End Your Ad Campaigns. Do This Instead!

"Campaigns are gambling. Systems are engineering."

For too long, businesses have been addicted to advertising campaigns. Bursts of activity, noise, and hope. Ad campaigns are like fireworks — at worst, they are duds that can backfire and do more damage than help, or at best, they light the sky, make a loud sound, then fade to black after a few moments.

After two decades in the advertising industry, I can tell you that  ad campaigns will destroy your business. Thankfully, there is a better way.

Campaigns Are the Junk Food of Advertising

The word “campaign” itself comes from the Latin campania — a field of battle. A campaign was never meant to win the war; it was a temporary manoeuvre to take a hill, a castle, or a patch of ground.

That exact same thing is true for advertising campaigns.  They are meant to be short-term, strategic launches to accomplish some specific short term goal.  As harsh as I’m being to ad campaigns, they are occasionally useful.  If you’re a mattress store and you got an extra truckload of queen mattresses that you need to liquidate, then great, let’s do a one-time, specific advertising campaign.  If you’re a roofer and you want to gain market share because a hailstorm hit just on the edge of your typical service area, then by all means, use an ad campaign to capitalize on the timeliness.

However, it is imperative that you treat those  use cases with caution.  If that mattress sale doubles your revenue for the month, it is very tempting to think, “Oh wow, I should do that every month!”

Just like with the original meaning, if your army is involved in “campaigns” for too long, then you run out of troops and you lose the war.

So, why are ad campaigns so dangerous? Well, you either win or lose, then start over again.

When you run a “flash sale” or promote a “30-day test” or “$10k sign-on bonus”, it becomes easy to forget that your continued success in business is about winning the marathon.  An ad campaign is like running the first few miles of that marathon at a reckless pace without thought for the miles ahead. Sure, you might sprint mile two, but then you collapse at mile three, and the race isn’t over.

If the campaign is a “win”, don’t make the mistake of taking a short-term win for a strategy.

Your company could be out of business when Facebook or Google changes their algorithms, which would directly affect the success of any future campaigns.

Conversely, short-term campaigns can cause losses, too.  It’s at least once a week that I hear an entrepreneur say something like, “I tried Facebook, it didn’t work.” That’s campaign thinking because they are thinking in terms of pass/fail. 

Campaign thinking creates slaves to discounts, gimmicks, hacks. It makes giants fragile. Remember JCPenney? They trained customers to only buy at a discount. Campaign thinking destroyed them.

A campaign can fail. A system cannot.

Ad Systems: The Engines of Scale

An ad system is not a stunt. It is not a flash. It is not a gamble.

It is a living, breathing framework that compounds results. Systems don’t spike and vanish. Systems measure, adapt, and evolve.  The steps are fairly simple.

• Planning: Determine who your audience is, what your goal is, and then determine the messaging to get the audience to do that goal.
• Optimization: test, refine, tune
• Scaling: once it’s generating the results at a predictable and stable rate, ramp it up

Systems are predictable, reliable, and repeatable. They survive platform changes because the system isn’t wedded to Facebook or Google or LinkedIn. The audience doesn’t vanish when an algorithm changes — it just moves. A system finds them again.

Systems are not sexy. They take discipline, resources, human capital, and relentless iteration. But they are unbreakable because only parts can break — and parts can be replaced.

When you build your ad system, you should not think in terms of win or lose.  Focus on why something isn’t producing the results.  Find the specific breaking points.  Are people clicking on the ad at an above average rate?  Ok, then look at time on site- are they spending more than a minute? If they are, what is the user experience like?

Treat building an ad system like you’re fixing an engine.  You’re testing where the power is flowing and identifying the choke points and areas of stoppage, then you fix that choke point and see if another one develops.

Campaigns vs. Systems

Campaigns are gambling. Systems are engineering.

If you find yourself saying a specific platform works or doesn’t work, or you find yourself starting over with new ads every month, then you’re just doing it wrong.

Why Systems Win

Because businesses don’t need ads that work once. They need ads that work forever.

• They need hiring pipelines that don’t vanish when a job board raises its prices.
• They need sales processes that don’t collapse when Google changes an algorithm.
• They need predictability. Reliability. Compounding growth.

That is what systems deliver.

The Revolution Starts Here

No platform is the problem.  No platform is the solution.  Instead, focus on fixing and refining your advertising until you have an exact, reliable, consistent result with a consistent message to a consistent audience.  Once you do that, then you won’t be put under when the market or a platform changes because you know who your audience is so you know where and when to reach them..

It starts with one decision: to stop gambling with campaigns, and start building engines. Engines that scale. Engines that last. Engines that make dreams come true.