Who else watched Gordon Ramsey make eggs once and now they always cook their eggs in a small pot and keep stirring?

PS - I know theres typos in here, just a heads up in advnce… ;)

🔳 Media Buying Teams & Structure

Late last year I had the privilege to steal an hour of time from some of the largest media buying shops in our space such as Optimize to Convert, Standard Conversions and Scale Up Media Agency…all with the purpose to understand how they hire, structure, scale and manage their media buying teams; and heres what I learned.

🔵 They All Have Lived It

As a leader, you don’t just get to point your finger and expect to see the results you want from your people. You need to lead by example. You need to not just coach and mentor your team but show them that you went through the mud, the very same mud they are going through so that they know they can turn to you and be confident you can lead them out of it. They’ve brushed off the hard hits that came in their journey, they’ve had the super late nights into mornings analyzing data and uploading new angles, and they’ve been kicked in the teeth with ad bans and account suspensions.

Talking to leaders like Tyler Day of Optimize to Convert, he’s done every last thing his media buyers have done and he wouldn’t expect them to do something that he hasnt done himself. As a leader, you need to either know the process inside and out to instill trust in your team or you need to ensure you’re building the right people capital to help lead that charge.

🔵 Media Buyer Collaboration is Key to Them

If you’re in the stage of growing your media buying team and you feel as if all your media buyers are silo’d, you are definitely not alone. Its not easy to get other media buyers to share ideas and hold each other accountable, especially if their compensation is tied to performance, I mean…I get why they wouldn’t. Having your media buyers working together, sharing ideas and pushing each other is my FUCKING dream. We struggle that with our media buyers here at PALO. At the end of the day, thats not necessarily a bad thing if you’re hitting your KPI’s but the power of getting some absolute killer media buyers, on a zoom or in a room, and chopping it up is unbelievably powerful.

Teddy Truong of Scale Up Media Agency was in the middle of addressing this challenge when we spoke and based upon the very few chats we’ve had after and looking from the outside in, it looks like he’s not only solved this but is crushing it.

Find a way to gamify your media buying team with stats but not dollar amounts. An advisor of mine mentioned that if you want to watch your media buyers grow and compete, get them jealous of each other over the next persons CPA, margin %, overall growth. Also, find ways to tie the entire departments performance to one big goal so that if the whole division hits a goal, everyone gets rewarded. It will be amazing to see the team work and accountability flourish organically.

🔵 Specialists Are More Important Than Ever

I think this may be a controversial take…

A full stack marketer with an affiliates mindset is so hard to find and when you do find them, they’re like a wild animal. They cant be tamed and shouldn’t be tamed. Banking on finding a stud well versed in every platform is a bet that isn’t the smartest one to place. Our space is becoming more and more competitive and every platform is becoming more “specialized”. With that, people like Ray Sinalo over at Standard Conversions have team members that focus deep in one platform and one platform only. This is because every platform is evolving in the way content is consumed, the type of audience, the strongest type of action and how creatives should be formatted. If you’re going to get up to a six figure spend a day, you’ll want to ensure you dont lose your ass on one days spend because your media buyer has knowledge a mile wide on platforms but an inch deep on each. This rings so true with paid search vs youtube. Yeah same platform but wildly different in terms of the psychology behind the ads and the stage the user is at in the funnel.

🟢 Closing Thoughts

Media buyers are the back bone of the performance space. Whether they be hands on media buyers or the ones that have lived it and now lead. If you’re looking to build your media buying team or just want to learn more, DM someone you respect or shoot them an email. Thats what I did and I was able to chop it up and get different points of view on what success looks like.

🤖 AI Is Kind of Overhyped…

I was on Twitter last week and so a bunch of hype around a company called Icon.com. They claim that their platform is a fully integrated, all in one system that manages your Facebook ads, creates copy, videos and uploads. It had a build up with names like Peter Thiel behind it as an investor and also, a shiny landing page to get people through the registration. (PS - i kind of love their landing page). Now I think the idea is awesome, a full stack marketer that essentially works 24/7….sign me up. But when diving in, it fell short of the expectations it set. I don’t think its a bad system, I just think it has a long while to go until its truly a full stack CMO out of the box.

The point of all this is that I think AI is getting a little too overhyped (right now) for what it can actually do or replace. There doesn’t seem to be one system that is the perfect solution. A lot of the people I’ve spoken to are building out systems that tie together several AI platforms to accomplish the job they want. When speaking with an absolute AI monster like Samar Hussain, his approach is building within autonomous systems like Visual Studio and Cline which connects different LLM’s together to get the job done, and it takes a lot of trial and error. By the way, Samar takes on clients for jobs like this and he knows what he’s doing, DM him on LinkedIn or reply here and i’ll make an intro.

Now Im not saying i’m anti AI but I dont rely on it to do the job that a very strong marketer should be doing because its not there yet. We use AI at PALO to bring things across the finish line. I very much prefer just whipping out my iPhone and recording myself talking through different copy points and our media buyers prefer this too. Its straight up real and it doesnt look hacky. Its also free. Now I’ll swap out my face at times if I dont want to be seen using HeyGen but thats typically the extent. I rely on our strategic mindset to create winning copy or to determine what should I be doing in the video or the green screen background, not AI.

AI isnt going to do this, your experience and your creative engine 🧠 is going to do this so stop outsourcing this as there is no free lunch. AI is creatine, its not going to lift the weights for you but it’ll damn well make you better.

🔍️ Some Ad Insights from PALO

Our biggest verticals at PALO right now are Medicare and still MVA and we’re beginning to grow home insurance as well as social security disability.

MVA has begun to take a nice turn and we’ve seen that our overall quality of leads turning into retainers has spiked. This is a combination of changing our creative angles and investing a bit more into search has improved what our clients are seeing.

Below are the fun stuff when it comes to our facebook side which is still our biggest spender.

Current Metrics from Facebook Ads (As of 4/30/25)

• CPM: $80.73

• CPC: $6.23

• CTR: 1.29%

• Average CPL: $66.07

• Current ROI: +18%

🛠️ Tools We’ve Been Loving.

🤖 Visual Studio w/ Cline & Mass Page Creator: We’ve been doing SEO and mass page site creation for ranking pages organically and have been wanting an easy way to get unique content for every single page we create. We create sites that has a city page for every city in the country so creating unique content for every single city is a very hard task. We’ve found that using VS with Cline allows us to create a page for each autonomously and build content thats 100% unique, which google LOVES. We’re running tests now and will report back when we have more results.

If you need an introduction or for us to point you in the right direction, just email me at [email protected], and I’d be happy to do so.

🍣 Roll-Ups and Acquisitions

Im starting to hear more about acquisitions taking place in our space but not the typical route where PE or a big corp comes in and scoops up a marketing agency, its actually reversed. Marketing agencies wanting to grow are either purchasing/merging other agencies or marketing agencies looking to own more of the funnel are buying businesses such as insurance agencies to service their own traffic. This is so fucking cool and proves that the acquisition funnel is so important, difficult and sought after.

This is where my buddy Greg Miller over at GRP ads has been focusing. They’ve been making moves in our space to partner with other agencies by bringing them into the fold of GRP while still allowing the founder to keep a sizable chunk of the equity for when the parent company inevitably sells for 7 quadrillion pesos. Whats really awesome about this is they know the space well, so well that the agencies they’ve been bringing in have been growing by 300% simply be leveraging their cash and systems. Thats pretty good especially if you can retain equity too.

Im posting this as a favor for Greg, so dont think this is a paid promo! But if you’re smaller but profitable, I really think you should at least have a convo with Greg. You can shoot him an email: [email protected]. He’s also very active on LinkedIn if you want to DM him.

📼 Content We’re Loving

🖊️ Closing Quote

After you read this all and made it here, try the below, maybe it’ll change your day/week, maybe not but whatever.

1. Close your computer.

2. Go outside and walk.

3. Call your mom or dad and just ask them to tell you about what it was like raising you.

If your parents aren’t around, call someone you care about and just talk some shit. Get away from a screen, get connected with people you care about and I guarantee the hour you just spent will make your day.

Do it.

~Love Tony 🥦