Thrive Digital manages $500M in annual ad spend with 130 staff members
“What started off as this freelancer consultancy that I started running in a walk-in closet in my old apartment became A 130 people, and we manage about five hundred million dollars a year in ad spend for small and large companies, including Uber, Asana, Tempur…”
Startups relying solely on platform loopholes will fail when conditions change
“What they fail to see is that those loopholes come and go. And so if they scale massively and their entire, you know, businesses predicated on the performance of this one loophole that they found, or like, you know, investing everything in a single channel, an…”
Lifetime value is a misnomer for early-stage companies lacking operating history
“These abstract concepts like lifetime value, which is difficult because like that's, you know, most businesses are relatively new that we work with. And so the idea of lifetime value is kind of a misnomer. Like they don't know what that is yet, but we have to …”
Adding dogs to furniture photos doubled or tripled social ad ROAS
“And one of the art directors was like, put the dog on the couch and let's take some photos of, you know, dogs on, on furniture, which made it more playful and approachable. That one change resulted in a total unlock of their performance on paid social channels…”
Over-optimizing for cost per lead ruins downstream B2B and B2C acquisition ROI
“The common mistake that we see as people build out a funnel, so to speak, for, you know, B to B lead gen projects or B to C lead gen projects is they'll be overly reliant on the first of a sequence of metrics that ultimately yields a sale.”
AI shifted agency roles toward strategy without reducing overall headcount
“And so the effect ultimately that we've seen from a human capital point of view is displacement. So we're actually, we have more people now than we've ever had. But the nature of the work that they do is more strategic.”
ChatGPT cuts agency RFP drafting time from one week to ten hours
“So we can feed, you know, ChatGPT a hundred, you know, previous RFP responses that we've done and have it spit out, you know, net new responses to net new questions in a net new RFP. And it's like 80% good and still requires like 10 hours of work to, like, mas…”
Generative AI cuts campaign mockup time from a week to an afternoon
“On our creative group, we can come up with, like, mockups in, in, like, literally, like, one percent of the time that it took, so you no longer have to, like, draw the initial mockups for art. Suddenly, you know, what might have taken one person a week of work…”
Technical and math backgrounds strongly indicate aptitude for performance marketing roles
“So if you're making your first hire, you probably want them to be, to have the ingenuity and capability to solve a lot of the problems that you're going to run into within the context of tracking, attribution, data visualization, and then campaign management. …”
Thrive uses surprise estimation questions to test agency candidate composure under pressure
“I actually borrowed a Jeff Bezos question from early stage Amazon, where I asked people, You know, without much warning in an interview, I'll ask them whether it's okay to do a bit of a thought experiment together and whether they are comfortable, you know, as…”