The Insurance Company Buying Reactions

Insurance company with an enterprise budget and a marketing manager who had never touched advertising. Somebody handed over a budget and said do Facebook with it. I saw the account as a prospect. They never hired me and there is no result here to claim.

They were putting over $100,000 a month into boosted posts, and that number blew my mind when I saw it. They would take whatever the latest post was and put money behind it. Facebook at the time defaulted a post boosted from the backend to engagement optimization, so every dollar was buying the cheapest available reaction from whoever was cheapest to get one from. Nobody downstream was doing anything with the audience that bought.

Read the objective on every active campaign. Check whether anything retargets the engagement audience. Check whether a conversion event exists at all. Three questions, three answers, all of them no. The hard part came after. I remember thinking, how do I tell these people they're quite literally lighting their money on fire. They might as well walk up to Mark Zuckerberg and hand him the keys to a mansion.

• Facebook Ads Manager review
• Campaign objective audit
• Audience and retargeting check

No result to report. They didn't hire me and I'm not going to imply the account got fixed. What the audit found is the whole story: an enterprise budget running on the platform's default setting, month after month, with nobody checking which setting that was.

I use this account as my reference point for how bad it gets at the top of the market. The budget was enterprise. The advertising literacy was zero. Nobody inside the company could tell the difference, and nobody around them had a reason to say so.

Digital advertising is technical, and it isn't technical enough to keep anybody out. Anyone can call themselves a media buyer and it's hard to prove they're wrong. So I qualify people with questions that have answers: how much spend have you managed, how many mistakes have you run, how fast did you scale an account and what broke when you did, how many split tests can you hold at once. A hundred grand a month buys a bigger version of whatever is already happening in the account.