Chase Chappell Spends Hundreds of Millions on Ads | Digital Social Hour #103

He spent like $100,000 in a month on TikTok for a brand.

Got him to the number one spot in the App Store.

But the biggest thing is the content side, and you're producing about 20 pieces of creative a week just to float that much spin.

30k days on ad spin, you have to have a lot of content.

Do you see like a baseline of like a specific maintained view volume or is it like every other video is viral?

Are they all viral?

Um, the majority go viral.

Okay.

I've been going viral for like 12 months straight, though.

See, there you go.

Some people have.

We know somebody who did 300,000 subs in a single day off of of one borrowed video, and then all of his videos end up doing about 200 million views combined.

It's insane.

Welcome back to the Digital Social Hour.

I'm your host, Sean Kelly.

Here's my co-host, Christiana Hurt.

What's up, guys?

And our guest guest today, Chase Chappelle.

What's going on?

How we doing?

Good.

What brings you to Vegas?

Well, last time we were at your event, which was incredible, by the way.

Loved it.

I met a lot of cool people there in the e-commerce space.

It's really amazing to hang out with all these other people that do YouTube and stuff.

I actually formed a couple of connections that we're working with people now outside of there.

That's why I have them, honestly.

I love connecting people together.

Yeah, no, it was insane.

I was actually shocked at the turnout, too.

Yeah.

It's wild how many people would literally travel somewhere to go to an event.

But once you get there, it makes sense.

Yeah, it's interesting because I don't even run paid ads.

It's just all just word of mouth.

Yeah, through DMs.

Yeah.

That's good at sliding those DMs.

I think that's how

I invited you.

There you go.

DMs are the way to go.

Instagram DMs.

That's where all our deals happen.

You find success in DM ads or organic DMs?

Both.

We run both campaigns.

So like we'll do organic videos.

That'll go borrow, get a bunch of DMs.

And then we also run paid ads for it as well.

Nice.

I mean, obviously quality comes through organic, though.

We don't do any outreach though.

Okay.

Yeah.

So you've basically overseen $200 million in ad spend through Facebook, TikTok, social media.

What are your biggest takeaways from that?

Yeah, so I mean with Facebook ads right now like I've been in the space for seven years now and essentially a lot of the stuff that we're doing is focused on what's going on right now.

These video creatives, short form content, it's absolutely crushing it.

So like all these brands are trying to figure out the content strategy for video.

Nobody has it figured out at all.

And that's like the biggest thing to do right now is clipping your videos just like you are on a podcast or with your actual content for your product or store.

It's a big way to actually scale up.

But a lot of people haven't figured it out.

And so they need creative.

And that's the biggest thing for that.

And then TikTok obviously is crushing it.

But the biggest problem on TikTok right now, if you're trying to scale up, we spent like $300,000 in a month on TikTok for a brand.

Got them to the number one spot on the app store.

But the biggest thing is the content side, and we were producing about 20 pieces of creative a week just to float that much spend.

30k days on ad spend, you have to have a lot of content.

So like brands will hop on TikTok.

They're like, I see all these views.

Let's get results.

Let's get sales.

They launch a video and then after seven days, it's over.

Like there's no results.

Whereas on Facebook, you can move that creative over there and it can last up to three months, a year.

And we have clients that have creatives that have been running for like two years straight.

They get tons of sales.

Is that because Facebook has more users?

Not necessarily.

It's more of their algorithm is more in tune.

They have a lot more data.

It's more consistent.

The buyer is a lot different because on TikTok, you got to think a lot of these people haven't purchased off that app yet and they don't trust it, which is why this whole ban is coming about right now.

You know, every day something's changing with the TikTok ban.

So like there's a lot of skepticism around it.

And then the people on TikTok specifically, they're just not used to buying on the platform, period.

So like they have their information on Facebook.

They're used to purchasing off that app.

So like TikTok, there's a huge deficit in terms of people who are comfortable buying right now.

So do you feel like on TikTok, people are getting a return of social presence and omni omnipresence versus an actual monetary return?

Yeah, so it's more top of funnel, definitely.

You're getting a lot more awareness.

Your Google search volume's going up significantly.

If you have a viral video on TikTok, it's likely that a lot of people are gonna go to Google first to search up the brand or business.

You're gonna find a lot more followers going to Instagram, YouTube from TikTok.

So it's migrating people.

And then TikTok as a platform itself is great for growth.

and awareness and then you can get incredible sales days.

I mean we work with brands that are doing a hundred thousand dollars in a single day off of one viral video that gets 2 million views in sales for their store.

We had another brand, Waterboy, that you know did 100,300K off of organic sales and literally are constantly sold out just from viral videos of them being you know sharing their story about how they started their business.

On TikTok.

Exactly.

And so there's like specific formats organically that are just going wildly viral, but also producing insane sales for brands.

And that's like a founder story, sharing the background of the business, product comparisons.

That's where you compare your product against like a billion-dollar brand's product.

Because a lot of them are trying to chase margins, whereas small businesses might have higher quality, right?

So they can highlight different ingredients.

Those videos get tons of sales as well.

So that's really like the main play for TikTok.

If you're going to do ads, you're going to have an insane creative team.

And you're going to be able to produce content every single week at a very high velocity to keep the ad span going.

It's funny you say that.

I produce three TikToks a day.

Yeah, that's a lot for most people.

That's what we put out.

I myself am probably making like out of the three that get posted, like seven to ten.

Because that's what it takes to keep up.

Yeah.

And are you, do you see like a baseline of like a specific maintained view volume, or is it like every other video is viral?

Are they all viral?

Um

majority go viral.

Okay.

I've been going viral for like 12 months straight though.

See, there you go.

Some people have it.

So like the viral aspect, some people's content hit really well.

Yeah.

And then like is your content like voice talking or

it's all different.

Some of it is relationship.

Some of it is business.

Some of it is just me walking.

Yeah.

Like,

for example, like a video of me being pushed in the pool, 27 million views on TikTok, 15 million views on Instagram on his page.

My page was another 11 million.

That's exactly.

And then Twitter was another 8 million views.

Yeah.

Wow.

So I got to push you in a pool and recreate that.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Okay, so here's the thing with that.

You take a video like that and you recreate it, push me in the pool.

There's a 10% rule is what I call it.

You recreate a viral video and model it as closely as possible.

You'll see about 10% of those views.

So if it got 20 million views, then you can expect like a 2 million.

It's so good, man.

Average.

And this works so consistently well.

I tell this to people all the time.

Don't like copy somebody word for word, but go look at how they format the video.

Format it the same way.

Just replace it with your own content and your own style.

You're going to see around an average of 10% of that video That is so crazy because I know off the top of my head five girls that have ripped my walking videos and they're just doing it the same and they're seeing results and it's just so so good to know so next time I see a video with 10 mil I'm gonna try it out 100% it's absolutely insane a lot of it goes back to behavior psychology just how people like watch content on tick tock in general like a lot of things are very relatable and then if like there's a controversial piece in that content that made it go viral now that's harder to replicate.

So like if it's you look at the comment section and you'll see everybody commenting, they'll talk about what it is that they're calling out in that video for why it's viral.

Yeah, I notice a lot of my controversial clips get more views.

Absolutely.

Controversial videos go insanely wild on views because obviously there's two different sides of an opinion on something.

So there's comments that are fueling the growth.

There's shares.

It's making people mad, upset, happy.

There's a lot of different reactions.

So the videos go way more viral.

But the problem is businesses don't know how to use controversy to curate sales.

So like an example of this is we have a brand called Bad Society Club.

They did 110k

in a single day off of a controversial video.

And it was like women in their 40s should start dressing like they're in their 20s again.

And that pissed a lot of people off.

They didn't like that.

And so the video went crazy viral.

And then in the comment, they just pinned their website and was like, here's where you can buy.

And so they did 100,000 plus in a single day.

That's crazy.

So do you believe in story selling or just shareable content?

Yeah, I mean, it depends on the objective for sure.

But I mean, there's definitely formats you can see that are consistently producing views and sales.

So like a founder story that's easy to connect with.

And, you know, people fall in love with a brand through a person specifically.

And so you'll get a lot of people buying because of the founder.

Whereas like people will hop on.

on their branded accounts and they'll have like some you know individual whether it's a guy or girl posting content for their company page, but it's just like them just hopping on every little trend doesn't equate to sales at all.

It's just like random view volume.

It has no effect on the business.

I feel that.

Makes sense.

Which products or services have you seen the most success with?

We work in a lot of different industries.

I mean, clothing's crazy, supplements are crazy.

I mean, there's so many different things on TikTok that just go absolutely wild in terms of views and sales.

I don't think there's like something I couldn't push on TikTok that would like not get sales if we applied a format to it.

Really?

You don't think so?

You feel like you just got it mastered?

There's just formats that consistently produce the results, and it's like really consistent.

And then same thing for Facebook ads.

So you feel like you could sell funeral home services?

Potentially.

Gotta try it.

Those guys make a lot of money, actually.

They do.

Yeah, it's crazy.

That business is wild to me.

It's really wild.

You've got to pay 10K for what?

Just to use the space?

I know.

But you know what's crazy?

People on TikTok are now walking us through the the embalming process.

Oh, they are?

Tons.

Yeah.

It's a huge thing.

I've found myself watching them.

Okay.

Like embalming and taxiderming pets.

People that want to taxidermy pets.

Yeah, so that's another thing about TikTok is like you'll watch like a specific style of video and then you get stuck in that category of content.

But then they'll float like random videos every now and then to see if you have different interests and then it starts to mix your page.

So like the big viral videos are always usually the more general, broad type content, obviously.

What do you see as the next TikTok?

Is it YouTube Shorts?

Is it Snapchat, Facebook?

YouTube Shorts is probably one of the most powerful ways to consistently grow because

I know so many YouTubers that will post YouTube short content.

It gets like one to 2K views.

But they post for three months straight.

one video goes viral and it activates all of the others and they just all start to grow like incredibly fast.

So like if you just hold it out on YouTube, it's all about consistency.

The moment you have a viral video, all of your other

videos will pick up.

It's crazy.

I know somebody who did 300,000 subs in a single day off of one viral video, and then all of his videos ended up doing about 200 million views combined.

It's insane.

And he had like literally just a few thousand views on each video.

And I was like, why didn't this happen to me?

That's where I'm at right now.

So I'm going to keep posting.

I'm posting twice a day right now.

I know.

None of them have taken off.

They get like 5k views, but I'm hoping one of them will take off and what you'll see a video that did 5k views now and it'll come back in like two months and do like 100k views and then all the videos from that time period as well will start to just jump wow it's so weird so i put my viral videos on youtube shorts and i noticed they spike way more like they'll do like 50k 100k but they do you're going more viral on youtube no i just take the viral videos that do millions of views on other platforms i just put them on youtube shorts yeah just pray for the best i have a friend Alex Stemp.

He has like a TikTok channel,

you know, nearly 20 million followers on there.

And every single one of his videos, he always gets a million plus views.

He's like the street photographer.

I make strangers famous.

I think I've seen that.

So he'll just go and take a photo shoot of somebody and make them famous, literally.

And people love the content because it's part one, part two.

But it's a model that works so well for views.

He migrates it to Instagram.

Amazing.

Migrates it to YouTube.

Nothing happens.

Three months in, he gets a single viral video, passes you know nearly a hundred thousand subscribers in a single day crazy and all of his videos go off that's wild yeah I'm trying to get that monetization so I need that absolutely they pay the money you need 10 million views on reels really yeah that's insane in 90 days wow yeah it's pretty stressful that's a huge number yeah you know but one viral video could do it though that's better you're always one video away from going viral like yeah I got 10 million on TikTok so I know it's possible.

Yeah, your stuff's been growing fast.

Yeah.

It's insane.

Where do you see AI intersecting with your business model?

So it's definitely going to change the marketing industry, e-commerce.

We've been playing with it.

We'll do like a create a Macha T business for me on Chat GPT, and it'll tell you like the background, where to get the supplier, all this stuff.

And then you just plug it into like Mid Journey or like an image generator, and then ask it to create the product and like schematics of design and stuff.

get that, send it over to the people, create a business so quickly, get a logo, get a hat, apparel, everything.

AI.

It's absolutely insane.

We have clients right now already testing this with like Facebook ads, and they're like, hey, what audience should I target?

And we advise people on how to do this stuff.

And the AI will be like, hey, target this audience, this age range.

And they're getting like a five to seven X return on ad spend, which is like, if you spend a thousand bucks, you're making back five to seven K.

And they don't even know what audiences they're targeting, what the copy is about.

They're just having the AI write it for them.

So it's, I mean, these things are generating a lot of money for people right now.

It's definitely a game changer.

So are you a firm believer that it's making our lives easier, or do you feel like it's taking food out of a lot of people's mouths?

I think it's going to create a lot of opportunities that are, like, definitely unseen right now.

Usually what happens with this type of stuff is you'll have a regression of a lot of jobs being taken away, and then you'll have a huge explosive category of so many more opportunities just opening up, right, for different spaces, because there's just so much demand now.

And so, obviously, the educational side of it is going to be, you know, depending on what you know and how to use these things will depend whether or not you get a job.

But yeah, it's going to make a big difference.

So there's probably going to be a definite regression in opportunities for jobs and then a huge explosion of growth here in the next couple of years.

I feel that.

What's your goal with the agency?

Do you want to sell it?

Do you want to give it to your kids?

Agency right now is just a business that we're, we bring in clients and we just manage them.

There's no long-term roadmap in the sense of getting rid of it.

It has my name tied to it.

I'm not really interested in selling that business because it's kind of a generator for us, for other companies we're launching.

The biggest thing for me right now is surge.io and essentially that's a software that does ad tracking for Facebook ads, TikTok ads, because of the Apple iOS changes that

and so like you can't track your ads like you used to.

So like if you ran ads for you know jerseys, you used to know your ROI definitively where it came from.

Now it's not like that.

So all of your data then gets wrapped through Apple if you opt it out.

It can take up to three days to be sent back to Facebook.

And then Facebook will tell you, oh, we're estimating your purchases.

We don't actually know which audience it came from, but we know you got to sell.

So it's like, okay, well, where do I put my budget?

It's not very accurate anymore.

So that's where we're solving that issue right now with the ad tracking, specifically for Shopify e-commerce brands.

And then tying in the customer journey there from like upsell apps, you know, post-purchase surveys to really get people to self-identify where they came from as well.

If they saw a TikTok video and then went and purchased.

And then we can connect the dots to see if they're lying or if it's accurate or not.

Got it.

So it's similar to Hiroshima.

Yeah, we're just not in the B2B space and they're strictly ad tracking.

We're more looking to bring this product to the masses like any Shopify store owner.

And this business is really just wanting to be able to make it super simple for people to use the tracking in general.

7%.

Yeah, so like we're not trying to go after

all the major size brands that have all these people who know all the performance marketing tactics.

We're trying to make it extremely simple for the average Sophify store to hop on, increase the revenue, get better data, and be able to scale their business.

Right.

Yeah, and we're going to try to exit in that company in a couple of years.

We're on a raise right now.

SAS is the way to go for exits.

Absolutely insane multiples right now.

Isn't it like 10x?

It's crazy.

40x in our space.

40x?

Yeah.

And customer data platforms, averaging 20x to 40x multiples.

On space.

Crazy.

Yeah.

Off of revenue.

Holy c.

You know, pre-money valuations can do hundreds of millions of dollars without even making a single dollar.

Wow.

I'm going to have to look into this space, man.

It's crazy.

It's literally crazy.

Tech is like one of the biggest spaces right now for where all this money's flowing because logistics are screwed up around the world.

It's hard to get your products.

These businesses are like, all these investors are tired of losing money on all these deals because they're like having a hard time scaling from infrastructure.

And then all this stuff with politics and things going on in the world makes it super complicated.

So tech is the easy one because you just get users, add more services, and it's a very scalable business.

Yeah.

It's booming right now.

Do you see this upcoming recession

affecting your business at all?

No, not necessarily.

I think the biggest thing that could affect us would be like TikTok getting banned because that's like a 50% source of traffic.

What would happen for y'all?

For me,

it would impact me a little bit, but not nothing crazy.

I just started TikTok a lot.

Yeah.

I would be bored.

You'd be bored see i have a huge following on tick tock but i don't i don't i i'm not tracking if sales are coming from it and i don't personally in my opinion don't feel like i'm making money from it i get hotel collabs so i guess i'd have to pay for my own hotels again that's interesting i feel like a lot of people probably share that same like feeling of tick tock being a fun place to create content

yeah like i mean i'm not gonna say that i had like the creator program and things like that but again like there's no way for me to track it so there's no way for me to have an emotional bond to it yeah for you would be a major blow though it's a huge part of our business yeah so I mean like about 50% of our lead volume has came from there it has decreased a little bit because of what they're censoring content wise like using dollar signs and stuff on TikTok starting to become an issue really certain financial stuff they're like really locking a lot of the you know

They're tightening up the bolts in terms of what content's being allowed.

I could see that because some of my videos get like a thousand views.

And it's really annoying too because a lot of these videos, if you get rejected or banned, then they're, you know, essentially not allowing your videos to just explode over the course of like five videos.

Didn't they find out there's like some button?

Yeah, they're like suppressing people.

Literally just by pressing a button or heating it up.

It's like hitting the up button.

Yeah.

If they find a creator like Alex Earl something and they're absolutely in love with her and they know the view volume is great, they're just going to keep pushing that video insanely.

in terms of views.

It's crazy that they can even do that.

It's kind of like the old version of

YouTube's most viral videos.

They'd have like the top 10 list.

Yeah, yeah.

But then come to find out that the videos are hand-selected.

I remember that.

It's like, come on.

I was so disappointed when I saw that.

I can't believe it.

I used to look forward to that list.

And then once I found that out, I'm like, all right, I'm not even going to.

I think that's why people don't trust these social media companies.

Yeah.

Because, like, think about the people who work there.

Like, what's their agenda?

Their favorite creators.

And then people like, you know, us or other companies can't even.

Yeah.

I mean, we could go down the rabbit hole on this, but we'll get canceled.

So we should

not even talk about it.

Literally

all right, well, what do you got planned?

Focusing on scaling surge.

We're getting a new office location and we're gonna be expanding rapidly because it's a new marketplace and

there's a lot of things to be done in this space that a lot of companies haven't figured out yet.

It's a huge problem with ad tracking and so we're trying to you know master and provide a lot of tools to business owners so that way they can scale their business on Shopify.

Shopify is a huge market.

It's Amazon, Shopify.

It's really two sources.

You're either shopping there or shopping on the other one.

Right.

So they're the biggest two.

Pretty much.

I mean, if you're not on Shopify, you might be on WooCommerce, but

WooCommerce is really for like beginners.

Yeah, I can't think of three brands that you can come up with.

No, not at all.

I feel like Walmart is not going to be a competitor.

Absolutely.

They're definitely in the mix.

So they're taking up a percent, but I mean, if you look at how many Shopify stores there are out there and we're talking about tens of millions of stores and like how many customers they have it's a huge portion of the internet for sure and amazon as well but then you have walmart and all these other

great walmart specifically now offers walmart one which is cheaper than prime really and now you can be an independent seller on amazon yeah that's crazy yeah so walmart walmart's creeping yeah very very quickly that's why i asked yeah the e-commerce site is definitely going up for them i have trouble shopping at walmart Walmart just because I'm pretty healthy.

So when I go there for food or snacks, I can't find anything.

That makes sense.

Yeah, I definitely think it's a demographic play for sure.

Like who your audience is.

Again, that 97%.

Yeah, exactly.

All right.

Any closing thoughts on where people can find you?

Social media at RealChase Chapel on Instagram.

DM me the word podcast.

Happy to send some free trainings over.

YouTube as well, Chase Chapel.

We do a lot of free trainings online.

And then if you're on Shopify, sign up for Surge, S-R-I-G-E.

Cristiano, where can people find you?

You guys can find me at Christiana Hurt, anywhere on the internet, or just Google Multi-Couches.

Awesome, Sean Kelly here.

Thanks for tuning in this week, Digital Social Hour.

See you guys next week.