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Sept. 24, 2021

What Was Learned Studying A Billion Dollars of Ad Spend With Travis Chambers

What Was Learned Studying A Billion Dollars of Ad Spend With Travis Chambers

This episode features guest Travis Chambers. A chief media hacker, Travis is the Founder of Chamber Media, a growth and video agency with 100 employees that has tripled the revenue of 6 multi-million-dollar DTC companies, driven $600M in tracked revenue, managed $100M in ad spend, makes 3,000+ videos a month for ads on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Find out how it is possible to run and grow a successful marketing agency while working 4 days a week and still balancing life and work for both you and your employees.

In this episode, Travis reveals what his team learned in studying a billion dollars in ad spend. Listen as Travis explains the 7 foundational video ad types that every ad account should have and test: spokesperson/anchor, closer/dynamic ads, product demo, lifestyle, social proof, case study and unboxing. Find out what each of these video types are; why each of these video types work and how you should use them in your own marketing.

Why it is that most agencies are focused on winning awards instead of creating video ads that actually work and how this drives Travis to grow Chamber Media.

Finally, thinking of starting your own business. Learn why Travis suggests that you start by selling your time before you start selling products and how to best gain experience to be successful

Episode Action Items:

You can find more information regarding Travis Chambers by visiting his agency, Chamber Media at https://www.chamber.media.

ABOUT THE HOST:

Andy Splichal, who was recently named to the Best of Los Angeles Awards’ Fascinating 100 List, is the founder and managing partner of True Online Presence, author of the Make Each Click Count book series and Founder of Make Each Click Count University found at https://www.makeeachclickcountuniversity.com.

He is a certified online marketing strategist with twenty plus years of experience and counting helping companies increase their online presence and profitable revenues. To find more information on Andy Splichal visit https://www.trueonlinepresence.com, read the full story on his blog at blog.trueonlinepresence.com or shop his books on Amazon or at https://www.makeeachclickcount.com.


New episodes of the Make Each Click Count Podcast, are released each Friday and can be found on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast and on Make Each Click Count at https://podcast.makeeachclickcount.com.

ABOUT THE HOST:

Andy Splichal is the World's Foremost Expert on Ecommerce Growth Strategies. He is the acclaimed author of the Make Each Click Count Book Series, the Founder & Managing Partner of True Online Presence and the Founder of Make Each Click Count University. Andy was named to The Best of Los Angeles Award's Most Fascinating 100 List in both 2020 and 2021.

New episodes of the Make Each Click Count Podcast, are released each Friday and can be found on Apple Podcast, iHeart Radio, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts and www.makeeachclickcount.com.

Transcript

Andy Splichal 0:00

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host Andy Splichal. We're happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic which is What was Learned Studying a Billion Dollars of Ad Spend. Today's guest is a Forbes 30 under 30 Lister and founder of Chamber Media, a growth and video agency with 100 employees. This tripled the revenue of six multimillion dollar DTC companies driven 600 million and track revenue, manage 100 million and ad spend. Currently makes 3000 plus videos a month for ads on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest. A big hello to Travis Chambers. Hi, Travis.

Travis Chambers 1:29

Hi. How's it going?

Andy Splichal 1:30

It's going great. I'm happy you could join us.

Travis Chambers 1:33

Yeah, I'm excited to be here.

Andy Splichal 1:35

Now to start off. In the bio it says you were a under 30 Lister. So let's start there. I heard it there's a funny story behind how you got on this list. What is that story if you don't mind sharing

Travis Chambers 1:49

The Forbes list?

Andy Splichal 1:50

Yeah, yeah, the Forbes list.

Travis Chambers 1:52

So um, so I didn't think I had much of a shot. But I was like, okay, if I'm a chief media hacker, that's what I call my job title, then I should be able to figure out how to hack this thing. So what I did is I went and I asked the most famous friend that I had, if I could nominate myself from her. So I'm like, Look, you don't have the time to fill out all this stuff. I'll fill it out. Can I nominate as as you she said fine. So then I had her tweet it out. And then I just went on a spree to try and get everyone I could to retweet her tweet. And mentioning the Forbes editors. And it just got their attention. It got their attention. And then I had the revenue growth to pass their their checks where they like get your tax return tax returns and stuff to just validate your business

Andy Splichal 2:48

Sure.

Travis Chambers 2:49

And, and that was it. And I think if I just would have had a random person apply, or nominate me or whatever, I just don't think, you know, I don't think I would have got it.

Andy Splichal 2:59

How famous was the person who nominated?

Travis Chambers 3:03

I'd say like, I'd say like, mainstream, like mid mid sized, famous but like internet wise, like Mega famous Laura Clary. She's, she's got like seven or 8 million followers or something like that.

Andy Splichal 3:18

Okay, okay. And today, you make funny videos, and you've grown your age, save from 20 to 100 employees a year, all while adhering to a four day workweek. Yeah, how are you doing it?

Travis Chambers 3:33

So it was about two years ago, where we thought, Man, this is kind of hard to run this business. And you know, it would be nice to just have Friday's off where people don't bug us and, but it also is just maybe the right thing to do. Because when I when I was working in the ad agency business in Los Angeles, I just couldn't find a job that had less than 55 - 60 hours a week. It's just the industry is just it's a consuming job. It's a consuming industry. I think a lot of people especially move into LA that that are probably were willing to work for less and work more hours in order to advance their careers. And I had a kid at home. And so I just didn't have that luxury. And so I thought, Okay, well maybe I'll just start my own ad agency. And maybe we'll just innovate enough where people can work 35 - 40 hours a week. And still, we could still do well. And so it was a few years in where we actually started to have some employees real sizable team instead of just you know, two or three of us. And so I thought maybe I saw some articles come out about the four day workweek. They had tested it in New Zealand, they had done a study on it and then they had also tested it somewhere some company in Japan and tested it. So we thought Well, let's give it a shot. And if it doesn't work, we'll just go back to it. And at that time, I think we are Yeah. 10 employees told employees something like that. And in that two year span, we've grown and now I think we're one of the biggest ad agencies in our specific niche within the industry. And we've done it, you know, without people really working more than 40 hours a week, 35 hours a week.

Andy Splichal 5:25

Now does that has nothing to do with the Tim Ferriss' Four day workweek?

Travis Chambers 5:30

You know, I did read that book. And that Tim Ferriss was actually the first light bulb that went off in my head, that, Hey, maybe I could be an entrepreneur. Maybe I could start a business one day. But I never really believed that the four day four hour workweek was possible. And I still just don't think you can really do anything really great. on for hours a week. But, but it was, it was what set the light bulb off. You know, it was what like shed light on the path. The book that really drove it home, though, the book I would recommend everyone read that wants to eventually start their own business is the $100 Startup. Because the four day four day the four hour workweeks really trying to get you it's a very sensational title. It's a it's a promise that I don't think is very realistic. The $100 work week, the $100 startup makes a very practical leap into how you could do this and it's just overviews thousands of businesses that were started for $100. And mine, I started my business for $100. Because when you're starting a company, you know 90% of companies require a lot of capital, a lot of connections, a lot of privilege, for lack of a better term. And other than being white and having a good education. I didn't have a ton of that I didn't have a ton of connections, I didn't have a ton of capital and stuff like that. So when I read that book, that's when it became real. I thought, Man, I can start an ad agency for 100 bucks for a business license. And I'll just start selling my time.

Andy Splichal 7:12

You know, let me go back because I am curious. I I also got started in our Los Angeles ad agency in the miracle mile area. So I'm curious who was it that you are with? You don't mind saying?

Travis Chambers 7:25

So I was at Crispin Porter and Bogusky.

Andy Splichal 7:28

Okay.

Travis Chambers 7:30

That and, and that was great. I was only like 45 - 50 hours a week there. That was pretty manageable. And then I went to 20th Century Fox, and worked at an internal agency there called Mcbeard. And part of the reason I had to work so many hours is I was just so out of my depth. And I had to I had to put in a lot more time in order to do the stuff that people were probably getting done and 50 - 55 hours. And it was, you know, it was like eight or nine hours a day, seven days a week. It was kind of what what I was having to do. And there was a lot of late night deadlines that were due like the next morning, and it was just crazy. What agency were you at?

Andy Splichal 8:11

I was with Italia gal. Cool. So they had Smart and Final and Del Taco were some of their big clients. So the question I wanted to do the Chamber Media, what you guys did is you went and you you took in you studied 50,000 ads with $1 billion in ad spend. And tried to figure out the formula. What? Why did you decide to do this and what came out of this study?

Travis Chambers 8:42

So we have always made really big production videos. And up until three or four years ago, that was that was what worked best is a long video ad the type production that you know, I was like the Dollar Shave Club thing. But then ads start to get more expensive. And Facebook ads came out. We started before Facebook video ads existed, we were mostly just YouTube ads, and Facebook ads just trying to change things where you could run smaller pieces of content, you could run two, three second videos, you weren't just trying to prevent people from skipping anymore. Now it was an impression game. Now it was can I get five seconds of someone's done? Can I get eight seconds of someone's time? It wasn't really like can I get them to skip this ad and then keep them here as long as possible. And so what happened is our success rate with these larger production videos, it just started to go down. And we started to see some other people who were only running image ads or kind of like very quick videos, in some cases were outperforming some of our big production videos. And that's when we thought okay, there's something wrong here. We need to really look at what we're doing and why, and that was about three, four years ago. And that's where we kicked off this project. And so we put a team on analyzing every ad that we had ever created. But we also went and we scraped the top 1% of the top 2000, Shopify stores ads. And we put them all into a database. Once we got all those codified, and titled by a dozen different parameters by every characteristic really that we could find within the ad, with meta tags and stuff. At this point, we had a database 50,000 ads, and we started to see patterns, we started to realize that of 100 different ad types that we had identified, they seem to fall into seven different categories. And so that's when we completely changed how we do business is with this approach of the foundational, the seven foundational ads.

Andy Splichal:

Well, that's great. Don't keep us in suspense. What are what are those seven foundations?

Travis Chambers:

Yeah, let me see, I might have to pull them up. Sometimes I have a hard time remembering each one. So there's a spokesperson, ad, there is a closer, there is a product demo, lifestyle, social proof, case study. And. I'm missing one, I'm gonna have to pull these up.

Andy Splichal:

And so a successful ad needs to have one of these seven, or multiple of the seven.

Travis Chambers:

Rather, an ad account should have all seven of these ads that have every every brand should make each of these seven ads, and test them. Now it gets crazier. Not every. Some ads work better in certain industries. It's really crazy. And I'll go through some of that stuff. I'm just pulling up the the seven foundational ads right here.

Andy Splichal:

Great, okay, did you find what number seven was?

Travis Chambers:

I'll find it. So. So let's, if you want to go through which what these ads are as far as, alright, I've got pulled up here. So one is the spokesperson anchor ad, that's kind of the thing I explained, we sometimes call it the everything ad because it has all the other seven types inside of it. So it's usually a minute and a half long. That's the ideal length that we have found. The other is a product demo, I think I don't think I need to explain that. I think everyone knows what that is. Obviously, there's different ways to do product demos, you could do stop motion animation, you could do side by side comparison, you could show it being on, there's all sorts of different ways to do it. Third is social proof. So this is third party credibility. So whether this is a press feature, whether this is a collage of testimonials, whether it's your review, rating, whatever that is, there's there's tons of different ways to do testimonials and things like that. Sometimes this also includes UGC, user generated content, a bunch of users just showing themselves using the product talking about it for Is dynamic ads, sometimes like we call closer ads, those are basically where people just take a bunch of clips together. And they're running them in retargeting. So a lot of dropshippers use these a lot of Chinese manufacturers use these kinds of ads, it's actually pretty common ad type, you will see a lot of the like top 1000 brands though doing this. Five is a case study. So that's any type of empirical evidence. That could be also a side by side comparison. One of the most popular case studies is it before and after. But there could be clinical studies, clinical trials, there could be talking about the ingredients talking about the materials that go into the creation. Just showing proving that this product is quality six is lifestyle. And that's just showing what you will feel like and what your life might look like. With this product, it's really a big one and especially in apparel, and then seventh is unboxing and that's the one I missed is just showing the product being open the gratification of kind of that experience,

Andy Splichal:

Gratification of ownership. Now, if somebody is struggling with getting, trying to increase their video ad performance, they're struggling. Just getting people to watch a lot of it or interact or take action And where would they start? Is it to incorporate one of those seven? It depends on what vertical? I mean, what would you tell them?

Travis Chambers:

If they want to get started?

Andy Splichal:

Well, if they want to have better results.

Travis Chambers:

So take a look at your ad account, and just look at what you're currently doing. And see if there are are things that that you need to build, and you need to try. And the beauty of this seven foundational ad thing is it just, it just shows you what you're not doing. And about 80% of the accounts that I see, have not tested all of these categories, the most glaring, the most often one is the spokesperson ad. And it's really interesting, because only 2% of the top 1% of ads from the top 2000 Shopify stores is a spokesperson ad. But what's what's so kind of crazy about that, is that spokesperson ads in an ideal mix usually get about 20 30% of the overall performance in certain industries. So that's, that's just an ad that a lot of brands don't make, because they either just don't want to invest. Because it's an it's, the spokesperson ad has all the other seven ad types within it. You know, and, and it doesn't work great for every industry, but it works for most of them. And so a lot of brands, they just don't really make that, you know, kind of investment into that. So for anyone that's wanting to really expand, that's my advice, is make sure you have made every single one of these seven ads, and tested it, and then continue iterating within these categories. So social proof, for example, you want to make you want to you want to test two or three long form, unedited social proof ads, and testimonials. So this is just somebody with their iPhone, that looks raw, they're in their home, and they're just talking about it for like a minute and a half or a minute, then you want to have a testimonial collage. So you want to have seven or eight different testimonials, that are all edited back to back, then you want to have that same ad but like highly produced with motion graphics and music and fast moving stuff with with text overlays and things like that. And then you want to have, you know, show the reviews that you have is one video the reviews. So if you have Amazon reviews, or walmart.com or, or you know any any type of other site, Yelp or whatever that is, that should be an ad, then if you have any press features, you should be showing seven or eight press features, you know, with with hyped up music behind it. And then then you want to have a collage of all of these things in one ad, as well. So wow, then social proof just in one vein, I mean, you, you could make seven or eight different ads. And generally I've seen there's about 10 ways to do each of these ads is what I've seen. And obviously there's endless creative executions. But as far as like the actual ad type, these seven ad categories make up for about 100 different types of ads.

Andy Splichal:

Wow. So how long you're creating all these ads? How long do you run each, until you decide if it's a keeper to continue running or go on to a different format?

Travis Chambers:

Yeah, so it's more of how much you spend, really. And generally speaking within a few $100 on an ad, you can usually get enough to see what's going to happen within an ad set. And usually within an ad set, you want to have about 25 conversions. 25 conversions is where Facebook really starts being able to optimize and use the felt full power of their algorithm. Below that it's just kind of trying to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

Andy Splichal:

So let's, uh, let's talk about Facebook. So you guys, you're creating ads for Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest. Is it mostly Facebook? Is that where you're seeing most of the results or is it across? How's that working?

Travis Chambers:

It's 60%, Facebook 40% other platforms. So Google search and YouTube are about 30% of that pie. And then Pinterest and TikTok are generally the remainder of that pie.

Andy Splichal:

Okay, and what about the new Facebook targeting the recent privacy fight between Facebook and Apple how, how is that affecting what you're doing.

Travis Chambers:

So that's been interesting, because we've seen a lot of brands and agencies get killed off by that iOS update. Because they were overly dependent and overly focused on the advanced and rich targeting features of Facebook, we have always thought that this targeting window is never going to happen again. This is the only time we think that platforms have grown so fast and so quickly that all this targeting was available. But we knew that eventually, even if it wasn't shut down, for by Apple or some iOS privacy update, we knew at some point it was going to just be shut down by competition or, or, you know, legal laws or anything like that. And so we always relied on what's always worked, which is brand marketing. And so we've always invested a lot into our, our messaging and our creative. And, and have always tried to focus on larger, more broad audiences. And to use the creative itself to get people to select sell soft slides. So for example, the old way of doing marketing is I'm going to run something as cheap as I can. And I'm going to get the cheapest clicks that I can, I'm going to get the most people for the little littlest amount of money to my website, and I'm going to get my website given some to purchase. The problem is once they're there, you've already paid for them to be there, which is a big problem. Our approach is, let's make a longer, more, more expensive, well better produce creative, because views are significantly cheaper than clicks. And we don't want everyone clicking. We want everyone viewing and deciding on whether they're a customer or not, before they go to the website. Oh, then the other thing is people like to read. So once we get to the website, we don't want people really having to read we want them to already have been educated on exactly what it is that they want. And they're ready to buy, for example, Mr. Cool and AC unit $1,500 product, the highest converting page for a long time was the checkout page, just the product page, like your standard Amazon product page, basically, with very little information in the video just sold people on it. And they trusted the brand and they just went for it. So that's the that's the importance and the way that we've been able to avoid the iOS update. And we have only seen a 4% drop overall, across our accounts, there's been two or three accounts that have been hit especially hard, but of the dozens and dozens of accounts that we have, we've been able to maintain.

Andy Splichal:

So with this high end creative, are you producing that in house? Or where where's that getting done?

Travis Chambers:

Yeah, so we've just got a army of creators that are in house full, full, full time employees with health insurance, that show up every day, in their their mission is to just create content. And then we have an Ad team as well. So about a third of our team is our ad buyers. And then we have these account managers and these research strategists that connect the tissue between those two disciplines, to to use the software that we have this database that we have called the brain to ensure that we are creating the very highest likelihood ad type for that client. And then it's just an iterative process where you just basically continue to go down the list and and what's cool too is we even have a chart for what the highest performing ad sets are by industry. So so we're not just you know, we're not a one trick pony. When it comes to women's skincare, or men's apparel, or, or jewelry, we've got a kind of a game plan and historic data for all those categories to figure out which creative needs to be made. And the whole reason for this is I it just used to drive me insane, crisp and port number guessing you because it was just like people just have these ideas. And the ideas were always focused on winning awards. And that's how everybody did it. That's how everybody is still doing it at these big brands, what's gonna win us awards, and I noticed that usually stuff that wins awards does not convert it. It gets the agency more business, but it usually doesn't perform for the bottom line. But you've got these corporate lifers inside the brand that also want awards. And so they play along with it too, because they don't they don't care about the company. They care about progression, their career and being featured, you know, in in the press in the marketing press. And so it's just you have a real big problem and it's just a massive waste of resources. And so, you know, seven years ago, I really set out to try and solve this problem of how can we make creative that converts and that performs that also, you know, looks good for the brand. But we don't care about awards, we don't apply for him.

Andy Splichal:

Now, let me let me ask, Do you have a favorite success story of a client that came to you that after maybe struggling to get results came to you and has done well with you guys.

Travis Chambers:

One of my favorites is Transparent Labs. So they got some really good SEO rankings through affiliate marketing. And they were doing about 100 - 200 grand a month in sales that way, and that's kind of like the, that's kind of every ecommerce brand got started, like 10 years ago, is you get some SEO, and then you just collect that traffic. And then you get into a bunch of press features, and you get a bunch of affiliates that write about you, you know, a bunch of blogs, and boom. But that doesn't really work anymore. The real estate rushes over for that game. And so it was interesting, because they hired us because they wanted us to add another acquisition channel. And this was about four years ago, four and a half years ago, Facebook ads were still kind of new. So we launched with with this video production, and this ad spun, and pretty much within six weeks, we're spending 100 grand a month and getting a million a month in sales. And we're able to take labs over a million a month on $150,000 ad spend. And, you know, between the cost of goods and the cost of ads, meaning their margin was pretty good. They were they're making some good money. And about four months later, they lost about 80% of those affiliate SEO search rankings. So that business will have gone from 200 grand a month down to about 30 - 40 grand a month, overnight. Instead, we were able to scale to the moon. And two and half years later, they were able to get acquired for $10 million between those two partners. And it was a great, it was a great, you know, two and a half year kind of case study for that business.

Andy Splichal:

Right. Now, on the other side. Is there any challenges that you struggle with, with your agency on on trying to get results for your clients?

Travis Chambers:

Yeah, we had some huge failures. One of the first ones was for a mattress brand. And I don't remember if you remember this, but do you remember six years ago, when the mattress, the box mattress madness happened? No, no. So you had all these brand new brands like Casper, purple, tufton needle, all these brands came out. And we got hired by this one company to launch their new box mattress brand. But then they had some budget delays. And in the eight months between when we were supposed to launch and when we actually launched, the number of box mattress brands went from about 12 to over 100 in the United States.

Andy Splichal:

Wow.

Travis Chambers:

And what had happened in that time is that these market leaders had actually contracted backdoor deals with Facebook for white labeled gated inventory. Casper was one of the main culprits in this and Casper has done all sorts of shady things in that industry. But basically they gated they gated off this inventory so Facebook didn't allow other mattress brands even access probably a good 50 60% of this this inventory. serve ads to people. Oh, so we launched and our video wasn't good. We thought at that time. That if we make a big enough produced video with enough scenes and props and actors and stuff, it just overwhelmed people and convert. Well, we got so distracted by all of that, that we kind of the message just got lost. The sales message was just totally lost in that whole thing. And it tanked and it tanked bad. I think we launched like 100 grand and spent and then only sold like 40 grand and mattresses. Oh no, that company didn't make it. That company kind of effect on for a year or two. And I think they're still making mattresses now but but that that pretty much like our campaign pretty much killed that company. I think they were doomed anyways because all the competition, but we spent probably 150 200 grand on all between them. Didn't production in the ad spend. And it was pretty sad. That was a pretty sad day.

Andy Splichal:

Now, so we touched on it a bit, as far as you started the business with, with little to no money. But you know, definitely inspiration. Now you've gotten to the point you're you're managing this big team, it's a growing agency, you're taking vacation, you're working four days a week, how would you say to somebody would be the best way for them to start a business if they had little to no money?

Travis Chambers:

In buying?

Andy Splichal:

In anything

Travis Chambers:

Sell your time first. So let's start with the service. Sell your time, don't, don't try to go get inventory, don't try to build a brand. Don't even know go raise money. I think almost every business just started as a service first. There's even a lot of SaaS companies, big Sass company unicorn billion dollar companies that started with the service. First of, hey, let us solve this problem for you as a service provider. And then we'll build software on that. And I think that's the way to go. So like, if you want to, let's say you want to start a men's apparel brand, you don't have big connections, you don't have a lot of capital. Maybe learn the art of design first, and sell your services for designing men's apparel, or go to China, go to Bangladesh, go to India, go visit all these factories, make relationships with these factories, and go sell your supply chain services, your time to other people. Because what you'll do as you'll gain experience with other people's money, and you'll learn this industry inside and out. And you'll also be able to save money. And if you're good, you'll be able to make your six figures a year, hopefully multiple, six figures. And then you'll be able to start build a brand to build a brand, you also start to build case studies. And then you'll be you know, you will be an expert in that thing. And then you can go raise money, then you can you have revenue, you can get a bank loan, if you want, you have a business, that's actually a real thing that has domain expertise that has a place in this industry. So I think people need to start with services. And when you start with a product too soon, if you've got too much capital, if you got too much investment you've got, you know, too many too many connections, then your products probably gonna suck. You've got to eke it out with selling your time in the beginning.

Andy Splichal:

And when you're selling your time, do you feel that it's better to go with that solo to find a business partner or find a few business partners? Where would you be on that?

Travis Chambers:

I've had a high failure rate with partners. Given though most of my projects were pretty small. But the original members of Chamber were not willing to leave their jobs after we had done a million dollars in revenue. And so we actually came to an agreement where I started a completely new entity, and they just kept one of our clients. And so you know, that didn't work out. And then a year later they are I had an intern. That was really great. And after about two or three years of working together, I actually made him a partner. So this is what I'll say about partnerships. Partnerships, I think, usually are the way to go. Usually, you only want to have two, you don't want to have three or four partners. There's too many voices, too many people. And then my advice to partnerships is there always has to be one person that's in charge. Don't do a 50/50 partnership ever. It's got to be 60/40, 70/30. There's got to be somebody who's at the end of the day, it's their thing. They're in charge, and we're all part of it. And

Andy Splichal:

Now, that's yeah, no, that's great advice. Now back to Chamber Media, and what you guys are doing, what problems? Do you feel that you're solving for your clients? And and how would you say you're standing out from the competition?

Travis Chambers:

Yeah. So there's a lot of messages that we've tried that have worked.

We've multiplied the revenue of six multimillion dollar companies just showing the scale scale and size of our operation. And us being like the Henry Ford production line for video and ad buying has worked really well. And just showing people inside how our operation works because in our industry, there's just a lot of kind of fly by night, online business kind of people and they do all sorts of crazy things to get credibility. Some of them are like rent Lamborghini use to try and show their success. Some of them will rent like really nice office space to have a cool background. And so I think just showing, like, now look like we're a $15 million a year company with 100 people, that's helped a lot. You know. But when we didn't have that, when we were only 10 - 15 people, we really had to kind of use our small size, kind of as our strength as like, we'll give you more attention. We're very focused on case studies, performance based. And so, you know, we would like, specifically message that it's not good to go with a big agency you want to work with, directly with the founders, and you're gonna if their time

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, no, no, yeah, you want to take advantage of what what you're doing. For sure. Yeah. Hey

Travis Chambers:

You know, what a truth to that, too. You know?

Andy Splichal:

Now, how would you define what services that you offer clients?

Travis Chambers:

It's pretty much um, video production, bad buying, and email marketing? Pretty much.

Andy Splichal:

Okay, and what what makes the perfect client for your agency, who are you almost going to be able to guarantee you're going to help and be very successful doing?

Travis Chambers:

the higher the highest success rate we have are with brands that are already doing well, of course, success begets success, what we have seen is about 70% of the brands that sign on with us are already doing over $500,000 a year in revenue. And then the our high high, a more expensive packages have a higher success rate. So people that do our anchor video program, you know, which is six figures have the highest success rates. Now, I don't really think that that's necessarily because that program works better than the other programs, I think it's more correlation and causation, I just think that the business is generally just in a better place to be able to scale and to do well. So so that's kind of the most the highest success potential, a lot of times brands will come through, and they kind of want to give us their last penny. And those those have a very high failure rate, if we even work with them. So those are, and then if you look at just the actual products themselves, too, we usually like to see that cost of goods delivered is under 40%. So if it's too expensive to manufacture and ship the product, that's a high chance of failure. We'd like to see to usually if they have a high reorder rate, or a high lifetime value, where or high average order value, that's really good, too. If people are buying it over and over again, or when they buy they're buying more than one. The other thing we see is brands that have multiple products do better. Single Product brands are just a very high risk, and you're not, you're not really getting extra money out of the customer. Once you have three or four complementary products, the chances go way up. And then also just having other sales channels too, we've noticed that brands that maybe have a ranking on Amazon or search search, ads do well for them, or they have an influencer program that does well or they're in retail, usually two or three sales channels is a high indicator of growth.

Andy Splichal:

Now, do you work exclusively with DTC direct to consumer brands?

Travis Chambers:

Yeah, that's that's the majority. It's about 70% of our customer base.

Andy Splichal:

What's the other 30?

Travis Chambers:

Services, local local businesses, services

Andy Splichal:

You do services, okay,

Travis Chambers:

B2B, SaaS, software stuff that those categories kind of fill out, for the most part of the rest of it.

Andy Splichal:

Got it. So how can it end interested listener? Whether they're perfect or not, if they want to learn more about working with you, how would they contact you?

Travis Chambers:

Yeah, so chamber.media is our website. There's no s on that. We have a contact form that's really good to place. Also, I'm really active on LinkedIn. I post thought leadership stuff there almost every day. And then I'm on Instagram as well. travis_chambers.

Andy Splichal:

Great, well thank you.

Travis Chambers:

I'm super responsive on Instagram

Andy Splichal:

Instagram. Okay, cool. Well, thank you very much. This has been fantastic, Travis.

Travis Chambers:

Well, thank you incredible questions.

Andy Splichal:

Great. Well, that is it for today. Remember, if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding Chamber Media, or connecting with Travis you'll find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business using Google paid ads request to join the Make Each Click Count Facebook group I've been releasing some brand new free live trainings and more will be happening soon. In the meantime, remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing and I will talk to you in the next episode.