[00:00:00] Welcome to the Professor’s Podcast, where we discuss the best strategies to massively improve the reach and bottom line of your business in the current virtual and economic landscape. Your host, Howard Thai generates over $5 billion for his clients annually using innovative tactics, both on and off Amazon.

[00:00:21] What is up everyone, Hurricane Liz here, back for the Professor’s Podcast. And, with me as usual, the man, the myth, the legend, my copilot, Howie Thai, which we will talk to shortly. But I just want to say Howie, PPE 3.0, right around the corner. And remember people that attended 1.0, 2.0 were ranting and raving about the talent you recruited

[00:00:39] Then we had a $40 million a year seller, and we had another $50 million a year seller. But this year you've gone above and beyond what I'd call. It's just absolutely amazing. Considering you've been stuck in a hotel room in Hong Kong for months and months, literally almost exiled from the rest of the world.

[00:00:55] Yet, you still have managed to recruit some of the most amazing talent, including $150 million year seller. And you didn't stop there. You brought the heat, you brought a $20 million a year seller, and then you did something that's just almost unheard of in the Amazon world. You went outside of the Amazon scope of things and you recruited the biggest and brightest talent in all of paid traffic.

[00:01:16] And we've got the gentlemen leading the charge here today, which you guys will hear more from here in a second, but Howie, how the hell did you do this? On top of that, we can't even get your internet to work, right? Yes. You still managed to recruit the best of the best in terms of talent. How did you do that?

[00:01:32] We, we got you as pixelated guy right now. We got you with some audio prompts, but you still found these guys. How did that happen? It's a, well, it's pretty hard actually. I'm on my phone, texting people saying, Hey, do you guys know anyone that is in within this space. And, all my affiliate world people and my friends over there, as well as the affiliate side of the industry, trying to reach the gap between, you know, Amazon and the affiliate marketing world.

[00:02:00] So, and then I found Dee which actually, since I do, I deal a lot with social social signals with Amazon. So what else do you talk about social signals and Dee here? So I'll let you, introduce Dee. Absolutely. You know, the thing that I love about Dee and I think it's absolutely amazing is just like the, he would literally comb the entire earth and find the best of the best at whatever they did.

[00:02:24] And he was attending all different conferences. I literally met him outside of an event that I was speaking at in Barcelona, and he had spoken at the previous event and that's kind of how we came about. And we just kind of ran in the same circles with the same amount of geniuses. And once you run with the same amount of geniuses, it just rubs off on you.

[00:02:40] I think I talked about this during one of our events, how he's like, that's why I like to hang with you. That's why I like to hang with all these really smart Amazon people, because naturally it just rubs off on me. But the other crazy thing about you Dee and again, we are winging this episode since Dee is not an Amazon seller by any means he's just an expert in paid traffic and more in branding and things of that nature.

[00:03:01] So we are going to chicken wing it. The last thing that I wanted to mention before I jumped into this, but Dee, one thing, when I saw your name out, you know, speaking at one of the events, it reminded me, I used to actually meet a poker player. There was a very famous poker player named Dee Deng that was just literally just thrashing everyone and just kicking their ass and taking their.

[00:03:19] Their money. Did that happen to be you by chance? One, it didn't have to be me, but how, how crazy is that? Like, like that name and that permutation. That is, that is so, so funny, but yeah, super, super excited to be here. Like, you know, Amazon has always been a world that fascinated me and the way that it works in the inner mechanicians around the whole thing, always been super fascinating.

[00:03:43] And I know people in that world much like you guys, and naturally a few other people that are powerhouses in the Amazon game as well. And there's some, crosstalks, I'm really excited about this because I see from a really high level, the Venn diagram, the overlapping  circles between performance branding, social signaling, as well as Amazon.

[00:04:04] And that intersection there is super compelling for me. Right. Absolutely. And you know, the reason that that name always struck a chord with me is because for a while, people thought that I was actually a guy playing poker because I was just kicking people's ass and taking their money. And they thought that I was the other Deng brother.

[00:04:19] So they thought that I was secretly the other Deng brother. And my big brother Dee was just helping me kick everyone's ass. So it was kind of funny to me, but it's a fantastic story, nonetheless. And like I said, when I met you the name, I was like, wow. I wonder if this is the Deng brother that they confuse me with, but now that I know that you're not.

[00:04:37] And now that I obviously know you are a Facebook expert, it would've made perfect sense, though. If you were because naturally Facebook ads in some way, shape or form, when you first start is a form of gambling, I mean, it's still to a certain degree. It is. We talked a lot about that before the podcast and Howie had a brilliant question, which he will be asking you here momentarily.

[00:04:53] But before we jump into Howie’s question, my question for you is, I really like the people that are listening to this are mostly Amazon sellers. So they really have no idea about your background, about what you've done and why you're so brilliant and literally why, how he was pretty much begging you to speak at this event.

[00:05:11] So can you let everybody know a little bit more about yourself and how it is you got to where you're at as well as what you consider yourself the best in the world at. Absolutely. Absolutely great question. First of all, I want to thank you all for the opportunity to be able to jump on it was it wasn't all that long ago.

[00:05:28] We started the company, my co-founder Scott and I in 2017. Before that I had a tech venture, that was my first foray into business. Didn't know anything about business and that first venture almost drove me pretty much completely broke. If you go on YouTube and you Google my name and you see a talk, I literally tell that story about how.

[00:05:47] I had a, I had a big amount of money come out of my bank account from a giant bill or a tax bill or something like that. And I saw how much money I had left while we were watching TV with next to my wife and next to my step kid. And I had to make a split second decision. Do I tell them what, like what's going on or do I kind of just keep it quiet and persevere?

[00:06:05] Thank God I persevered because right now, fast forward to now. Agency's 80 people strong. We've got close to just as many clients and, you know, and we manage multimillion dollar spend. And the fortunate thing is not only across doubling down on only Facebook, but multiple other social traffic sources and social paid search as well.

[00:06:25] And focusing a lot on the back end too. So making sure we've got email SMS. And all those different pieces, I guess that the big, biggest flex that we have so far is because of the unique way that we think about social, rather than just very direct response, straight up the top for this one client within an hour, we made them $2 million, 2.4, something like that.

[00:06:45] And, you know, it's just being able to do really cool stuff like that as an agency, because we get to see such a breadth of different types of verticals, different types of products and apply different types of thinking. So, yeah, and, you know, having a team in the U S and as well as the team here in Australia, super fun ride so far and getting to meet awesome individuals like yourselves at conferences, within circles, like these, and to have real conversations with real people who are very genuine and all about giving and sharing and knowledge share, like.

[00:07:15] What else? Can I mark it or ask for it? Like seriously? Right. Absolutely. And before we jumped into Howie's question, one last question for you. We had a guest on yesterday who I know would absolutely love to be a fly on the wall right now that was Anthony Lee. Who's an expert in Amazon ranking. And one of the things that Amazon said that particularly mid-level two brand new sellers are having a tremendous amount of trouble with right now is this whole thing with Facebook and the political.

[00:07:42] Ads. And as a result, a lot of accounts are being shut down for people that are just simply running Amazon giveaways. What have you seen on your end? Is it about the same thing and what have you guys done to adjust, to being able to almost combat Facebook in what seems to me like they're just randomly taking accounts down.

[00:08:00] Like I think, I think I'm not sure if I told you to see, but I've been banned from Facebook so many times and I just kind of gave up on it and I just moved on over to YouTube. No. Got you. It's, it's really a wacky role and I don't envy anyone. That's working at Facebook right now, and we'll be able to geek out on that stuff in a moment when we get to that point.

[00:08:18] But in the past, all I can say is this, and I'll give you guys a preview of the story. So all of 2020, the headline really in the, in the paid social in the social media world really is all this talk around privacy, like web privacy started becoming a really big thing moving into 2020, especially with Apple at WWDC, talking about their ITP.

[00:08:43] Intelligent Tracking protocol, as well as their PCM, which is the Private Click Measurement, which essentially what Apple stands is we sell this awesome hardware and it protects you as a consumer with privacy. So, you know, all that evil stuff with Cambridge

[00:09:00] Analytica, this, that, and the other, we want to make sure our phones can help you not have that happen to you.

[00:09:04] A big part of that is of course the underlying narrative is Facebook. And so Facebook knowing this have been pushing a lot of code into the production that is flagging accounts just with the computer review, not with a human review. And that's where these people are getting flagged. And we get some of our clients flag.

[00:09:23] Some of our clients are selling like apparel. You know, like a cute dress or a pair of like, you know, track shoes and they're getting flagged as well because of the fact that code is getting pushed up into the platform. And it's not clear as they just can't catch up. Right. The computer moves at this speed and humans can only move at this speed over here.

[00:09:43] And it's, it's been very frustrating. Unfortunately, we have a rep because we wanted in Australia, is highest spenders. So we have a rep at the Asia Pacific head office. And even at their level, they're like, listen, just bring it to us, let us know if a is happening one of your clients and we can  then escalate it accordingly week.

[00:10:01] But even internally, you know, that really gives me a signal of how they're organized internally, where they go. We just have to undo it. We can't fix it at the system computer level. We still have to fix it at the human level. So just know if it's happening to you and it's happening frequently. One, just know that it is.

[00:10:20] It is very, very common, in fact, more and more common, the closer we are to today. So it happened to you last week, very common of happening last month. You know, it's getting to that point again, because of all this code, like to give you an example on Tuesday this week or Wednesday, this week, we opened up our ad manager and we could not see half of the metrics that were in there.

[00:10:39] It was this double dash after $2,004,000 spend, you can't see your cost per click. You're a CTR. You're nothing. That's how buggy the system has been. So a lot of people are freaking out right now and I've taken it upon myself almost. That's like a personal mission, really to arm myself with one as much knowledge and research as possible.

[00:11:00] I mean, I, because of a pal of mine, I've gotten to speak with a Stanford instructor for machine learning, a machine learning employee at AWS, a Facebook recruiter for machine learning, as well as a few like Uber nerds. That talk about like server-side tracking and all that, just so I can wrap my head around it because I truly don't believe that.

[00:11:22] People that spend money on Facebook ads, whether it's agencies or brand owners or CMOs, or, you know, media buyers in general know what's about to come in the next few months and how hard we're gonna probably get punched in the teeth. Right? Absolutely. No, that leads perfectly into what, Howie you were asking earlier.

[00:11:41] So you want to tell people a little bit more about that Howie before, you have this question for Dee. So the question I was going to ask him before, before we get going on was, well, what do you think? Because a lot of these big sellers that we, that we talked to right now is kind of scared about the, you know, iOS 14 rollout, where they kind of block Facebook from, from all the privacy things so that they can actually tap in, do ads on.

[00:12:08] Those iOS 14. So I just, we just want to know how would you, what do you have? What can you tell us about that and what have you figured it out? I got you. I got you. Big sellers watching this. I got you. Howie live. I got you. I've gone to, I mean, I've, I've gone to the point, yeah, Listen, I'm a CEO of an 80% fucking company and they haven't seen me for three weeks because of this.

[00:12:32] I'm like, no, one's talked to me. No one expects any, any answers for my Slack, cause I need to go investigate and figure out what was going on. And fortunately, my previous startup was a tech startup. So I understand code to a certain point to be able to tear apart the infrastructure. So understanding that people are scared naturally the fear comes from uncertainty.

[00:12:53] So, and this is the reason why, as a joke, if you go onto my Twitter feed, you'll see that keep calling it 14 because I truly believe that this is like COVID for digital marketers in a certain way, especially on the Facebook side and the same type of phenomenon. When it first came out, it was like, Oh, you know, just one case in China, it's not going to really affect me.

[00:13:13] I don't have to worry that much. And then all of a sudden you hear in the news, wait a second. Now, like there's someone in my country. There's someone in my town and then it goes from like, I don't give a shit to like fully freaking out. So I want to make sure that high power sellers that you guys are talking to, you guys are at least equipped with the information so that there is no freak out, but there's more so let's figure out what to do next.

[00:13:35] But before we get to that point, I think it's important and feel free to stop me at any time. If I'm going a bit too fast, cause I've gone a bit deep with this. The whole situation goes like this, Apple says we've got this device. We want to make sure that to the consumer, this device is safe from the Cambridge Analytica nonsense.

[00:13:54] And all of that craziness that you've heard Facebook does to you or any type of ad tracker does to you. So with that, keeping in mind that Apple isn't only just hardware, but they have Safari, they have their in-app browsers and also all the apps within their app store. And the big key point conversation is all around web privacy and ATT, which is ad tracking and transparency.

[00:14:17] Which was meant to drop last September, but they couldn't iron out the kinks. So they're about to drop it now, like literally any day now with Iowa's 14 point, when we think it's 14.4, everyone's around 14.3. If they're, if they're updated to the latest version and when ATT drops, essentially every single app that wants to live on the app store.

[00:14:40] That wants to stay compliant with tracking and still maintain good. Stay in the good graces of Apple with the app store needs to flash a prompt to ask their users, Would you like to allow insert apps’ name to track you? Allow or disallow. Right? So the default state is disallowed. So in other words, the action is to opt in the action isn't to opt out.

[00:15:05] So that's the first principle there because of that opt out. What it does is, is it forces, it enforces three things onto Facebook as a platform, Snapchat, Pinterest, anything that's an app on the, on the, in the phone, right. It restricts it aggregates and it delays data. Keeping in mind that people that scale and spend a whole bunch of money on Facebook, usually like us, for example, especially like, you know, high spend big black Friday type season.

[00:15:34] You're pretty much hitting refresh every 15, 30 minutes looking how your spend is doing and then making decisions accordingly. Now, one of the delay part is if it's an iOS 14, opted out and user the conversion data that goes back to the Facebook can be delayed between anywhere randomized between 24 to 48 hours.

[00:15:53] So already if 50%, and by the way, I did a, an aggregate analysis in Q4 for our agency. And something like, if I'm not wrong by just from memory 11 million revenue attributed to Facebook ads. Three or 4 million attributed to Android devices. And then the rest were just like desktop, the standard, the other trickles trickles trickles.

[00:16:17] So that kind of gives us an idea of, you know, where things are at in terms of iOS users. Now, based off of that, then if you start seeing a big data loss, you need to know how to one, capture the data and report it for yourself, but then to what you can and cannot pass back to Facebook. Because that's how the architecture goes right from the ad click to the website, all the Facebook click ID and all the URL parameters.

[00:16:47] If you go to, if you sent, when you send it to the website, The first party server will be able to suck up all that data. No problem. And then you can do all this stuff if you want with it. It's just, when you try to pass it back to Facebook, there's going to be some issues there. So really it's, it's a lot of people having to shift their thinking from it's either direct response, you become so powerful with your copy, with your creative and all that, and have that type of a brand where it is an impulse buy.

[00:17:17] Or you have enough, a good enough of a funnel to be able to close the sale on that first touch, or you then have to leverage email and capture some type of personally identifiable information, some PII, first name, last name, email to build that list, to be able to nurture the sale accordingly. So it's, so that running is going to be a bit hazy because of that patchiness and data where you might start seeing existing purchasers.

[00:17:45] Seeing top of funnel ads as if they've never bought from you before. Cause all that retargeting is going to get really jumbled up. So hopefully I've given you guys a good enough picture there, but there are mitigation strategies, but you know, while I'm describing the issue, if you guys want to jam on that a bit more, please feel free to let me know.

[00:18:02] Yeah. You know, the interesting thing there, I'm sure how he has something to dad, but Amazon sellers are usually used to getting delayed data from our PPC platforms. How is that? Not what do you, what do you think that the reaction is? They get probably like used to like the 24 or 48 hours stuff. So for Facebook, well, depends on how big the seller is.

[00:18:21] If you have that much data and that much sales going in for add on ads and it's going to be pretty, it's going to hard to manage. Yeah, I'm sure it might be a little bit scary also, depending on how I I'm sure you could spend. I mean, I know you could spend a heck of a lot more on Facebook in comparison to Amazon, Amazon, you sort of get used to it.

[00:18:41] You know, there's going to be delay. You kinda have all that experience, but you know, unfortunately it's, it's happening, knowing all that that's going on. Do you see any opportunity with what's happening for sellers in general times times it's. So, and this is why, so we've been, this is, this is one of the fortunate thing, has it really is.

[00:19:04] We've been through COVID so we kind of know if we cast our mind back, we can kind of remember the, Oh, wait, I gotta wear a mask. Oh, wait. There's like, I hear about all these different, crazy drugs. Maybe I should, like, I got told, like I should drink bleach or like put some kind of UV light, all these wacky like cures.

[00:19:23] Right. Here's where the opportunity is, if you know, from a, if you can speak to someone or know someone, or if you know yourself technical implementations that you can put in place to not solve the entire issue, but mitigate the issue. It's literally like having a pre-Brexit team. Right. So that's what I've been looking for this whole time.

[00:19:48] It's like, how do I jump straight to like, let me pass all this bullshit and get straight to like pre vaccine or at least something that's a, a good enough blocker. So in this case, it, the, the magic term that I'm, that I've arrived at after a lot of research and by research, I mean, just, just cross referencing my thinking with very smart minds, way smarter than myself is essentially.

[00:20:13] Server to server tracking. So first party tracking and that's where for any of the sellers that also have their own website implementing Google tag manager, server side container. So that. Essentially you are converting third-party cookies, so you don't have the Facebook pixel, any, any other trackers and pixels.

[00:20:33] Those are all third party and that's where Apple really can mess you up a whole bunch. But once you convert that to a first party, first party data, and a first party cookie. Now you've got a lot more control and power. So that delay in reporting the conversion back to Facebook, if you're viewing it in the Facebook ad manager, There might be some delayed and some real-time because you have your Android users and your opted end users, and then you have the out users.

[00:21:01] So you kind of looking at almost like. Half of a metric, right. Each side. Whereas if you have first party stuff, you can then take that data and spit that out into whatever dashboard you want and make still those informed decisions at the campaign level of see what creative is working, see what ad sets are working and see what audiences are working.

[00:21:22] And because you have that first party data. You can then leverage, leverage the conversions API as well as the, really the offline conversions API, which will in theory, in theory, help a lot more with the user matching on the backend and also with building custom audiences on the back to Facebook again too, because now it's first party data.

[00:21:44] It's your data. Right. It's no longer third party on the browser side. And you're relying on the Facebook pixel. It's saying this data belongs to the website owner. So when it goes back to the Facebook, it makes life a lot. It's it's more of that gray area of, well, this isn't clean Facebook stuff. This also is information that the website owner has like email, like first name, last name, but also like cookie data as well.

[00:22:12] So they're right there that right there, as technical as that sounds and possibly intimidating for some people to hear it. The moment you wrap your head around that and more than happy to point you guys to other content, or if anyone, you know, within the audience wants to dig into deeper and go down the nerd rabbit hole with me and pop out the other side, looking like an Uber nerd, happy to handle you guys, all the resources required or just, you know, come talk to me, just book a time with me.

[00:22:40] Happy to talk people through it. No obligation, not like I I'm not. I believe in abundance. I don't need to close every single damn person that talks to me. I just want to make sure that everyone's clued in because millions of dollars are on the line. But once you understand that, that right there becomes the pre vaccine against all this stuff.

[00:22:57] Yeah. And you know, I feel like much of this interview, I've, I've hogged you up. D so I want to just make sure how he doesn't have anything to ask you before I fire away with all the other questions I have here. So we have like another 25 minutes before the next person comes up. So I want to put in some of my questions in here.

[00:23:15] So what, what we do actually, we're also like a marketing agency for Amazon sellers. So what I'm, we're all into like social and external traffic and stuff. So we want to know what kind of expectations can people get out of having social ads? If they do ads on using social and stuff like that. Can you talk about that?

[00:23:36] Because since we know that you're you do that for your clients as well? Absolutely. So in the context of, of the way that social works with most of your, your audience and their Amazon setup, does it usually there is the destination URL, usually to an Amazon page or two and owned like an actual website with a landing page or a squeeze page.

[00:24:01] It's to an Amazon listing usually. Got you. Got you. Right. So you could essentially on, we do have attributions that we could do, and we will do like a rotating URL with some kind of, you know, percentage of per keyword or keyword ranking. But we do have attribution if we want to do it that way. Got you.

[00:24:24] Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it's, it's. It's interesting, right? Because we've got at least 20 minutes, 25% of the people that hit us up possibly a bit less that come from an Amazon discipline. And that are thinking about going into the direct to consumer brand own a website, have that experience discipline.

[00:24:46] And the most common thing that I see is naturally with Amazon, which I completely understand why. It is, it is very, very product centric, right. And, and around the keywords. And it really requires that type of thinking and that type of discipline to come first and foremost, to be able to win on Amazon. And then you go on social and it's a really different experience.

[00:25:05] Right? All we talk about all the time, too. I don't care who is selling, what on what platform? By the time you go to social, it's all about being native to that social platform. What I mean by that is if you're going to the beach and you're wearing a business suit, you're not native to the platform, right.

[00:25:22] You've kind of, everyone's staring at you like, yo, you're at the beach, bro. Like, you know, chill out. Right. And that's where creative really matters. And what you're putting in front of to catch the eye to stop the thumb on social really comes down to either. And what we're seeing working right now is definitely user generated content and definitely doubling down on the influencer side and, and leveraging a lot of that and using copy that almost sounds like the influencer wrote it also helps as well.

[00:25:52] So that the whole thing looks super native and then the destination is almost like, Oh yeah, sure. It points to Amazon. Like at, by  that point I'm already so sold in that, I'm just looking forward the buy button. But before that really, really all we're doing is being able to go, how do we make this experience one feel naive, but then also to feel trustworthy and not salesy to a consumer set.

[00:26:19] That is now very, very, very, very, very, very numb to the typical ads that they've been seeing for the past few years. Right. Whereas like product, and then maybe you see some emojis, green tick, this ratings, five star and all that type of copy. It worked for us and it still works for a certain demo. Don't get me wrong.

[00:26:37] But, if you're going after the high payer spending, and this is just from, from testing ourselves, if you're going to have to hire spending, more likely to convert type individual and natural. You have to know your marketing personas, obviously, but that user generated content and that influencer style content works a ton.

[00:26:55] And we just over-indexes on creative. Like it's such a big variable and, and, and so many people want to nerd out on, but if I tweak this in the backend and if I click on this button or if I change the bid a little bit and all that other stuff, I'm like, yeah, that's cool. But really it's all about the creative.

[00:27:12] It's all about that call. Interesting. You were just saying about like maybe 25 or less of your people to come to you are actually from Amazon or does Amazon, can you tell me, like, how do they approach working with you? How do they usually do they have a landing page? And then, uh, from there they can switch it off on where they go to landing page.

[00:27:32] You go to Amazon or after a certain amount of enough orders to get ranked. Rank on Amazon. They're going to go switch it to that or Shopify or something like that. How do they, how do you deal with you? Got it. So the most common use case is they're already doing a certain amount of like enough volume on Amazon for that to go, okay, we've got something here.

[00:27:55] We now want to you know, we read some blogs somewhere that you have to own the customer and that you have to own the customer experience. So let's go and build a shopify store, and they usually get into the, wait a second my unit economics on Amazon looks like this, and this is my cost per acquisition on Amazon.

[00:28:15] How do I make sure that I still can maintain the same margin and achieve the same type of CPA ROAs when it's a non-Amazon out there in the worldwide web Shopify store. So their, their thinking is more, gets closer more to the I mean now I want to build a brand and infuse value into this brand, which, which isn't just a collection of products, but rather, you know, the typical brand, right?

[00:28:39] Like what Liz is wearing Nike, it makes people feel a certain way or it makes people think about a certain thing. So by that point, we really get into the world of performance branding and how to put all the, all those different things together. So it's not so much. Bring it to a Lander, drive it somewhere and then go to the Amazon store.

[00:28:58] It's almost like let's just  focus on the Shopify presence and let your Amazon key humming away. They can, they might do some cross sharing and back linking to be able to, if you want to go on Amazon, do here. If you want to go to the website, go there. And some of them get even crap after to go on Amazon.

[00:29:15] We use that as the foot in the door type products. So if you can buy a single products on Amazon, But because they want, most of there is to compel people to go to their website. You can only buy the three pack, the five pack, the 12 pack on our website. I'm gonna say. Interesting. Do you have any questions?

[00:29:36] Yeah. Yeah. You know, I've got a couple more Dee have you thought much about what you'd want to speak to at this event to the Amazon sellers? I know we've been talking a lot about all the Facebook stuff, and obviously, you know, now that there's some Amazon sellers that actually do drive traffic to the listing direct, but I do know others that drive them to a landing page, and then they go to Amazon and that's a lot having to do with, even though we can track attribution, like Howard said, now a lot of them still like to drive to their own traffic.

[00:30:01] But what topics have you thought about speaking to these group of Amazon sellers? I think basically based off of what we spoke about today, the most top of mind thing I think for now, and for the next few months is going to be around iOS 14 and mitigation strategies. There there's a, that's a really big topic and I want to make sure that I serve, you know, which, whichever community that I touch.

[00:30:23] I want to make sure that I serve to the best of my ability. And if I can bring as much guidance as possible in that arena would love to be able to talk about that. If, if you know the feedback that comes back from me from, from your, from your community, Hey, you know, like we get the whole iOS thing and that's like too doom and gloom and scary for us.

[00:30:41] We'll talk about something else that I think the other part is just being able to, to be able to pull out the type of creative that is the intersection between representation, like makes people feel a good way about a brand, but also has conversion principles at the same time. I think that's really important.

[00:30:59] And not enough people talk about that. I don't know why maybe it's because it's not as sexy as, you know, just tweaking around with all the different types of ad rankings and this, that, and the other, but also a really important area there. And then we can add some technical stuff into the piece too, but top of mind for me, absolutely.

[00:31:16] And possibly top of mind, like how we said for the community might be that iOS stuff. Right. You know, last question that I have for you is knowing what we talked about earlier. It's almost really the depth of drop shipping and people that have one-off products from AliExpress and stuff like that.

[00:31:31] They're pretty much going to be set up to fail in the coming months and in the coming years. But we also talked about mom and pop brand owners and people that are just starting to launch their product on Facebook online. What about these mid-level Amazon stores that already have a pretty decent brand.

[00:31:48] They're already pretty well-known on Amazon and now they want to venture out into selling on their own site and using potentially Facebook. And obviously there's a lot of other traffic that's up and coming, but do they still have a chance to really get in on it or have they already missed the boat?

[00:32:04] Great question. And in fact, you, you, that statement right there just made me think about an additional answer to your question earlier on what's the opportunity here, there, right? There's the opportunity, this, this, the type of value that you're providing to your community is the edge that so many of these.

[00:32:25] Let me get a Shopify. Let me leverage Facebook and Instagram ads types don't have, which is intimate know-how on Amazon because Amazon quite honestly is fairly immune to all these, all this craziness is happening right now. So if, if you like, it's almost like being able to say, I just found this awesome Island that 14, isn't even touching.

[00:32:49] Right. And that's the Amazon world. So that's such a huge edge that I wish so many of our clients can really understand and wrap their head around and see how they can weave their products in there. So that's the first thing. The next thing is to directly answer your question, Liz, the, on the, on the Facebook side, the next few, I would say the next three to six months, two things are gonna happen.

[00:33:12] One from, from a technical implementation standpoint, the board has really risen. You know, I was talking like server side and cookies and all that, like technical nerdy, crap that really like, you know, a lot of marketers don't care about. And in the past we didn't need to. So the bar has been raised to the point where if you want to be able to get a hold of your data properly, you kind of need to have that.

[00:33:32] First in place until Facebook comes up with new product on their platform. The second part is the machine learning algorithm because of this lack of data is going to get really bottled for volatile for a while. Right? That's not to say that CPMs won't come down to try to maintain some type of equilibrium.

[00:33:54] So based on those two statements, the best thing, if. I was speaking to a [00:34:00] mid-level person that is on Amazon, like crushing at that level. And being able to maintain that, I'd say two options, one either skill yourself up so that if you're nerdy enough, skill yourself up so you can understand these technical barriers and then determine if that's where you want to put your money on that table.

[00:34:18] Right now, if you think that you can turn that into a bit of a, a heater, otherwise. Talk to someone who knows what the hell did they're doing and then make an assessment accordingly, you know, because there's a fair bit more to unpackage or, or, or the third option. Just wait it out a little bit. Let the things settle again.

[00:34:38] I'm, I'm pulling a lot of comparisons with COVID. Remember that period when like no one knew what was happening and then the period where like we're in now where it's like, we know what's happening, but no one really cares as much anymore. If you could wait that middle part of like, I don't really know happening out and to be Frank, it's not going to be that long.

[00:34:56] Facebook does have most like. The most brilliant minds in the world, like, cause they can afford the most brilliant minds in the world. And it could just be three months before it's like, okay, it's settled down enough. It's good enough to jump in the water. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, that's it also remind me, I actually had a brunch with the guy that his business model is very similar, whereas he's got an agency of.

[00:35:21] To what I was talking about. Like, he's a, mid-level an Amazon seller, but he's got instead mid-level brands that are on whole food shelf that are on other company's shelf, but they're not getting much traction off of their actual website because they've relied so much on brick and mortar traction. And now what he's doing is he's just approaching them to sell more stuff online, but he's still using the power of Facebook ads.

[00:35:40] But again, He's got a lot of experience and he's done over nine figures doing that, but it's kind of similar. It reminded me of people that have mid-level Amazon brands that are very well-known Amazon, they're making millions and millions of dollars, but yet they're not getting any traction in brick and mortar or on their own site.

[00:35:54] And I still think that there's a lot of opportunity there. Since, as you said, you're an expert are getting Facebook sales, getting. Facebook sales off of people's websites. This guy was apparently working with people that are experts at getting into brick and mortar stores. And there's a lot of Amazon sellers that are still not in brick and mortar stores.

[00:36:09] So lots of opportunity there. Now, how we, before we say goodbye here, do you have any last words? Well, there's a lot of stuff. I don't think we could cover up in 10 minutes, but I will talk to him afterwards. Like I promised you, I I'm interested in what you do and wanting to learn more about what you do on your social site.

[00:36:26] Fantastic. Yeah. D any final words from you before we say goodbye here? Yeah, absolutely. Just, just two words. Thank you. Appreciate you guys for having me. This is super fun. Again. Any, any opportunity to jam with good people? Always a good time. Hopefully, you know, everyone that's watching got a bit of value out of this.

[00:36:42] Let's keep the good train rolling. Absolutely. I'm looking forward to your speech at the PPE 3.0, which again is how he's third virtual live events. So you can stream it live in your underwears. I usually tell everyone just don't stand up, do us a favor and don't stand up or make sure at least you've got the video.

[00:36:59] Turn it off when you do decide to stand up. But that's the beauty of it. You can attend it live in the comfort of your own home. You will get to listen to 12 to 13 brilliant minds. Many of them, in the multiple six, seven and eight figures per month, I don't believe there's a nine figure per month. There is a nine figure per year, but you'll also get people like Dee who have multimillion dollar agencies that are responsible for tens and tens of millions of dollars.

[00:37:24] I am super fired up about it. I know how he is to find out more information on this event. Go on over to Howardthai.com/PPE3, and right this very moment, you can take advantage of early bird pricing, which means you'll get a 50% off discount the usual mastermind price, and you will be paying the same amount.

[00:37:42] That the brotherhood and sisterhood of the world's best Amazon sellers in the world pay. Once they attend one event after you attend one event, then you're part of the brotherhood slash sisterhood, and you will be able to be part of the family and you will also get all the excitement, all the secrets.

[00:37:59] All the strategy and the tactics that are working right now in 2021. So again, to head on over and learn more about that and early bird pricing heading over to howardthai.com/PPE3. Other than that, it was a great, fantastic learning session and jamming session. Dee I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[00:38:16] And Howie, as always, you're a man of few words, but you've got a brilliant mind brother. So I look forward to doing more of these with you. Thanks so much, gentlemen. Welcome to the Professors Podcast, where we discuss the strategies to massively improve the reach and bottom line of your business in the current virtual and economic landscape. Your host, Howard Thai generates over $5 billion for his clients money using innovative tactics, both on and off Amazon.