Hello and welcome back. This week we are tackling something almost every business owner running ads has experienced lately: the phone calls. Google, TikTok, even Meta, all suddenly keen to help you grow your business. Because we manage so many ad accounts for clients, we field around ten of these calls a day, so we have a fairly good read on what is actually going on. And it is worth understanding before you hand anyone access to your accounts.
If these calls have ever made you feel like you must be missing out, this episode is the antidote. Mel and Mon break down the push versus pull difference between social advertising and search, why TikTok is growing so fast and whether your audience is even there, and how AI tools are now coming for Google’s search revenue from yet another direction. It is a clear, slightly cheeky guide to reading the motive behind the sales pitch so you keep control of your own marketing.
A large global platform wants to profit from you. It is not your marketing strategist. So when the phone rings, take a breath, question the motive, and keep your hand firmly on your own wheel.
Why are they calling?
Here is the hot tip. It has far more to do with the rep’s sales target than with anything to do with helping your business. As Mel puts it, the motive is “to grow their revenue,” not yours.
The tell is in the contrast. Try raising a ticket because your Google Business Profile got wrongly closed or your account was hacked, and good luck getting a human. But express interest in spending more, and you will get a friendly call from someone who understands neither your business nor your industry, offering to make changes on your behalf. Most of these callers are not even employees of the platforms. They are commissioned reps, a different person every time, paid on getting your ad spend up.
What is actually happening at Google
Google is feeling the squeeze. Its ad revenue growth has slowed dramatically from the boom years, and when your biggest product, search, starts withdrawing, that is a serious problem. A stat worth knowing as a business owner is how much of Google’s revenue sits in undefined, uncategorised advertising. Billions of dollars where, as Mel describes it, “we took your money, you put some adverts out there, they were clicked on,” and you do not really know where it went.
People have wised up to that. They have grown tired of loading a credit card and trusting Google to get it right, and instead they lean on agencies or good in-house managers who know how to set a budget and exclude the wrong search terms. The classic example is a roofing client who made top hats, the tin component that sits on a roof. Google wanted him to bid on “top hats,” but ninety nine percent of people searching that phrase are picturing formal headwear. Without exclusion terms, that is money straight down the drain.
The Zuckerberg pitch that should worry you
Meta, by contrast, is flying, with tens of billions in quarterly ad revenue and strong year-on-year growth. And Mark Zuckerberg has been clear about the plan: cut the agency out entirely. His pitch, roughly, is that you plug in your credit card, Meta handles the targeting and the creative, generates thousands of ad variations with AI, and you never need an agency or even the metrics again.
Mel’s response is worth quoting: “Why would I hand over all my creative to a company that barely understands me and doesn’t want to answer the phone to me when my credit card’s been hacked?” We have lived that exact scenario, where a client’s profile was compromised and ads for an unrelated product started running in another country, and getting help was nearly impossible.
The deeper problem is what the pitch leaves out. It does not ask what your most profitable product is, who your audience is, what a good lead is worth to you, or how you will know it is working. For a B2B client in WA, the nuance matters enormously. An AI writing ads from your website will not know the WA health and safety requirements for an onsite diesel mechanic or how far an oxygen tank needs to sit from a welding ignition source. So the output will simply be wrong most of the time. We sometimes give a client three ad variations and they find that overwhelming and ask us to just recommend one. Four thousand is not a feature, it is a fog.
What a business owner should actually do
If you are short on time, it is perfectly fine to say you do not need assistance and hang up. If you want to have some fun, do what Mel does and ask the caller to tell you something about your business or your target audience. When they cannot, you have your answer, and a polite exit.
Beyond the calls, the real strategy is to reduce your dependence on advertising over time rather than feeding it forever. Run growth campaigns when people are looking, then build the assets nobody can take from you. Build your customer database and your CRM. Build your reputation through great work and great reviews. As Mel puts it, Google can change an algorithm at any time, and Meta changes theirs whenever they like, so “build your own databases because no one’s coming for them,” and build your own reputation, because no one can take that off you either. That is your proprietary software.
Got a burning question you want the answer to? Stuck on some marketing jargon? Unsure how AI fits into the future of your business? Just want a straight answer to a question no one’s ever explained properly? Send it our way. We’ll pick the best ones to unpack in future episodes.