THE AD PROFESSOR: A MASTERCLASS IN ATTENTION FARMING

Morning!

I slept in this morning for the first time in maybe 3 months. It felt like I went in and out of hibernation.

My only goal over the next 6 months - make weekend lie-ins a regular occurrence.

(Let’s see how long that lasts)

Talking of sleep, today I’m going to break down a marketing strategy that is keeping me up at night.

It’s new, it’s simple, and I think it is the future of marketing.

Let’s get straight into it!

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BREAKING DOWN THE STRATEGY

There are only a few people in the marketing space that I idolize. Most of which died 20+ years ago.

They were people who spearheaded the space, set the foundations of what we use today, and created the marketing fundamentals we all follow.

But there is 1 modern-day marketer that I am completely in awe of.

Not because he owns a billion-dollar marketing firm or that he’s released some best-selling marketing book.

Instead, he just constantly seems to be 1-step ahead of everyone in the space.

He is subtle, yet dominant.

And there is a strategy he has put in place recently that people are quickly going to copy.

His name is George Mack and here is the best approach to marketing I’ve seen in 2024:

I came across George about 3 years back after seeing one of his threads on Twitter.

He seemed sharp and ran an ad agency called Multiply. So I went down the rabbit hole and ended up writing a breakdown of his approach to marketing. (See here)

But now, I wish I would have waited, because it’s safe to say George has taken it to a whole new level in 2024 and it has been incredible to watch.

So let’s break it down into 3 simple stages:

Stage 1: Get Attention

Online marketing gurus love to hate on attention-focused marketing.

But guess what, marketing that gets 0 attention gets 0 sales.

This is why I love Dave Trott so much. He openly says that the first thing a marketer should focus on is that their ads get attention.

And it seems like George gets this better than anyone.

Because late last year George created ‘The Ad Professor’ on Twitter.

The page is simple, every day ‘The Ad Professor’ shares 2 things:

• His “Collection” of great ads

• Ads he created “In his lunch break”

And people love it.

In under 1 year, he’s racked up 162k followers alongside threads that regularly rack up 10M+ views.

Talk about getting attention.

But who cares? It’s just a Twitter page.

Here’s why it’s genius:

1/ The Viral Concept

The content he puts out is virtually a cheat code.

Ads are designed to get attention. Companies have whole teams working on them with the sole intention of hooking people in.

So when George - or ‘The Ad Professor’ - compile the best ads they’ve seen…

They’re inherently going to get people’s attention.

2/ The Target Audience

Ads are created for everyone, but who consumes them most on social media?

Marketing professionals.

Who is George’s target audience for his ad agency?

Marketing professionals.

It’s the marketing department that hires agencies like George’s to run their paid ads. Which again, are inherently attracted to the content ‘The Ad Professor’ is posting.

So now he has millions of the right people all staring in his direction… now what?

Stage 2: Push Action

You take that attention and you push it towards your business, it’s really that simple.

But George took it one step further.

He noticed he was on to a winner with The Ad Professor and went all in. He redirected the old Multiply site to www.adprofessor.com.

(Which is an incredible site in itself)

Then he simply pushed all the Ad Professor traffic towards the site through simple CTAs at the end of threads.

This one “thread finisher” (as they’re called nowadays) had 4000 views alone.

Imagine getting 4000+ views per day on a CTA to book a call with your agency - if 0.1% clicked it you’d be laughing all the way to the bank.

Another thing George did to push traffic towards the agency was to change the Twitter bio:

It’s a clever mix of adding extra credibility to the Professor’s name while also qualifying leads with the “$50k/month”.

Again, simple stuff. But effective.

Stage 3: Scale

What do you do when you have a winning formula? You scale it up.

Which is exactly what George is currently doing.

1/ Newsletter launch - Began pushing people into a newsletter which I believe has 50k subscribers now.

2/ Moved the Ad Professor to LinkedIn - He actually turned his personal profile into the LinkedIn Ad Professor profile. Just another commitment towards the strategy.

Not much of a disguise, but already at 50k followers on LinkedIn!

Stage 0: Positioning

Yes, this should be stage 4, but I thought it wasn’t interesting enough to have as the first point so decided to put it here.

But there is something to be said about the positioning and branding behind the whole ‘Ad Professor’ character.

These are subtle nuances, but I think they make the brand 10x more valuable and 10x more engaging:

1/ Not a personal brand

Everyone is on the personal branding train, hell, I’m on the personal branding train. But ‘The Ad Professor’ is a unique new play on it.

It’s kinda like a personal brand… because it’s a person. But now it’s something that anyone can own.

This is something everyone is probably overlooking. But there’s a big difference between selling an agency that relies on a personal brand for leads Vs an agency that gets 100s of leads from a mysterious professor.

Agencies reliant on the founder’s personal brand for leads ain’t worth much. But agencies that have lead gen built in? Probably worth 4-5x more.

Why wouldn’t a large ad agency buy the Ad Professor and take the lead gen? Or buy Multiply and take both.

It’s a no-brainer.

2/ Not a personal brand (again)

I don’t want to hate on personal branding, because I think it’s priceless for founders. But when it comes to following a person, you kinda always know they are trying to sell you.

‘The Ad Professor’ on the other hand… feels more like a cool Twitter page that shares great ad content.

The fact the person behind it didn’t want to put themselves as the face of it gives it this selfless feel - and I think it’s a huge factor as to why it was successful.

There’s a mystery, there’s selflessness.

It’s just different. People can love it, without feeling weird for idolizing a person.

And this screenshot is proof:

This is something George has tried before but never managed to make it take off, until…. The Ad Professor was born.

As always, the messenger matters.

The Irony: The Isn’t New

As much as I would love to claim that George is a super genius, his approach isn’t new - it’s just the way he applied it that is.

Take Hubspot for example.

• Billion-dollar company

• Work in the B2B space

• Sell high-ticket software + more

But guess what…

No one gives a f*ck about a billion-dollar B2B company. Which is why they get under 30 likes per tweet, even though they have 800k+ followers.

How do they solve that issue?

They bought attention.

• Acquired The Hustle (a business newsletter) for $30M

• Acquired/Started 32 different podcasts

Now they have a media arm that gets attention, which they then drive to their business.

There are probably another 4-5 big examples you could find of this. But the concept is the same:

Create a medium that gets the attention of your target audience → Use it to drive people to your business.

 🌱 THE GREENHOUSE

Things I’ve saved this week that are worth seeing:

• My breakdown of Dave Trott. (See here)

• The Ad Professor Twitter page. (See here)

• A thread on incentives by George Mack. (See here)

TL;DR

1/ Create media that gets attention
2/ Push it towards your business
3/ Scale it across platforms

That sounds so simple as a summary, but it’s so much harder to activate on than it is to say.

There’s a reason Hubspot paid $30M for The Hustle and that’s because they didn’t think they could create it themselves.

A media arm + a business.

I think we’re going to see this a lot more in the B2B space and George has done it magically.

Right, that’s all I’ve got for you today - I hope you learned something.

If you did, why not forward this to a friend?

Until next Sunday.

— Niall

WAIT… BEFORE YOU GO

If you’ve read this far, why not see how else I can help you:

• Follow me on Twitter for more marketing stuff.

• Connect with me on LinkedIn to follow my business journey.

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THAT’S ALL!

This has been a breakdown of The Ad Professor’s marketing strategy. I hope you have learned something and can implement a similar strategy in your business!

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