One of the things I tried at CCAW was performance marketing. Think Google Search ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, etc. I never had true success with it. I went as far as hiring five or so MBA and undergraduate interns from Emory to help me figure it out. The result after their project and our own internal testing was the same: It was too expensive. The amount we had to pay Google, Meta, etc. for a click was so high that it wiped out all our profits. We weren’t selling subscription products, so we had to be first-order profitable, which wasn’t possible (in a scalable way) using those platforms.

I’m helping a friend with his new start-up, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that performance marketing will need to be part of the marketing strategy. From my preliminary research, I’ve found that the performance-marketing landscape has changed drastically in the last two or three years. Several factors are involved, but I think one of the biggest is that the algorithms these platforms use to decide which ad to show to which user have made the ads much more effective. The introduction of new ad platforms is also a game changer for performance marketing.

It’s still early, but I’m intrigued by what I’ve seen so far and want to learn more about the new reality of the performance-marketing world.