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.

once i find something that works, THEN i optimize the details.

most people do it backwards. they tweak small things hoping for breakthroughs. but you can't optimize your way to a winning campaign. you have to find the win first.

here's a real example:

on a big launch, we tested optimizing for purchases vs. optimizing for leads.

lead cost was obviously higher when we optimized for purchase.

but here's what the data showed: leads from the purchase-optimized campaign were nearly 10x more likely to buy the high-ticket offer later.

10x.

if i'd just followed the "optimize for the lowest CPL" rule, i would have missed that completely.

the rule says go for cheap leads. the data said go for quality.

and the data wins, every time.

this is what separates good marketers from great ones:

good marketers follow the playbook.

great marketers wrote the playbook… then kept experimenting after they wrote it.

they understand that creative is the biggest lever. not audiences. not bidding strategies. creative.

your ability to generate compelling hooks, angles, and messaging is your competitive advantage.

everything else is noise. the stuff that distracts dumb marketers enough for you to win.

good marketers are constantly testing new angles. pain focused. desire focused. social proof. us vs. them. they repurpose what's working organically and turn it into ads.

they're not precious about their ideas. they let the data decide what's good.

the people who get stuck in the box…"ABO is the only way," "CBO is the only way," "talking head videos are the only thing that works"... they never experiment.

and they never win.

copy and paste marketers are the losers of this space. full stop.

they want you to tell them exactly what works so they never have to think again.

but marketing doesn't work that way. the landscape shifts. algorithms change. what worked six months ago might be dead today.

the only constant is the process:

launch. gather data. refine. repeat.

small, consistent improvements compound into massive wins.

so here's the mindset shift:

stop looking for the "right" way to do things.

start asking better questions.

what's actually happening in this account? what does the data say? what would happen if i tried something different?

learn the fundamentals. understand the why.

then experiment. break the rules. test stuff that feels wrong.

that's where your real wins come from.

when you break the rules and it works, you start to understand something about the process you didn't before.

that's where the magic happens.

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