple strategy. You want to get people on your site at a low cost and have them stay there for a bit. It's like, yeah, that's good. You can manage your business that way for sure.

[David Herman]

That's my job.

[Guest or Panelist]

All right, David, do you. Do you have a sense of like. Because you, you talk a lot about quality of impression on a, like a per. What's the word for it? Placement basis. Like within Instagram. Right. Reels versus feed versus story. Are you often looking at time on site broken out by that?

[David Herman]

Yeah.

[Guest or Panelist]

Do you have a good feel for like, where. Which platform or which. What is. Is it platform the right word? Or within Instagram, within meta, which are their sub like ad units? Are you seeing the best time on.

[David Herman]

Site with stories and feed still are.

[Co-host]

Still kind of the best.

[David Herman]

Reels is the worst, but also just. It drives way more impressions. So the one thing I, I always like to look at is the percentage of spend going to each placement. And if it starts shifting too much towards reels, I need to pull back on that type of creative because it's driving way too many eyeballs and not enough of what I need, which is action. So there's always that tug and pull of like, you know, social engagement. Yes, it still needs to happen, but it can't be the main driving force. I still need to drive revenue.

[Co-host]

All right, cool.

[Host]

David, I've got question number two for you. You're still on the desert island. You also get to take a book, a resource, but it can't be business related.

[David Herman]

Can I get going to say, that's good, that's good.

[Guest or Panelist]

Yeah.

[David Herman]

Good day. There's could always find everything you need. Life through scripture, 100% probably, I'd say.

[Host]

All right, we've got number three here. What's your core or sorry. All right, we've got number three here. What's your one contrarian belief about business that other people in your position think you're crazy for?

[David Herman]

I'm gonna do it.

[Guest or Panelist]

Say it probably is desert island dashboard.

[Host]

I was gonna say I'm on site.

[David Herman]

I would say. I would say, okay, here, I'll say this one and maybe people will agree with it, maybe not. I think that Facebook is getting harder to use, not easier to use in that in the context that they are trying to build a product that's easy to use for everybody, they've actually done the opposite by making it way harder to use. And I've told this to the person who's literally in charge of building it, and he was not happy with me.

[Host]

And that's only because you couldn't find Zuck. Otherwise you would have said it directly to him.

[David Herman]

Yeah, yeah, I would have gone right to Zuckerberg. He's too busy with Ray Ban.

[Host]

All right, cool. We'll keep moving here. What is the single most important word in leadership?

[David Herman]

Accountability.

[Host]

Beautiful. What is the single most important word in business?

[Co-host]

That's what I. Prophecy, too.

[Guest or Panelist]

Yeah.

[David Herman]

Clean dude.

[Host]

Simple answers. What's the best meal of the day? And why?

[David Herman]

Breakfast? Because it shapes your day.

[Guest or Panelist]

Love it.

[Host]

Right?

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[David Herman]

Okay, I like this right now.

[Host]

What is the most overrated growth tactic?

[Guest or Panelist]

Better not say applovin.

[David Herman]

No, most overrated growth tactic is. I don't know. I don't know. That's a, that's a very loaded question. I think for me, it's the, the.

[Host]

The inflated bit cap strategy, the inflated bid cap strategy. I'm unfamiliar.

[David Herman]

Yes. Meta pushes this. I know a lot of people run with it, which, like, they'll, they'll spend, like, they'll set their budget at like, $50,000 a day on, on a campaign and have a, have a, have their bid set at this. I've never really seen it work that great, and it kind of fizzles out, but they're claiming that it works a lot. I personally seen it, love it. I'm sure there's people out there that are crushing with it, but I've never seen it.

[Guest or Panelist]

Have you ever seen, like, a horror story or the brand, like, because I think the tactic is, like, you set a super high budget and a low cpa, right? So it, like, barely spends that budget.

[David Herman]

Gap rules. But then the rules break. Because rules break a lot breaks. You had it where you wake up and it's spent, like, $16,000. And so.

[Guest or Panelist]

Oh, no.

[David Herman]

Yeah. I, I, I am not playing that with Meta. I know Meta wants you to push it. Nope. About doing it. Sorry.

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[Guest or Panelist]

Especially when it's not your, your ad. Yeah.

[David Herman]

I'm responsible for this.

[Guest or Panelist]

Yeah. So, yeah.

[Host]

All right, last question. Number 10. Maybe you saw it coming. What is the most underrated tactic right now?

[David Herman]

I would say patience.

[Host]

Can you, can you expand on that?

[David Herman]

Really? I, I think, I think that.

[Co-host]

Okay.

[Host]

Gary Vee.

[David Herman]

Yeah. No, I, Yeah. Here's why. What I have seen, what I found, what I've learned is that we haven't. We're not in the era anymore of people just spending, spending, spending. People on the era of waiting Waiting, waiting, then spending money. And I think that it is a completely different season for. For the country, at least speaking to Americans. But Canada, Europe, like, we're all kind of feeling the same stuff, right? People are pitched, they're pinched, we're pitched. So it's like we're trying to look at one day, click one day numbers, but the reality is the amount of people that are buying in that, that that group is shrinking. And so having more patience with your ad campaigns, have more patience with the way you launch creative campaigns and, you know, marketing tactics like give it more time is kind of where my head has been at. And, you know, a couple of the brands that I work with were just like, hey, it was a really bad week. But we really believe in this. Like, we feel like it's in the right direction. It ends up working after about two weeks. Like, there's things like that that's happening a lot. And so that's kind of how my philosophy has been. Like, I just resist the urge to click a button to turn it off. I'm, like, trusting myself. But this is what we set up. We believe in it. We came up to this conclusion because of this. Listen to it and go, all right, Patience.

[Host]

Underrated. I like it. That's Lindy advice. I think people for a long time will be preaching the. The value of patience. All right, that's a wrap on Titan 10. David, thanks for coming. And third time on marketing Operators. This is.

[David Herman]

This is big hall of fame. Like, if there was the Hollywood walk of fame, I would be on there.

[Host]

You get a star. You get a star for sure.

[Guest or Panelist]

You're the most repeat. Yeah.

[Host]

Jersey.

[David Herman]

I have to pay for it, though.

[Host]

Jersey and the rafters.

[Guest or Panelist]

No, no CPM on the star. Yes, it's a cpm and it's. And it's a high one.

[David Herman]

Yeah.

[Host]

Awesome.

[David Herman]

Awesome. Thank you.

[Host]

All right, thank you again for tuning in to Operators Titans. I was with David Herman. I love talking to David. He's not only got time in market, he's been around for just about as long as anybody else, but he's also going deep with brands all across the spectrum, small to big. So hopefully you got a lot of great takeaways.

[David Herman]

I know I did.

[Host]

Thank you again to Applovin for sponsoring and thank you for listening. We'll see you on the next episode.