Gonto:  It's so hard to get people to click on a link, or to go to a link if you mention it on the podcast, that you've done so much work and you actually got people to come and then you fuck it up after that. Like that's the worst type of fuck up because like it was so hard to get them there and then they're there it’s like, yeah.

Hank: Okay today we're gonna talk about how to do an ad right. We're gonna start with some podcast ads and some other stuff, and actually we're not gonna talk about the ads at all. We're gonna talk about what happens after you click. What happens after you convince someone to do what you just told them to do in the ad?

This came up because I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, the Acquired Podcast, and suddenly there's a Vercel ad. I'm like, oh, I know a thing or two about this. This is interesting. Let's listen in on this ad. Vercel spending the big bucks, more than I ever spent while I was there. And at the end they had a URL and I was like, well, let's see how the team did.

I went to the URL vercel.com/acquired and immediately I was like, okay, they did something huge correctly here and I sent it to you and I think we can criticize the page. But then I got curious and I looked at the other ads. Statszig also had an ad, you know, statzig.com/el/acquired. So not as clean a url.

And then Claude Anthropic. They also had an ad and they didn't have as clean a URL. I actually had to go back into the, the podcast blog post to find the link to it. And that one just skipped me to, uh, the signup page. So first I sent you these and said, we're gonna talk about it. What are your first impressions of these pages and the ads and this whole concept?

Gonto: First of all, to me, what's interesting is…  It's so hard to get people to click on a link, or to go to a link if you mention it on the podcast, that you've done so much work and you actually got people to come and then you fuck it up after that. Like that's the worst type of fuck up because like it was so hard to get them there and then they're there it’s like, yeah.

Hank: Think of the audience. These first ads, they're with the Steve Ballmer episode, which is a follow up episode to two episodes they did on Microsoft. So people like the people who listen to this are people who are concerned about high level strategy over decades of a company's life.

These are your C-level enterprise ads. So when someone clicks on a page and they can get a bunch of stuff, we'll talk about Vercel’s page, but let's talk about Anthropic’s screw up here. They forward you to a signup page. Is a CTO gonna just be like, well, I listened to the ad and I'm ready to sign up for Anthropic?

Absolutely not like that. It's just throwing it away. 

Gonto: And if they're ready to sign up, it's gonna be just to use it by their own or check it out. It's not, I think, gonna be for like, oh, I'm going to use it for my entire company, or something like that. So in that sense I think that's learning number one, which is if you're doing an ad, check your audience.

If your audience are CEOs and CTOs of huge companies, think what's the best target for that. So then the only thing that I think Claude did well is that at least they have the claude.ai/acquired url that will redirect you to sign up. So at least they're measuring who goes there before they send you to a signup, but then it's a signup page.

And I'm not saying A CTO will never sign up. But if they will, they will first check what the product is about, what's there, stuff like that. Like at least if you're not gonna send them to a custom page, send them to a case study for other enterprise companies. Send them to a docs page so they can browse it or something like that. But this makes no sense. 

Like I always think about this anecdote where Atlassian was paying 3 million a year to Auth0, and they found us because the CTO found the docs and started playing around and liked it, and then sent it to somebody else. So in that case, at least, like it wasn't the enterprise page, it wasn't the contact me, but at least it was the docs, the signup page has absolutely nothing.

Having said that, I think that's the only thing they did right. The, the rest they fucked up, the personality they're targeting, they fucked up the page. And more than anything, like you got somebody to click, you got somebody likely given the podcast that is maybe a CTO or a VP of engineering to go and you're just missing the opportunity.

Hank: Yeah, and we're not even talking about the content of the ad here, right? Because on a podcast like this, when you're spending the big dollars, the hosts actually do a great job of, yeah, they take your notes and then they're gonna adapt the content perfectly for the audience, and especially on Acquired. 

Those guys, they're researchers, they research these companies. They know their audience. So well, and with all of these ads, they do so great adapting the ad for their audience. There's gonna be traffic and there's gonna be interest, and it's gonna create awareness and all that good stuff. 

But yeah, let's contrast now the Anthropic page, which also, by the way, one last confusing thing there is the ad is mostly about Anthropic. They do talk about Claude, but you land on a Claude url. 

Gonto: Let's talk about Vercel. So Vercel, if you wanna check it out, is vercel.com/acquired. I talk about what I think they did right. And then I know you liked them. There were things that I, I would've changed. But what I think they did right is they did a custom page for Acquired.

Like that's it. Just, that is incredible. And they also understood their persona because they have an option to sign up, which is called start deploying. But then they also have like get an enterprise trial or talk to an expert. Get an enterprise trial is a CTA. That is nowhere in the entire website of Vercel, but it is here because again, this chat Acquire, it makes sense for an enterprise trial and I think what they did right is you land there, first thing that you see is trusted by teams ads and they just show you logos and companies like that gets you like, oh wow, there's like really cool companies that are using it. 

Hank: And it's companies…this is a catered list. This isn't just their list that they always throw around. You know, it's got Scale, OpenAI, Granola like tools that you've used and you're, you're in the know. 

Gonto: And they also have some, like they have Runway, they have Ramp, so they have some that are more FinTech, some that are more startups, some that are more old school. And it's clear that they've actually thought about it. Like they have Chick-fil-A, for example. Like it's really thought on the list. 

Then they talk about Vercel Ship this... I don't get it. Like you shouldn't, I think in this case if you're trying to get people to try your product, to talk to you, mention the conference. Just because if somebody doesn't know about your product, they will not go to your conference like… First they will want to learn about you, learn what you do, and stuff like that. So that section, I didn't like it. 

Hank: That would…

Gonto: Then you scroll and you see v0. This one I actually like it a lot because even though it's a new CTA and everybody will tell you If you have an ad space, don't have that many CTAs, don't have those many things so that people can like just stay locked on one thing. In this case, what I like about it is they talk about AI and I think every enterprise company that's old school or even new startup wants to make sure that they work with a company that cares and think about AI now.

So having this v0 and having it talk about AI, I think is key. And then lastly, they show that their CEO was actually on Acquired podcast. So on this, I thought it was really good. 

The main thing I didn't like is that it has too many CTAs. Like so many CTAs, like, which one should I click? So I would've, I would've removed the register for ship probably and maybe the v0 instead of try, I would just mention it. I don't know. 

The other thing that I'm curious about, what's your take is they have all of their entire nav in the page. They have products, they have solutions, resources and everything. They also have like the signup and contact on top. Would you keep that or would you remove all of the navs so people stay on this page and pick something?

Hank: I would've removed the nav. I would've limited the choices, the Ship. The little Ship square, especially being placed above v0. 'cause they talk in the ad, they talk a lot about v0 and the podcast hosts have tried it.

And so they talk a lot. They hit a couple great things in the podcast ad. They were talking all about v0 and how Vercel, whether you code or if you're coding even less, like there's a solution for you and blah, blah blah. Like you should go listen to it. I'll put in the, in the show notes, I'll put where, where in the interview it is, I'll go find it, but it's a very long podcast with Steve Ballmer and not everybody listening to this is gonna wanna listen to Steve Ballmer for a couple hours. 

So the ship thing, it's total non-sequitur. No one's gonna land on the page and just decide, oh yeah, I'll go to this event in two weeks, three weeks from now, they should have put v0 a little higher.

They could have done that with Ship. And then I like that they inserted Rouch G’s podcast episode.

Gonto: That was good.

Hank: On their secondary…Acquired has Acquired 2, ACQ2. It's their secondary podcast for like non-public CEOs, which is where Rouch G is right now. And I agree with you. 

Yeah, limit the nav. Just give fewer choices and just reinforce everything that you said in your ad. Reinforce it because they came here because they heard that ad and they heard something in that ad that made them want to come here and now you're confusing them. You're not delivering on what you said. 

Gonto: Let's talk about Statsig.

Hank: Yeah.

Gonto: So you have statsig.com/el/acquired. What was your take on this one? 

Hank: This one's definitely more of a template, whereas so Claude Anthropic did nothing, vercel custom bespoke page, Statsig is kind of in the middle. They have a nice template here. They're a little more established, I think, on these type of ads.

They're more established with Acquired. They sponsored them last season, if I recall correctly. They don't really mention anything about the podcast except in the subheader in the first view port. They do do an okay job with like, they've got the logos, they've got their main principles that they're trying to push, and then they've got their kind of main thing, you know, book a demo or test drive it.

Gonto: I thought it was something in the middle. I agree. Like it's a good template. It's clearly focused on ads. At least it has some customization, but I don't know. I would at least added the acquired logo or something like that to make it a bit more customizable or potentially something related to what they are saying.

Right. I think even just adding the logo from Acquired would've been enough. And I, I actually think you have to add customer logos similar to Vercel. 

So from all of this, I think Vercel was by far the best on how they do it. And I think if you're doing ads for whatever, you always should have like a custom landing page even more if you're spending so much fucking money.

Hank: Yeah. A lot of times. We'll get these tiny startups and they'll ask you or me as an advisor, just, you know, usually people looking for free advice. 'cause that's the stage they're at when they're doing this. They're like, oh, should I be doing ads? Or, oh, I tried ads and I didn't get anything. And usually my first thing is, well first off, what was your ad copy? Like, what were you targeting? And second off, where did that go? Were you just pointing them to your, your signup page? 'cause that's probably the worst thing you can do. 

Second worst is pointing them to your homepage, but at least that's something. But at least you should do something that relates to your ad on a landing page and convert and test and experiment there, because that's the second, you got their attention, but can you keep their interest into conversion? 

Gonto: I think it's important to think about how much are you investing in the a. How much are you investing in the landing page? So if you're investing a lot in the ad, like Acquired, invest a lot in the landing page. If you're investing pennies on Google Ads because it's something you're testing, maybe you don't invest as much in landing page, it's like a template.

But I think whatever you wanna spend overall should be similar in all of them, but investing a lot in one and then nothing in others makes no sense. The other thing I'll say is I actually think it makes a lot of sense to think about what will the host of the podcast say about you and why? 

Like I've been listening lately to a podcast called Moneywise from Sambar that I really like. And one of the ads that I really like was an ad from Kubera

Kubera is a fantastic tool to manage your net worth. So first of all, like really good targeting, like people who are listening to Moneywise calearly can use Kuberra. Secondly, Sam says he uses Kuberra and he talks about how he uses it before doing the promotion. So that is incredible. So at least like this relatability of I'm using it, or even if it's not I'm using it, but how I learned about it, what I like about it.

But if it can be personal, I think it makes a huge difference on the type of ad that you do in the podcast. And it's, I, I, I think it's something that's worth spending time on it. I personally check a lot of the ads that show up in podcasts, but I never go to the urls that are mentioned. I just go to the websites, so I'm not their, their best target, sadly.

Hank: Well, and that is typically in a, in an audio format. I mean the, a counter argument to a lot of what we said is, well, mostly you're just trying to get in people's ears and heads and whatever, but geez, you might as well invest for the people that will go to the URL. 

Gonto: I agree. 

Hank: Yeah. 

Gonto: I think takeaways that we can share from, from this is number one, if you are doing a podcast or an ad and you capture the people…think about the landing page, think about how many CTAs and where it goes so that they are related to the persona that you're targeting. Think about how the ad is being mentioned on the podcast or similar, and spend similarly on your landing page and on the experience to what you spend on the ad

Hank: Exactly.

Gonto: Okay. Second topic today is actually an expansion from last week. Last week we talked about videos and how everybody now does videos for launch. And Hank actually found two videos this week, one from Century, one from Cursor that we want to chat about. What, what were your thoughts on the videos? 

Hank: Well, last week we established that you're bored of videos now, now that they've become table stakes, you're over 'em.

But that means they're table stakes, so you gotta do 'em people. And yeah, we had opposite examples. Cursor launched 1.0 of their product and you would expect for Cursor, who's now at over 900 million or whatever billion in revenue, and they just raised, you know, almost a billion in funding. Man. They must have the sickest, coolest video.

Nope, just a guy talking to a camera kind of awkwardly for a little bit, couldn't even follow him. 

Gonto: And the demo. The demos they did on the video sucked as well. Like, ah, animation, something fun, something different. Like it was the most boring video presentation ever. Like last week for example, we saw Superblocks video presentation.

It had better animations to go from like human beings to showing the code and it has some animations for explaining things. This had nothing. It was nothing. 

Hank: Cursor. They have the chance to become fully synonymous with vibe coding, with a future of coding, with so much the aspiration, it's all there. And they just were like, here's 1.0. I guess how boring. What a terrible miss. 

Gonto: I don't know. I will have like a guy maybe that's vibing and it is coding while they are vibing, like. Even something stupid like that… 

Hank: It should have been so…

Gonto: …would've been better. Um, 

Hank: Yeah, and with, with some of the money, I know cursor throws around, man, this could have been someone's job just for a month. Just make this video. Great. 

Okay. Anyways, then meanwhile we got something and, and it's not all production value because this other video also, actually even lower production value, but it gave me a chuckle. It was different. It had my attention. We should have actually looked at the stats and seen, like seen if it did well, but it's Century’s video announcing logs and all they did was they stuck a little webcam up with like a fisheye lens and it watched David Kramer come in and he was the CEO, he's stepped down, he’s in like a technical role there, but uh, he just comes in and he is kind of grumpy. And the joke, I guess the joke is just that Century records stuff now. They have logs now. And that was it. And then they have the other stuff. It was funny. He was, it, it gets the algorithm going. I don't know. I love it. And it, man, it took them, I mean, David walked in. Maybe he, maybe he did two takes. If, and I doubt it. I, I bet that was it. I bet they didn't even tell him about it. 

Gonto: The one thing that I think is good about this, and I don't think you can, if you can do it with every product, is while they were actually filming him, walk in, sit in the computer and eat the sandwich in the top it said, Century’s got logs now.

And I think every developer understands what a log is so they can understand and relate this camera to what's going on. So it was funny to me too, and I was like, okay, this was a great way to show this feature and everybody understands it. However, the problem I think, is that for a lot of features people do not…you cannot  just understand with one liner.

Like Century's got logs, okay, I understand what a log is, I know what Century is done. But with Cursor 1.0, I don't think they could have done the same thing in the sense that they were more complicated features or stuff like that, but maybe for a portion of the video they could have done something funny.

So I think understanding also like, okay, what am I, what am I shipping? Is it something that everybody else has and we don't yet? Because if that's the case, we should do something funny. If it's something unique, maybe we need to explain it a bit more. But I don't know, like add a few shows, add something funny, add something that makes me pay attention, um, do something unique.

I, I also loved the, the Sentry one. Actually, first time I saw it, um, I saw it because Hank sent it to me and I asked Hank like, is this it? Is there more video something? And no, but that's it. That was it. But it was great. 

Hank: It's great. And that type of curiosity gets you to dig deeper. I think that's, I think that's it.

That's a good follow up to our last week thing and we talked about some stuff with ads. Very applicable to what a lot of people do here. Yeah. Anything else you wanted to add? 

Gonto: Nope. 

Hank: Great. Everybody have a great week. 

Gonto: Thank you.