Digital Social Hour - Chase Chappell Spends Hundreds of Millions on Ads | Digital Social Hour #103

Episode Date: September 13, 2023

On today's episode of the Digital Social Hour, we sit down with Chase Chappell and dive into what makes a viral ad and the types of businesses and products he sees succeed. BUSINESS INQUIRIES: [e-mail] APPLY TO BE ON THE POD: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 SPONSORS: HelloFresh: https://www.hellofresh.com/50dsh AG1: https://www.drinkAG1.com/DSH Hostage Tape: https://hostagetape.com/DSH --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/digitalsocialhour/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We spent like $400,000 a month on TikTok for a brand. Got them to the number one spot in the app store. But the biggest thing is the content side. And we're producing about 20 pieces of creative a week just to float that much spin. 30k days on ad spin. You have to have a lot of content. Do you see like a baseline of like a specific maintained use volume? Or is it like every other video is viral?

Or they're all viral? Um, the majority go viral. Okay. I think we went viral for like 12 months straight though. See, there you go. Some people have it. You know somebody who did 300,000 subs in a single day off of one viral video, and then all of his videos end up doing about 200 million views combined.

Holy. It's insane. Welcome back to the Digital Social Hour. I'm your host, Sean Kelly. Here's my co-host, Christiana Hurt. What's up, guys? And our guest today, Chase Chappell. What's going on? How we doing?

Good. What brings you to vegas well last time we were at your event which was incredible by the way i loved it i met a lot of cool people there in the e-commerce space it's really amazing to you know hang out with all these other people that do youtube and stuff i actually formed a couple of connections that we're working with people now outside of that so that's why i have them honestly i love connecting people together yeah no it was insane i was actually like shocked at the turnout too yeah it's wild how many people would like literally travel somewhere to go to an event but once you get there it makes sense

yeah it's interesting because i don't even run paid ads it's just all just word of mouth yeah through dms yeah yeah i'm good at sliding in those dms i think that's how i invited you there you go dms are the way to go instagram dms that's where all our deals happen you find success in dm ads or organic dms both we run both campaigns so like we'll do organic videos that'll go viral get a bunch of dms and then we also run paid ads for it as well i mean obviously quality comes through organic though we don't do any outreach though okay yeah so you've basically overseen 200 million dollars in ad spend through facebook tiktok social media what are your biggest takeaways from that yeah so

i mean with facebook ads right now like i've been in the space for seven years now and essentially a lot of the stuff that we're doing is focused on what's going on right now these video creatives short form content it's absolutely crushing it so like all these brands are trying to figure out the content strategy for video nobody has it figured out at all and that's like the biggest thing to do right now is clipping your videos just like you are on a podcast or with your actual content for your product or store it's a big way to actually scale up but a lot of people haven't figured it out so they need creative and that's the biggest thing for that and then tiktok obviously is crushing it but the biggest problem on t tock right now if you're trying to scale up we

spent like 300 000 a month on tick tock for brand got them to the number one spot on the app store but the biggest thing is the content side and we're producing about 20 pieces of creative a week just to float that much spin 30k days on ad spin you have to have a lot of content so like brands will hop on tick totock they're like i see all these views let's get results let's get sales they launch a video and then after seven days it's over like there's no results whereas on facebook you move that creative over there and it can last up to three months a year and we have clients that have creatives that have been running for like two years straight they get tons of sales is that because facebook has more users

not necessarily it's more their algorithm is more in tune they have a lot more data it's more consistent the buyer is a lot different because on tiktok you got to think a lot of these people haven't purchased off that app yet and they don't trust it which is why this whole ban is coming about right now you know every day something's changing with the tiktok ban right so like there's a lot of skepticism around it and then the people on tiktok specifically they're just not used to buying on the platform, period. So like they have their information on Facebook. They're used to purchasing off that app.

So like TikTok, there's a huge deficit in terms of people who are comfortable buying right now. So do you feel like on TikTok people are getting a return of social presence and omnipresence versus an actual monetary return? Yeah. So it's more top of funnel definitely you're getting a lot more awareness your Google search volumes going up significantly if you have a viral video on tick-tock it's likely that a lot of people are gonna go to Google first to search up the brand or business you're gonna find a lot more followers going to Instagram YouTube

from tick-tock so it's migrating people and then tick-tock as a platform itself is great for growth and awareness. And then you can get incredible sales days. I mean, we work with brands that are doing $100,000 in a single day off of one viral video that gets 2 million views and sells for the store. We had another brand, Waterboy, that, you know, did $100,000, $300,000 off of organic sales and literally are constantly sold out just from viral videos of them being, you know, sharing their story about how they started their business. On TikTok.

Exactly. And so there's like specific formats organically that are just going wildly viral, but also producing insane sales for brands. And that's like a founder story, sharing the background of the business, product comparisons. That's where you compare your product against like a billion dollar brand's product product because a lot of them are trying to chase margins whereas small businesses might have higher quality right so they can highlight different ingredients right those videos get tons of sales as well so that's really like the main play for tiktok if you're going to do ads you're going to have an insane creative team and you're going to be able to produce content every single week at a very high velocity to keep the ad spend going. It's funny you say that. I produce three TikToks a day. Yeah, that's a lot for most people.

That's what we put out. I myself am probably making like out of the three that get posted like seven to ten. Okay. Because that's what it takes to keep up. Yeah. And are you, do you see like a baseline of like a specific maintain view volume or is it like every other videos viral or they're all okay I think I'm Barbara like 12 months straight see there you go some people have it so like the viral aspect some people's content hit really well yeah and then like is your content like voice talking or okay all different some of it is relationship some of it all different some of it is relationship

some of it is business some of it is just me walking yeah like for example like a video of me being pushed in the pool 27 million views on 15 million views on Instagram on his page my page was another 11 million and then Twitter was another 8 million views yeah well I got to push you in a pool and recreate that. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. So here's the thing with that.

You take a video like that and you recreate it, push me in the pool. There's a 10% rule is what I call it. You recreate a viral video and model it as closely as possible. You'll see about 10% of those views. So if it got 20 million views, then you can expect like a 2 million average. 2 million is still good, man. Average. And this works so consistently well.

I tell this to people all the time. Don't like copy somebody word for word, but go look at how they format the video. Format it the same way. Just replace it with your own content and your own style. You're going to see around an average of 10% of that view volume.

That is so crazy because I know off the top of my head, I have five girls that have ripped my walking videos. Yeah. and they're just doing it the same and they're seeing results. And it's just so, so good to know. So next time I see a video with 10 mil, I'm going to try it out. 100%. It's absolutely insane. A lot of it goes back to behavior, psychology, just how people like watch content on TikTok in general. Like a lot of things are very relatable. And then if like there's a controversial piece in that content that made it go viral now that's harder to replicate so like if it's you look at the comment section and you'll see everybody commenting they'll talk about what

it is that they're calling out in that video for why it's viral yeah i noticed a lot of my controversial clips get more views absolutely controversial videos go insanely wild on views because obviously there's two different sides of an opinion on something so there's comments that are fueling the growth or shares it's making people mad upset happy there's a lot of different reactions so the videos go way more viral but the problem is businesses don't know how to use like controversy to curate sales so like an example of this is we have a brand called bad society Club they did 110k in a single day off of a controversial video it was

like women in their 40s should start dressing like they're in their 20s again and that pissed a lot of people off they didn't like that and so the video went crazy viral and then in the comment they just pinned their website was like here's where you can buy it and so they did a hundred thousand plus in a single day that's crazy so do you believe in story selling or just shareable content yeah I mean it depends on the objective for sure but I mean there's definitely formats you can see that are consistently producing views and sells so like a founder story that's easy to connect with and you know people

fall in love with a brand through a person specifically and so you'll get a lot of people buying because of the founder whereas like people will hop on on their branded accounts and they'll have like some you know individual whether it's a guy or girl posting content for their company page but it's just like them just hopping on every little trend doesn't equate to sales at all. It's just like random view volume. It has no effect on the business. I feel that. Makes sense. Which products or services have you seen the most success with?

We work in a lot of different industries. I mean, clothing's crazy. Supplements are crazy. And there's so many different things on TikTok that just go absolutely wild in terms of views and sales. I don't think there's like something I couldn't push on TikTok that just go absolutely wild in terms of views and sales. I don't think there's like something I couldn't push on TikTok that would like not get sales that would apply to format too. Really? I think so. You feel like you just got it mastered? There's just formats that consistently produce the results and it's like really consistent.

And then same thing for Facebook ads. So you feel like you could sell funeral home services? Potentially. You have to try it. Those guys make a lot of money, actually. They do. Yeah, it's crazy. That business is wild to me.

It's really wild. You've got to pay $10,000 for what? Just to use the space? I know. It's weird. But you know what's crazy? People on TikTok are now walking us through the embalming process. Oh, they are?

Tons. Yeah. It's a huge thing. i've found myself watching them okay like embalming and taxidermying pets people that want to text yeah so that's another thing about tiktok is like you'll watch like a specific style of video and then you get stuck in that category of content but then they'll float like random videos every now and then to see if you have different interests. And then it starts to mix your page.

So like the big viral videos are always usually the more general broad type content, obviously. So what do you see as the next TikTok? Is it YouTube Shorts? Is it Snapchat, Facebook? YouTube Shorts is probably one of the most powerful ways to consistently grow because i know so many youtubers that will post youtube short content it gets like one to two k views but they post for three months straight one video goes viral and it activates all of the others and they just all start to grow like incredibly fast so like if you just hold it out on youtube it's all about

consistency the moment you have a viral video like all of your other videos will pick up. It's crazy. I know somebody who did 300,000 subs in a single day off of one viral video. Then all of his videos end up doing about 200 million views combined. Holy crap. It's insane. He had literally just a few thousand views

on each video. I was like, why didn't this happen to me? That's where I'm at right now. I'm going to keep posting. I'm posting twice a day right now. I know. None of them have taken off. They get like 5K views, but I'm hoping one of them will take off. You'll see a video that did 5K views now. It'll come back in like two months and do like 100K views.

And then all the videos from that time period as well will start to just jump. It's so weird. So I put my viral videos on youtube shorts and i noticed they spike way more like they'll do like 50k 100k but they do you're going more viral on youtube no i just take the viral videos that do millions of views on other platforms i just put them on youtube shorts yeah i have a friend alex stemp he has like a tiktok channel is you know nearly 20 million followers on there in every single one of his videos he has like a TikTok channel. He has nearly 20 million followers on there. In every single one of his videos, he always gets a million plus views. He's like the street

photographer. I make strangers famous. I think I've seen that. So he'll just go and take a photo shoot of somebody and make them famous, literally. And people love the content because it's part one, part two. But it's a model that works so well for views. He migrates it to Instagram. Amazing. Migrates it to YouTube. Nothing happens. Three months in, he gets a single viral video, passes nearly 100,000 subscribers

in a single day. Crazy. And all of his videos go off. Wow, yeah. I'm trying to get that monetization, so I need that. Absolutely. They pay the money.

You need 10 million views on Reels. Really? Yeah. That's insane. In 90 days. Wow. Yeah, it's pretty strict. That's a huge number. Yeah. One viral video can do Really? Yeah. That's insane. In 90 days. Wow. Yeah, it's pretty strict. That's a huge number.

Yeah. One viral video could do it though. That's true. You're always one video away from going viral. Yeah. I got 10 million on TikTok, so I know it's possible. Yeah. Your stuff's been growing fast.

Yeah. It's insane. Where do you see AI intersecting with your business model? So it's definitely going to change the marketing industry, e-commerce. We've been playing with it we'll do like a create a machete business for me on chat GPT and it'll tell you like the background where to get the you know supplier all this stuff and then you just plug it into like mid journey or like an image generator and then ask you to create the product and like schematics of you know design and stuff get that send it over

to the people create a business so quickly get a logo get a hat apparel everything ai it's absolutely insane we have clients right now already testing this with like facebook ads and they're like hey what audience should i target and we advise people like on how to do this stuff and the ai will be like hey target this audience this age range they're getting like a five to seven x return ad spend, which is like you spend $1,000, you're making back 5 to 7k. And they don't even know what audiences they're targeting, what the copy is about.

They're just having the AI write it for them. So it's, I mean, these things are generating a lot of money for people right now. It's definitely a game changer. So are you a firm believer that it's making our lives easier or do you feel like it's taking food out of a lot of people's mouths i think it's going to create a lot of opportunities that are like definitely unseen right now usually what happens with this type of stuff is you'll have a regression of a lot of jobs being taken away and then you'll have a huge explosive category of so many more opportunities just opening up right for different spaces because there's just so much demand now

and so obviously the educational side of it is going to be, you know, depending on what you know and how to use these things will depend whether or not you get a job. But, yeah, it's going to make a big difference. So there's probably going to be a definite regression in opportunities for jobs and then a huge explosion of growth here in the next couple of years. I feel that. What's your goal with the agency?

Do you want to sell it? Do you want to give it to your kids? Agency right now is just a business that we're, we bring in clients and we just manage them. There's no long-term roadmap in a sense of getting rid of it. It has my name tied to it. I'm not really interested in selling that business because it's kind of a generator for us,

for other companies we're launching. The biggest thing for me right now is Surge.io. And essentially that's a software that does ad tracking for Facebook ads, TikTok ads because of the Apple iOS changes. And so like you can't track your ads like you used to. So like if you ran ads for, you know, jerseys, you used to know your ROI definitively where it came from. Now it's not like that. So all of your data then gets wrapped through Apple if you opt it out. It can take up to three days to be sent back to Facebook.

And then Facebook will tell you, oh, we're estimating your purchases. We don't actually know which audience it came from, but we know you got to sell. So it's like, okay, well, where do I put my budget? It's not very accurate anymore. So that's where we're solving that issue right now with the ad tracking, specifically for Shopify e-commerce brands. And then tying in the customer journey there from like upsell apps you know post-purchase surveys to really get people to self-identify where they came from as

well if they saw a tiktok video and then went and purchased and then we can connect the dots to see if like they're lying or if it's accurate or not got it so it's similar to high rose yeah we're just not in the b2b space and they're strictly ad tracking we're more looking to bring this product to the masses like any Shopify store owner this business is really just wanting to be able to make it super simple for people to use the tracking in general yeah so like we're not trying to go after you know all the major sized brands that have all these you know people who know all the performance marketing tactics. We're trying to make it extremely simple for the average software store to hop on, increase

the revenue, get better data and be able to scale their business. Right. Yeah. And we're going to try to exit that company in a couple of years. We're on a race right now. SaaS is the way to go for exits. Absolutely insane multiples right now. Isn't it like 10x?

It's crazy that 40x in our space 40x yeah and customer data platforms averaging 20x to 40x multiples on this space is crazy yeah off of holy you know pre-money valuations can do hundreds hundreds of millions of dollars without even like making a single dollar. Wow. I'm going to have to look into this space, man. It's crazy. It's literally crazy. Tech is like one of the biggest spaces right now for where all this money is flowing because logistics are screwed up around the world.

It's hard to get your products. These businesses are like, all these investors are tired of losing money on all these deals because they're like having a hard time scaling from infrastructure. And then all this stuff with politics and things going on the world makes it super complicated so tech is the easy one because you just get users add more services and it's very scalable business yeah it's it's booming right now do you see this upcoming recession um affecting your business at all no not necessarily i think the biggest thing that could affect us would be like tiktok getting banned because that's like a 50 source of traffic what would happen for y'all

uh for me it would impact me a little bit but not not nothing crazy i just started tiktok a month ago yeah i would be bored you'd be bored i mean i have a huge following on tiktok but i don't i don't i i'm not tracking if sales are coming from it and i don't personally in my opinion don't feel like i'm making money from it i get hotel collabs so i guess i'd have to pay for my own yeah again that's interesting i feel like a lot of people probably share that same like feeling of tiktok being a fun place to create content yeah like i mean i'm not gonna say that i had like the creator program and things like that but again like there's no way for me to track it so there's no way for me to have an emotional

bond to it yeah for you it'd be a major blow though it's a huge part of our business yeah so i mean like about 50 of our lead volume has came from there it has decreased a little bit because of what they're censoring content wise like using dollar signs and stuff on tiktok starting to become a issue really certain financial stuff they're like really locking a lot of the you know they're tightening up the bolts in terms of what content's being allowed i could see that some of my videos get like a thousand views and it's really annoying too because a lot of these videos if you get rejected or banned then they're you know essentially not allowing your videos to just explode over the course of like five videos

didn't they find out there's like some button yeah they're like suppressing people literally just by pressing a button or heating it up it's like yeah if they find a creator like Alex or something and that absolutely in love with her and they know the view volumes great they're just gonna keep pushing that video insanely in terms of use it's crazy that they can't even do that it's kind of like the old version of YouTube's most viral videos they'd have like the top 10 list yeah but then come to find out that the videos are hand-selected I remember that it's like come on I was so disappointed when I saw that I can't believe I used

to look forward to that list and then once I found that out I'm like alright I'm not even I think that's why people don't trust these social media companies. Yeah. Because like think about the people who work there. Like what's their agenda, their favorite creators, and then people like us or other companies can't even. Yeah. I mean, you could go down the rabbit hole on this, but we'll get canceled.

Literally. So we should just not even talk about it. Literally. All right. Well, what do you got planned? Focusing on scaling Surge. we're getting a new office location and we're going to be expanding rapidly because it's a new marketplace and there's a lot of things to be done in the space that a lot of companies haven't figured out yet it's a huge problem with ad tracking and so we're trying to you know master and provide a

lot of tools to business owners so that way they can scale their business on Shopify Shopify is a huge market it's Amazon shop by mm-hmm it's really two sources you're either shopping there or shopping on the other one right so they're the biggest two pretty much I mean if you're not on Shopify you might be on WooCommerce but WooCommerce is really for like beginners yeah I can't think of three brands that you can't think of. Do you feel like Walmart is not going to be a competitor? absolutely they're definitely in the mix so they're taking up a percent but I mean if you look at how many Shopify stores there are out there and we're

talking about tens of millions of stores and like how many customers they have it's a huge portion of the internet for sure and Amazon as well but then you have Walmart and all these other specifically now offers Walmart one which is cheaper than Prime really and now you can be an independent seller on Amazon yeah that's crazy yeah so Walmart almost creeping yeah very very quickly that's why I asked. Yeah, the e-commerce site is definitely going up for them. I have trouble shopping at Walmart just because I'm pretty healthy.

So when I go there for food or snacks, I can't find anything. That makes sense. Yeah, I definitely think it's a demographic play for sure, like who your audience is. Again, that 97%. Yeah, exactly. All right. Any closing thoughts on where people can find you?

Social media, at Real Chase Chapel on Instagram. DM me the word podcast. Happy to send some free trainings over. YouTube as well, Chase Chapel. We do a lot of free trainings online. And then if you're on Shopify, sign up for Surge. S-R-I-G-E. Christiana, where can people find you? You guys can find me at christiana hurt anywhere on the internet or just google welcome college guys awesome

sean kelly here thanks for tuning in this week digital social hour see you guys next week