Are Meta Ads a Scam? Marketing Without a Degree, and What Right-Wing Podcasts Get Right

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Welcome to Office Hours with Prof G.

This is the part of the show where we answer your questions about business, big tech, entrepreneurship, and whatever else is on your mind.

What's happening?

Today we're continuing our special series, Prof G on Marketing, where we answer your marketing questions.

And just a reminder, Office Hours now drops every Monday and Friday, twice a week, twice the ProfG.

So if you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to officehours at profgmedia.com.

Again, that's officehours at profgmedia.com.

Or post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in our next episode.

That's right.

You're welcome.

All right, first question.

Our first question comes from Boxer the Horse on Reddit.

They ask, is advertising on meta platforms worthwhile?

Considering Meta openly admits using AI bots for engagement, are most of the people clicking on my ads even real?

Furthermore, isn't that click fraud when I might be paying for bots to engage with my paid advertising?

I appreciate your insights.

I think meta is a cancer.

I think that essentially when you have 6.5% of American teens are addicted to drugs or alcohol and 24% are addicted to social media, we have a problem.

And whether it was Shell Samberg saying we need to do better or Mark Zuckerberg saying that he'd heard or read studies that social media was actually good on the psychological well-being.

of young people,

they have lied to the American public over and over and over.

There's really few people who've done more damage to

global youth than Mark Zuckerberg or Shel Samberg while making more money.

I used to own the stock.

It's an amazing stock.

He's a brilliant businessman.

I think the stock has probably quadrupled since I sold it, but I'm not strongly ethical about my financial positions.

It's strongly ethical, judgmental, whatever the term is.

I just want to make money, so I'll buy stocks I think they're going up.

But I had trouble holding on to this stock, so I sold it.

See above, missed out on probably 200 or 300% gains.

He's an absolutely brilliant businessman.

Back to your question.

Oh, yeah, it's so worth it.

And the notion that there's some click fraud and some waste, what percentage of people who see your ad on television are technically fraud in the sense that they have absolutely no interest in your product?

You have what is probably, and I hate to say it, the most efficient marketing vehicle in the world is probably the ad stack and the ad tech brought to you by Meta.

If you think about AI, we tend to think of it through valuation or how it's consumer-facing, ChatGPT,

Anthropic.

and then we think about the background, the infrastructure, NVIDIA.

You could argue that potentially the biggest winner from AI is Meta.

They're the second largest purchaser of NVIDIA chips behind Microsoft, and they have, I think it's 1.7 million, 1.7 trillion tokens.

That's basically Latin for who has the most information to feed into and feed the LLMs.

To give you a sense, Reddit, where we get a lot of these questions, has 1.3 trillion tokens.

So they have the most information and the second most processing power.

And how are they using it?

Is it Llama, their consumer-facing AI LLM?

No.

The way they're making money is that they can figure out how to target you at exactly the right time with the right offer.

And they're also talking about going upstream and doing some of the creative work and also producing commercials that can, on the fly, automatically transition to a young couple if you just had a baby driving their Toyota Sequoia or a Toyota Camry if they've since you're 70 and are looking for just an economical car and don't care about having any sort of game, see above Camry.

So they are moving upstream into creative and into media buying and can, you know, create sort of real-time on-demand creative.

So yeah, does it work?

Absolutely.

And the notion that it's fraud, just think of it as leakage or waste.

But there's a reason why this is one of the fastest growing media companies, if not the fastest media growing company in history.

What do you do?

You just set up, you kind of decide what is it you want.

Do you want to create awareness?

Do you want to create traffic to your website?

Do you want to inspire foot traffic into a car dealership?

And you set up hard metrics and then you do a bunch of different tests.

And you can use, there's even AI media and tracking models and you figure out which platform is working for you.

Now, there is a cumulative test.

I find that most successful marketers don't.

don't isolate their media spend to any one medium.

That when you see ads or offers across different mediums, it creates more of a loyalty effect or a a cumulative effect or a whole that's greater than some of its parts.

But if you're just a small business just starting out, I say, all right, try and get some awareness, try and build some awareness with just content marketing.

Create your own content, your own Instagram on social, and then try and monetize it with direct response advertising, buying some Google keywords, buying some ads on Meta.

But set up really strong metrics and hold yourself accountable or the people accountable who are spending your precious dollars on what's working and what isn't.

In sum, yeah, the reason why this company is one of the most valuable companies in the world and Mark Zuckerberg is, I think, the fourth wealthiest person in the world right now is because, yeah, the bottom line is this shit works.

And when I say shit, see above, I mean meta.

Our second question comes from Bruin Aggie on Reddit.

They say,

what books and material do you recommend if you don't have time or money to get another degree outside of marketing?

Well, it kind of depends what you're interested in, boss.

Well, first off, I would read the four or five most important or type in into AI four or five most seminal books on history, like lessons from history or guns, germs, and steel, just like four or five basics to get rooted in history, because I think that gives you a sense for,

which is funny because in college I didn't take a lot of history and I wish I had.

I would think about doing a couple courses online and there's just, you know, whether it's Khan Academy or I think masterclass is not really what I call college.

I think it's more entertainment.

But there are a lot of courses now you can take for free that anyone from Harvard to Berkeley offers

and just be curious.

And then

also, I do think some of the online courses that test you such that you hold yourself accountable to learning certain things.

The reason why there's, you could probably string together a reasonable facsimile of an MBA from Wharton or Tuck, like a really high-priced elite MBA using just what's free online.

If you're into finance, you want to go to DeModarin's blog.

Is it on valuation?

Anyway, ask about DeModarin and read his posts every day and start just getting up to speed and reading a bunch of financial blogs.

But I would set a base of

trying to learn some history, I think a

basic biology and science courses.

And then if you're interested in business, I think you need to understand some basics around accounting, which is sort of the language of business, and some basics around finance evaluation.

But it's sort of what you're interested in.

And then trying to hold yourself accountable.

And also, there's just no getting around it, reading a lot.

Reading, you know, when you read a book, you're sort of a mini expert for about five minutes after you finish the book.

But I'd say the most important thing is just to stay curious.

And I like deadlines.

I give myself a deadline whenever I'm trying to

learn something or get a certain amount of information.

I was thinking about going back and actually taking another accounting course specifically or a distressed credit course.

I'm really interested in credit and bankruptcy.

Huh, amazing.

Amazing I don't have more friends.

But yeah, there's a lot of great resources for learning.

If you want to learn a language, Duolingo, Khan Academy, there's just a ton of great ways to learn.

But again, I think the most fun way to learn, the easiest way to learn and replace or supplant your college degree is just to read

wonderful authors on subject material that gives you more of a global perspective.

Thanks for the question.

We'll be right back after a quick break.

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Welcome back on our final question from DDXB.

Professor, what's the difference between how the political right and the political left market podcasts?

As a kid, my mom drove us around a lot and she always listened to the far right and radio shows despite being an old hippie.

She said it was more engaging and I frankly have to agree.

Lately, since the election, I started listening to a few right shows and noticed the differences.

Let's take Steve Bannon's War Room.

It's four hours a day.

Wow.

It comes out as four separate podcasts each day.

His cold opens are playing unedited liberal talking points, sometimes for up to five or ten minutes.

It's quite bold.

I can't imagine a left podcast getting away with that.

Then I listen to my liberal favorites like Ezra Klein, and it's much calmer, deeply focused discussions, no random interrupts or choosing music, much less of an ad for pillows.

Anyways, I'd love to know what you think about the marketing differences between the right and left podcasts.

That's a super interesting question.

So first off, I think on the left, we need to acknowledge that the majority of the people controlling media up until the 80s and 90s were college-educated urban professionals who skew

more progressive.

And as a result, there was a huge swath of America, maybe even half of America, that felt that they were been ignored and that no one was really speaking to them.

And then the rise of AM radio and podcasts basically filled that void.

And the real juggernaut or the tanker to fill that void was Fox.

They realized, okay, this liberal, sappy, virtue signaling

kind of corporate elitist bullshit of Democrats who pretend to give a fuck once they already have their own money.

People were sick of it and they just drove a freight train

through this opening.

And podcasts have kind of done the same.

Now, where things really came off the track, and this is true of the left and the right, is that back in the 70s and the 80s, what you had was ABC, NBC, and CBS would print money running Jiffy ads on the Partridge family, which was genius.

70 or 80% of America was tuning into the same three channels for five hours a day.

And they were just printing money.

And as a public service, they would take a small amount of their profits and they'd do this really boring, shitty show called The News, The Evening News.

And then on the evening news, they started this two or three minute segment called, with a remember, Senator Jim Tunney and Bruce Herschenson called Point Counterpoint.

And what they found is that was the most engaging and entertaining part of the show where they pit two people with different political views against each other and it would get personal.

It was kind of fun to watch these two grown men treat each other like fucking children or act like children, I should say.

And then they decided, okay, that's it.

And Murdoch recognized this isn't news, it's entertainment.

And the problem with news is it's really boring and not that entertaining because you have to fact check it, be more thoughtful, slow down, use your critical thinking, look at sort of, you know, angles of truth that

there is a truth, if you will, trying to pursue it.

They realized that news could be entertainment.

And the way you entertain people was to find people who already agreed.

They didn't want illumination.

They wanted support.

They wanted validation or they wanted to cement their existing views.

And also filling it up all day long with 24-hour news required a lot of quote-unquote entertainment.

What you have is novelty is just more interesting.

And Democrats like to appeal to their college-educated brethren and they want a virtue signal and clutch their pearls and just be indignant.

And just be indignant and a little bit more thoughtful and slow things down, which is

okay.

And then Sean Hannity comes on and starts spreading conspiracy theory that, I don't know, Joe Biden is a woman.

If the left were more entertaining, all they would be talking about is the fact that Melania Trump fucking hates her husband and hasn't spent, I mean, effectively they're divorced.

I think she likes going to fashion shows and being invited to everything and

her grift, her mini grift, her not-so-successful grift, the Melania coin.

It would just be, if the left were the right in podcasting, they would just be covering nonstop how much Melania hates Donald Trump.

But they do a better job of leveraging the medium, of catering to an audience that is more conspiratorial, more interested in stories, more interested in support than illumination.

The left goes wonky, the left goes deeper, which is more appropriate, more fact-checking, but quite frankly, it's just not as entertaining.

So what do we have?

We have gone from that three minutes of point counterpoint to 24 by 7.

And news is no longer news, it's entertainment.

Anyways, they do a better job on the right than we do on the left.

They're servicing a community that, quite frankly, has been underserved traditionally.

And they're not afraid to stretch the old, what's that thing?

That old T thing, the old true thing.

Thanks for your question.

That's all for this episode.

If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehours at prof2media.com.

Again, that's officehours at prof2media.com.

Or if you prefer to ask on Reddit, just post your question on the Scott Galloway subreddit, and we just might feature it in an upcoming episode.

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