the one thing that guarantees you'll stay an average marketer
you'll never be a good marketer if you're a rule follower. i mean that. i teach people to buy ads. i give them the fundamentals — the "why" behind how things work. and then i watch them turn principles into prescriptions. i say "it's probably healthier to scale 20-30% day over day" and they take that as gospel. they never break that rule. ever. here's the thing: i almost never follow that rule myself. when i launch something new and i like how it looks? i'll double the budget. triple it. sometimes quadruple it. because i have a feel for it. i know which risks pan out and which don't. last year we had a launch where i needed to spend $4M in a month. you can't do that scaling 20% day over day. it's just not possible. so you have to rework the framework in your mind. figure out what you CAN do to make it work. here's what most people get wrong: they think following rules IS the strategy. but rules are just guardrails. they're not the game. the game is understanding WHY the rules exist — then knowing when to break them. take campaign structure. i tell people: start simple. one campaign, multiple ad sets, test different creative concepts. consolidate where possible so the algorithm can learn faster. that's the principle. but i've got accounts where i'm running 15 campaigns because the business model demands it. i've got others where everything lives in one CBO because that's what's working. there are dozens of data points i consider when thinking about CBO vs ABO and it’s dumb to make a one-size-fits-all rule for that. the real skill isn't knowing the playbook. it's pattern recognition. when i look at an account, i'm asking questions: what's actually happening here? where's the drop-off? is the creative fatigued or is this a targeting problem? what does the sales team say about lead quality? i'm not looking for "the answer." i'm looking for signals. and then i test. big ideas first. i don't waste time testing button colors when the whole angle might be wrong. i test bold stuff — new hooks, new offers, new funnels.