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A
Hey, real quick, before we dive in, if you've got a brand or marketing tool that marketers need to know about, sponsor the show here at Perpetual Traffic. Perpetual Traffic puts you in front of thousands of seasoned marketers, CMOs and agency owners. So head on over to perpetualtraffic.com to apply to be a sponsor of this show. Why Meta is the best advertising platform on the planet in 2026. When I say the Andromeda Update is as big as when ads went in the newsfeed, people are like, what are you talking about? And how did they get there? From the advertising standpoint, not a of.
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People know this, that you're listening to Perpetual Traffic.
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Are you losing hours building campaigns and analyzing reports? Well, activecampaigns AI agents do all the heavy lifting for you. They create content, plan campaigns and orchestrate your email, SMS and your WhatsApp all working towards your revenue goals. You get clear recommendations on what to do next backed by billions of data points. No more guessing about what's working or wasting time on manual setups. Just strategy and results. Try it all for free over@activecampaign.com that's activecampaign.com hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic podcast. This is your host, Ralph burns, founder and CEO of Tier 11, alongside my amazing at home co host, Lauren E.
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B
Petrila, the founder of Mongoose Media. Host.
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A
So glad you joined us here today. And man, your voice sounds great today. You must have a new microphone.
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B
Doesn't look at the color of this mic.
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A
Whoa. Gentlemen, you gotta get over to perpetualtraffic.com YouTube just to see Lauren's cool new purple mic.
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B
Pink mic. How dare you.
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A
Well, it kind of looks purple. Is it more fuchsia to me? I think. You know what?
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B
What a boy Endzer.
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A
Anything that's like pinky purpley, I say is fuchsia. Anyway, yeah, so besides hobnobbing with politicians and hanging out at state capitals, you have been doing like a lot of digital marketing these days. Probably on the Meta platform is my guess.
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B
You know this is a chill big ass number. I could say it out loud, but it's really intimidating. When I said it out loud last time and I was like, yeah, there's.
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A
A lot going on right now and the reason why we're doing this, I don't even know. It's going to be three part series. I keep saying it's a three part series, but it might actually be longer because the history of Meta is a pretty big history. We're going to skip over some of the more minor parts. This is a continuation of part one where we talked about the fact that Meta has more influence than the Roman Empire and also the British Empire almost combined. Well, just about the same as the British Empire, which is crazy to think. And if you missed that episode, we're going to leave links in the show notes for that. Why Meta is the best advertising platform on the planet in 2026. But today we're going to get into the advertising portion before we said yes, this is a really big platform. If you are selling online, if you're a VP of marketing, if you're a CEO, if you're a CMO, I don't care what you sell. I've been on three or four different prospect calls this week. Some are B2B, some are B2C. Like, you know, everyone is on this platform so much so that it covers, what did we say, five eighths of the entire planet last time? So the point is, it could have.
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B
Just been like, 6, 7.
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A
Yeah, 6, 7, 6, 7. My favorite number, by the way. I know that's like a thing now.
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B
69 is my favorite number. So.
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A
So you hear that? Yeah. Whataburger is now like banning 6, 7 and 6, 9 from, like, when you order your burger, like, and they yell it out because, like, so it's like.
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B
13 on the hotel elevator.
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Exactly. It's the same sort of thing. So that's. That's what's happening now.
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B
Some of the best In N Out content has been watching, like, the consumers go wild and they're like, order number 68, order 65, order 67. Like, that's just great brand exposure.
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A
It's In N Out Burger. Absolutely. I'm sorry about that. I sick. I said burger. I've been to In N Out Burger once. I've never been to hamburger because we don't have any.
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B
You went in and out.
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A
I went in and out. And I was like, eh, it's all right. I like. I posted on Instagram. I'm like, yeah, it's pretty good. Anyway, probably pissed off, like, you know, 90% of our California audience today. This is a California company, if you didn't know it's in Silicon Valley. Hint, hint. And they're pretty big right now, so. But how did they get there? And how did they get there from the advertising standpoint? Not a lot of people know this is that we're going to sort of breeze past the origination story with Zuck and his co founders. And, you know, what were the guys? It was Dustin Moskowitz it was Eduardo Saverin. The social network does a pretty good job the movie of showing this whole thing. We're going to skip past that part because there's no advertising yet, although I believe it was Eduardo was in charge of advertising and failed miserably at it, even though he was ousted later on. And he's now a like a gazillionaire, so don't feel too badly for him. But what Zuck really wanted to do, and I think this is throughout the history of Meta and Facebook, is that he really underscored the importance of the user experience and the user experience to unite people, to unite the world on a singular platform. This is the thing that's been consistent with him. Say what you want about Zuckerberg, the point is he's been very consistent with that throughout his entire time at Facebook. You know, he turned down billions of dollars in offers from other companies and kept going on this thing, now turned it into Meta. But one of the original advertising parts to them was a deal that they did with Microsoft. You wear this in 2006.
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B
What? Well, I wouldn't, I couldn't work them.
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So yeah, yeah, 2006 you were like junior high school. But anyway, no, were you in high school? They actually, domestically, they outsourced their advertising. They finally said, believe was Savon who finally said like, let's just strike a deal with somebody and sell the eyeballs on the platform. And so they struck a deal with Microsoft in 2006 and after rejecting a $1 billion bid by Yahoo to actually take over the company, they did a strategic partnership with Microsoft. And still to this day, Zuck and Bill Gates are very cozy, very friendly. And he was also very friendly with Steve Jobs, believe it or not. They're very, very similar personality wise. But anyway, enough of that analysis. The key is that was their first deal after they invented the News feed in the very same year. It's almost like they, they, they started the News feed, which today we sort of take for granted. But then they actually did the Microsoft deal in the, like within weeks of each other. And all the things we now take for granted that started way back in 2006. Is that kind of a mind blower? If you sort of go back and do the research here, like that's how it all started.
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B
I'm almost like wondering like, because OpenAI's relationship, like their, their one of their first early on deals was like with Reddit. And so I wonder if the same team from Microsoft was like, hey, let's go after these social platforms or like where they structure these type of relationship deals. Being OpenAI is a subsidiary of Microsoft. Well, they wouldn't have been then. Oh no, it was like two years anyways. It is. It's really interesting how Microsoft has positioned themselves in this and in other really big advertising deals quietly. I mean, maybe, maybe it was loud, just I never heard about it. But also it wasn't.
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I actually didn't know I was doing research prior to this show. And by the way, there's props to another podcast that I listen to quite a bit actually called Acquired. It's the Acquired Podcast. They do a much more detailed breakdown of Meta if you want to go even deeper down the rabbit hole. They do like a three hour show, four hour show on this after interviewing Zuckerberg. So a great podcast. We'll leave links in the show notes for that. It's called the Acquired Podcast. A little bit nerdy, a little bit like too detailed for me. They're both two programmers who are definitely not marketers, but if you're our marketer and you love to nerd out in the sort of stuff, it's a great, great show for that. Anyway, the point is this, is that that deal actually enabled Meta to reject this bid by Yahoo for a billion dollars because they finally said, okay, we have a way to monetize the platform. We've got this deal where we're going to actually sort of white label or enable ads, you know, through Microsoft, through the Microsoft, which wasn't even like Bing. There was no Microsoft Network of advertising. Yeah, they just had all these users and they started to license it through Meta or Facebook at that particular point in time. So very interesting. That's way back in 2006. So that's when monetization really started. If you're still relying on Google and Facebook for all your performance, you're missing taking your performance even further. That's where Realize comes in. Realize helps performance marketers tap into more ad placements across hundreds of premium websites, reaching audiences you just can't find on traditional social channels. With intent based, contextually relevant ad placements, you can drive real conversions, not just impressions, and expand your acquisition strategy with better data, more control and higher roi. Thousands of brands already use Realize to diversify their ad spend, boost performance and unlock high quality traffic websites that will help you scale your business results. So if you're ready to go beyond the usual playbook and start reaching new audiences, check out discover.taboola.com perpetual to learn more. Or just check out the link over at perpetual traffic traffic.com for this episode. I was not on Meta until years after that, but I didn't realize that that's actually the sort of the evolution of it. The next thing that they did is. And this is one of their biggest mistakes.
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B
And.
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And if you go back and you do a Google search for Facebook mistakes or Facebook failed projects, it's like the list is so long of things that they've done. And one of the biggest things that they did that just really pissed off users is they did this thing called Beacon and this was in 2007. And so what this did is it broadcasted user purchases through the platform through the Microsoft. So anybody who bought something through an ad, it would then be broadcast to force social engagement with people's followers and people's friends.
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B
Oh my gosh. You would have receipts.
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So they made like these. Yeah. It would show like if you went out and bought something that you didn't want, the public.
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Oh my gosh, hello world.
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It would automatically appear in your profile. Yeah. Whatever you're like. So. Yeah. So they wanted to.
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Or imagine like a pregnancy test. If you're a military wife and your partner's overseas and you buy a pregnancy test.
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You imagine like the, the failures and mistakes. We'll leave a link in the show notes about this. But failures and mistakes by Meta and how they've been able to just overcome it just because they move fast and they break things. And that was sort of the. That was the mantra back then. It is not the case now. They're a little bit more logical. Zuckerberg thinks things through a little bit less. Less of that hacker mentality. You know, even though meta is still on. What is it? One Hacker Way. Have you ever been to the Meta?
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Yeah, I have.
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Yeah. Home Office. Yeah.
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Yes.
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It's actually on the other side of the sign for meta. It's actually the old sign for Sun Microsystems.
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Oh, is it? Yeah, because I was like, I have my picture from 12 years ago when I did a thumbs up down in front of the Facebook thumbs up headquarter sign.
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Yeah.
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I never, man, I remember going behind it. But that's cool that they had a nod to their old home. But either way. Yeah, yeah, they're on One Hacker Way. It's a huge.
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It's absolutely massive. It's like airplane hangar sized buildings there. It's absolutely crazy. But anyway, so if I can, I'll dig up a picture. Let's wrote in the show notes that where I actually take a selfie in front of the now Meta sign. But in the back is actually the Sun Microsystems sign, which is a company that's now defunct, but did actually have its. Have quite a run in the 90s into the early 2000s anyway. So just those two things right there, just like an example of one of their big mistakes, but relating it back to advertising. So they really struggled with the advertising model to start. They had no idea. And this is total zuck. It's like, all right, we've got all these eyeballs, we've got at that point, hundreds of millions of users, but how do we monetize it? And the partnership with Microsoft was the first step. The next step was, remember the right hand rail ads? Those happened shortly thereafter, in and around sort of 2007, 2008, 2009. And that's when I actually started to advertise in 2000, late 2008, late 2000 or early 2009. Yeah, doing affiliate marketing. And it was only desktop. Keep in mind, no mobile yet. No mobile Facebook. But it was the right hand rail ads. Do you remember those? Like the.
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B
I assume it's like you had, like I was, I remember when I was on Facebook desktop and you had the birthdays on the right hand side.
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So this is an actual picture you can see here. This is what the ads used to look like. They were this sort of odd size and they would just sort of hover on the right hand side on desktop. Okay. Yeah. And so this is what we used to buy. I mean, these were the types of ads all the time.
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B
And it would fit when you scrolled.
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It would fit when you scrolled. Yeah. So it sort of hung there. So picture like this scrolling here and those just kind of stay static on the top. And then oftentimes they would layer them, maybe two or three of them. And this was the sort of the Sheryl Sandberg effect. She started, she came in, in and around this time. And this is how they were able to wean themselves off Microsoft, start their own native platform. But remember, this was all desktop at this time. And the, the targeting was really sort of rudimentary. It was where people lived, what their gender was. It was male, female was. That was the only. There wasn't anything else. And then who they were interested in, male or female or. It's complicated. And then last but not least, marital status, which is either married, single or I believe it's complicated, was the third one and where you lived, what your age was. And that was it. That's all the targeting that you actually had. And that's before ads went into The News feed. And that's when things really started to take off, which is in, you know, 2013, 2012. That's when things really started to accelerate for meta. And one of the important parts to this is that they realized that in their, I think it was their 2012 IPO filing, when they actually had to went for their IPO, they actually submitted the fact that all of their average revenue per user was on desktop and literally none of it was coming from mobile. Even though mobile with like the adoption of the iPhone, all of everything sort of shooting towards mobile, they realized they basically didn't have a mobile advertising solution. And that's the reason why we now have ads in the News feed. Because those right hand rail ads obviously won't work in an app and the blue app on your iPhone or on your, you know, your Android device. And that's why we now have ads in the newsfeed. I don't know if people realize that evolution, we sort of take all of this.
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B
We didn't always have ads in mobile. Like I'm. I mean again for me it's like Instagram and Facebook has been one in the same and like Instagram has always been a mobile app. Then they made desktop and then they finally made a better version for the tablet like this year under Adam Zeri's direction. But it's like weird thinking that you didn't have mobile ads on. I believe it. I just, I didn't start advertising on Facebook until 2014, 2015 and so in that capacity it makes sense. I just, I'm still like, wow, that was, I mean I. Oh shit. I've been doing this for 10 years. Yeah, yeah, but, and so before that and it's like I remember like all the targeting options that are available. So when you're saying that you had such a limited number of targeting to then when it was like wide open and you could target people's Facebook groups, you could target very specific interests. I remember in 2017 getting a book allegedly that had printed every single like available like or interest that's inside of the meta ecosystem. Like you would like research it. And I remember like learning from Molly Pittman and something like how like you would like find out different ways and, and trying to find interest. Cause it was so ad set heavy.
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Yeah.
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And then I remember like seeing this book. It was like a printed like book of Congress kind of situation and how extensive it was and then.
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And that's how you targeted. Right?
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Yeah.
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But what people liked was the targeting initially on the ad platform, but then it became far more than that. And then in 2013, this is after this shift towards mobile. This is probably just a little bit before your time when you first started advertising on the platform, is that this shift towards mobile was the thing and they were really kind of caught with the, their, with their pants down, so to speak. So much so that the stock absolutely cratered when analysts read that, wait a second, everything's going towards mobile. But Meta or Facebook at that time doesn't even have a mobile advertising solution. People were just like, dumping the stock, like, this is the end of Facebook. I don't think, I don't think people realize how drastic that was. And oh, by the way, right after they, they announced they were going public, they're in what's referred to as a quiet period, like right prior to your ipo, where you can't make any, you know, big news announcements. You can't, because it would alter the stock, like all this sort of stuff. And oh yes, they, they bought this little company called Instagram during the quiet period. Can you imagine the balls of, of, of Zuckerberg and doing this? It's like he's absolutely insane, but insane in kind of a good way. So, yeah, we all know this as marketers and business owners, that growth is amazing. Until something breaks or some catastrophic event, heaven forbid, should ever happen to your business. And I don't mean just your ad campaigns going sideways. Maybe a client slips on a wet floor or a shipment suddenly goes missing, or a contractor gets hurt, or an employee gets hurt. Suddenly the thing you've been building can take a huge financial hit, maybe one that you worry might take down the company. And you should always be thinking about that as the business owner. Most people don't think about business insurance until after something goes wrong, when it's already too expensive or it's too late. That's why we're big fans of what next insurance is. Doing business Insurance is so important for any business, whether you're online or, or offline. And they've basically taken the pain out of business insurance. It's 100% online, ridiculously fast, and designed specifically for small businesses. You answer just a few questions and next tells you exactly what coverage you need. No phone calls, no waiting, no holding the line for the next representative. Just fast, affordable production that actually has your back when things go sideways. Policies start for as little as $29 a month. Don't wait for a crisis to remind you you're not covered. Get protected in minutes@nextinsurance.com perpetual. That's nextinsurance.com perpetual have you.
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B
There's a book I read, I can't remember which one it was, but there was a book that I had that talked about that deal and how Twitter was actually like, well, yeah, Twitter now. No X now. Twitter then had been like presenting a really strong deal. So I feel like this would be a really good point. I'm going to pull up in that last book and grab it that I had before. And then I feel like for the next one we can do like the Instagram era. So like we did the desktop era and like going over what meta went through to now where we're in a mobile era and leading up to the most important aspect is like, where are we now? And how, like if, if you think about, if you're listening to this and you're like, wow, that was so weird, there's a desktop era now we're gonna talk about the mobile era. Just know that what Ralph is leading up to is lead is 10 times bigger than this jump that we're talking about.
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A
Right? It's the reason why we're doing this because I think, you know, when I talk about this, I know today's sort of a shorter show, but when I say the Andromeda Update is as big as when ads went in the newsfeed, people are like, what are you talking about? I mean, when advertising went into the newsfeed and all of a sudden we had this incredible target. Remember the targeting that was in there? Like the big data companies, you had insane levels of targeting. Like the targeting, major ads, like you could put anything in front of people, but the targeting was so damn good. Now it's the exact opposite with Andromeda. That Andromeda update for the vast majority of our clients are wide open targeting with some age targeting and some, you know, geographic targeting, but literally it's the ads themselves and the creative themselves that creates the targeting. So I think it's important to know where we're at right now to understand where we've been when it comes to meta. And we'll continue this conversation with more Instagram and more mobile stuff and more meta knowledge bombs on part three, which hopefully we can finish up in record time here. But anything to add before we sign off on part two here on why Meta is the best advertising platform on the planet in 2026.
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It's so much more epic of what's coming and I'm just like, we're, we're barely, barely touching the surface. And I'm like, I'm really excited so hang tight. So you understand how dramatically different it's about to be.
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Yeah. We haven't even talked about deep neural networks. We haven't talked about AI. We haven't talked about AI. Haven't talked about this other thing called WhatsApp which they even monetized yet. There's so many different things that we'll be discussing on part three of Perpetual Traffic here sort of as your year end wrap up with some knowledge about why you should be adopting the meta platform in 2026. So of course everything that we mentioned here will be in the show notes over@petpetual traffic.com of course watch us on our YouTube channel perpetual traffic.com YouTube and as always wherever you listen to podcasts we appreciate rating and review gets us out to a wider audience teach people how to do this stuff the right through metrics that matter and growth that scales. So on behalf of my amazing co host Lauren Ippetrulo ciao till next show. See ya.
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You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.