I Spent $500,000 in TV Ads to Promote My Ad Agency… This is what happened

I spent $500,000 in TV ads to promote my own ad agency, and this is what happened. I've been doing marketing for over 20 years and honestly, I always thought that TV ads suck. Who likes being interrupted by ads when you're watching a favorite TV show or movie, right? I don't.

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In 2021, I decided to bet against the odds. Here's what I thought, if everyone is slowly leaving TV advertising and going digital, TV ads are probably getting less competitive and cheaper. So I decided to take some of the money that we're making and put that money into ads, specifically on TV ads. During this timeframe, I spent $500,000 on TV ads and here are the results.

So first off, I started putting my ads on stock channels. Our clients at our ad agency NP Digital, are big large companies like the Fortune 100, or Fortune 50, Fortune 500, you get it. Publicly traded companies. Ideally not companies that are worth 500 million or even a billion, I'm talking about companies that worth 10 billion, 20 billion, 50 billion. So what do they watch in the background in all offices? CNBC and Bloomberg and all the stock channel. So we decided to put our ads on all these stock channels.

TV ads doesn't really mean you're successful, it just means you spent money. Even then didn't generate any return. Then what I do? I spent another 100,000 and I kept going until 500,000.

And here's what I learned. Website traffic, not much. Branding? We got a lot more people typing in our brand. Leads? Not a ton of qualify leads but we got a few. But you know what it did? It brought more legitimacy to my ad agency. We're already big. We were on the Inc 500 listing. We're the 21st fastest glowing company. Wasn't top 10 so I wasn't really impressed. 21 is only a good number if you're playing Blackjack, but we digress.

And what I ended up learning from that process was, a lot of other companies were like, "Yeah we knew about you but we thought you guys were small." Even though at that time we had roughly 640 employees globally, and we were growing at a rapid pace, more than 50% a year. And we're just like, "No, we're growing fast, we got tons of awards, we won Performance Marketing Agency of the Year, and we got all these awards, and we showed some of that in our TV commercials."

But you know what happened? These bigger companies like, "Yeah we already knew about you but we thought you were small. We now realize that you guys are bigger, so we're now open to potentially hiring you." That's what it helped. It didn't help generate new awareness, it didn't help generate more leads. It got the people that already knew about us that were on the fence, to go over and include us in their RFP. RFP stands for requests for a proposal.

So that we got more big companies saying, "Hey, we'll consider you doing our marketing, doesn't mean you got it. You can try to get it, and if we like you out of other 10, 15 companies that apply, maybe you'll get it."

So do I think I would do this all over again? Yes. More so, would I do this all over again? Yes. Would I do this on a regular basis? No. There wasn't a huge ROI, but it's good to just get you on the map and maybe do other trickle effects or other versions of it. Like now we're starting to advertise in some of the big marketing and advertising sites that CMOs read. Probably won't generate sort a huge ROI, but I'm hoping it creates the same effect.

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15 Responses to I Spent $500,000 in TV Ads to Promote My Ad Agency… This is what happened

  1. Neil Patel March 16, 2022 at 6:54 pm #

    Have you ever run any TV ads? Tell me the experience you’ve had in the comments.

    • andy andy March 21, 2022 at 10:00 pm #

      That I don’t Sir wish I could help you out. Sorry Sir.

  2. SB Decent Recipes March 21, 2022 at 2:02 pm #

    Respect Everyone who were involved in this, seriously the best piece that I’ve ever seen on YouTube▶️, HAT’S OFF TO WELL ! LOVE YOUR VIDEOS !!!!!❣️❣️❣️❣️❣️❣️❣️❣️

    • B-22 March 21, 2022 at 2:05 pm #

      Right?!

  3. B-22 March 21, 2022 at 2:04 pm #

    Broooo the ball heads are a smooth touch! No pun intended

  4. adebayo omotosho March 21, 2022 at 2:08 pm #

    You follow Neil, then u don’t need to make many more mistakes

  5. andy andy March 21, 2022 at 2:17 pm #

    Love your videos a d thank you Sir.

  6. TechFactsGlobal March 21, 2022 at 2:26 pm #

    Hey Niel, Do you have TSLA or SOFI or PLTR in your portfolio? pls share your high conviction stocks?

  7. Exposure Ninja March 21, 2022 at 2:29 pm #

    Was surprised to see this title from you Neil! Super interesting insight

  8. Aqeel Syed March 21, 2022 at 3:03 pm #

    Very interesting insights!

  9. Nick K March 21, 2022 at 3:43 pm #

    I love the attitude of being the 21st fastest growing company, not impressed lol.

  10. Aurobindo Ghosh March 21, 2022 at 3:57 pm #

    you spent less that what google makes from your ads

  11. Akshay Tiwari March 21, 2022 at 4:06 pm #

    ✨✨✨✨

  12. Sumita Garg March 21, 2022 at 5:49 pm #

    Hi Neil, I am a regular follower and really admire your work. Sadly my experience with your team has been pathetic.
    I wrote to them almost a month back, except for confirmation mail no one responded. I wrote on the youtube channel, I was asked to send an email on a particular id, I did but still no response. I have no option now but to ask my queries on this page itself.
    1) NP UK pages states that focus is on increasing Aussies Business. Is it a strategy or a copy-paste issue?
    2) I am a subscriber of Uber suggest and I get frequent insightful emails that I follow religiously. Most of the links given in the pdfs are of 2013 or even older. Few links that I tried no more works. My question is that are the links only concern or the content has also not been updated for the last 9-10 years. I am taking inputs from these modules shared by you, I want to be sure that I am not learning something which is obsolete in the current scenario. Finally, I would request that have a robust customer service system especially if it is about something related to your own site. Thanks for your time in reading such a long post.

  13. PeaceInfo March 21, 2022 at 6:16 pm #

    Thanks you bro ✌️

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