[Top Agency Series] Creating Effective YouTube Ads To Achieve Marketing Goals With Tom Breeze

Tom Breeze is the Founder and CEO of Viewability, a world-leading YouTube ad agency that partners with companies selling digital products to get reliable, profitable customers at scale. He has had multiple successful ventures in presentation skills training, video marketing, and online marketing — but has now focused his expertise on video advertising. With over a decade of experience in the industry, 

Tom is a leading authority in YouTube advertising. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Leeds and a master’s in Psychology from the University of Surrey.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [04:10] Tom Breeze talks about Viewability and what it does
• [08:20] Who is a perfect fit for Viewability 
• [14:08] Budget recommendations for doing YouTube video ads 
• [19:50] The four quadrants for making a YouTube campaign work
• [22:41] Tom shares the best practices for creating a YouTube ad 
• [26:19] The ADUCATE framework for creating YouTube ads
• [38:06] Tips for setting up a call to action 
• [47:35] Tom talks about their Xray tool and how it helps people with YouTube ads
• [54:50] Things to do in a video to heighten retention of the listeners

In this episode…

If you’re running a business and looking to grow your brand, YouTube video ads are a must-have in your marketing strategy. However, creating high-quality video ads that resonate with your target audience is challenging. So, how can you make ads that attract and convert the right audience?

According to Tom Breeze, YouTube is the world’s largest video-sharing platform that attracts billions of users. This platform is a goldmine for businesses looking to increase brand visibility, drive traffic, and boost revenue. However, creating compelling video ads that resonate with your audience requires expertise and skills that many businesses don’t have in-house. He recommends hiring a professional YouTube advertising agency to help you create high-quality video ads that deliver results. 

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz welcomes Tom Breeze, Founder and CEO of Viewability, to discuss his journey running a YouTube ad agency to help businesses achieve their marketing goals. Tom explains how Viewability helps businesses with YouTube ads, the four quadrants for making a YouTube campaign work, the ADUCATE framework for creating YouTube ads, and their Xray tool.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Tom Breeze on LinkedIn 
• Tom Breeze’s email: [email protected] 
• Viewability 
• Inspired Insider 

Special Mention(s):

• Second Bite Podcast 

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Growth Through Acquisitions – What is Your KPI and Northstar? With Jason Swenk” on Inspired Insider
• “Building a Great Team and More Helpful Insights with Jason Swenk Host of The Smart Agency Master Class Podcast” on Inspired Insider
• “[Top Agency Series] Navigating a Merger and Becoming an End-to-End Digital Partner With Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech” on Inspired Insider 
• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on Inspired Insider   
• “Leading with the Customer Education Approach and more with Rick Cesari Founder of Cesari Media” on Inspired Insider

Masterclass Part 1

Masterclass Part 2

Masterclass Part 3

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz  0:22 

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of inspiredinsider.com. I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I’ve Tom Breeze of viewability.co. And before I formally introduce you, Tom, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out. And our mutual friend Jason Swenk. Big shout out, thanks for recommending Tom as guest and I actually did two episodes with Jason, Tom. one was where he built up his agency to over eight figures and sold it and the second is kind of what he’s doing with buying businesses, how he’s evaluating agencies and what they’re doing there. And obviously, we talked about his amazing mastermind as well. I had Kevin Hourigan, on who runs Spinutech. He’s had a agency Tom since 1995. So he talks about the evolution of the agency of the internet and everything in between, really smart guy. So check that episode out. And Todd Taskey also, since we’re talking to agency space, I don’t know if you know, Todd, Tom, but he kind of matches agencies with private equity, help sell agencies, and he’s got the Second Bite Podcast. So sometimes he’s seen these agencies make more on the second bite than they do on the first because then they sell, then the private equity group sells again. And obviously, the value builds with all of the value that the private equity group already has with the agencies in that group. So check out his podcast is great. And the episode I did with Todd Taskey. And this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect their dream 100 relationships and partnerships. How do we do that we actually help you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch or on a podcast. We do strategy, accountability and the full production execution behind the scenes. Tom are kind of like the magic elves that work in the background and make it look easy for the host to make everything run smoothly. And for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And I found no better way over the past decade to profile the companies and people I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should it’s kind of like Tom’s like, if you’ve thought about going on YouTube, you should right, I mean, the podcasts do go on YouTube, as well. And so Tom is going to share his, he’s been doing this for over a decade. But if you’ve thought about podcasting, check out rise25.com and learn more. We have lots of episodes for free on Inspired Insider that will go through everything you need to know about podcasting. So happy to answer any questions. But I’m excited to introduce Tom breeze, a leading expert in YouTube advertising with over a decade experience in the industry. He’s founder and CEO of viewability.co, which is a top rated agency specializing in YouTube ads, Tom’s worked with a lot of different types of companies from b2b to b2c, he’s helped Mine Valley, Click Funnels, Hello Fresh, Digital Maker and many, many more a lot, he can’t talk about it because of, they don’t want to share what they’re what they’re doing. So other people copy them. But he also has a software viewability.io, which will actually scan your YouTube channel to see what works, what doesn’t work. And he has an excellent report, which I’m excited, he’s going to show an extra report on this call, which I have not seen yet. So I’m interested to see the behind-the-scenes, and he oversees 10s of millions of dollars of ads every single year on YouTube, he has a mission. So they have an agency, they have software and training. So you can check everything out of viewability.co. So Tom, thanks for joining me.

Tom Breeze  4:02 

Jeremy, thank you so much for having me excited to be here.

Jeremy Weisz  4:05 

So talk about just for a second Viewability and what you do.

Tom Breeze  4:10 

So Viewability started off as an agency. And when we first started out, we worked with clients that we had a very different business model to most so we started off by funding client ad accounts. So we’d say look, we’ll fund the ad accounts, and then you simply pay for results. Yeah, it’s pretty good, right? It’s like it’s difficult for clients to say no to that offer. And we have that same model even today. We do have some big big companies that we work with and we’re a lot more flexible and how we set things up now with clients. We just like to be performance based though. Want to make sure that we got skin in the game and if we can find some of that client ad spend, then then clients, we just bought a really good relationship with them, and allows us both to scale and grow and work together and get the very best results. So that’s been said that we’ve focused on for like, 10 years now. It’s literally 10 years this month, that since I’ve run my first YouTube ad campaign, so that feels like a lifetime ago. There’s a lot of gray hair as a result of that. I don’t know if that’s because I’ve got three kids or yeah. And yeah, it’s been a really cool journey, we’ve learned so much on work continues to learn one of our core values is being pioneers. So I think we’re one of the first people into this space, one of the first people kind of properly running YouTube ads at any decent scale. And then, we started training few people and teaching and doing some mentoring and some consultancy, that works very well. It’s kind of like a model we flirt with from time to time, we always feel like training course model is one of those things where it’s like, a lot of people don’t do the work they’re meant to do. So that frustrates me sometimes I’m like, how do we get people to actually do this stuff, and then to do. So that’s what we kind of like do these courses from time to time. And we do like a limited release. And then we just been building software, because we realized there’s a change in the app and the atmosphere with the YouTube. And this started two years ago. And ever since we’ve noticed, like some big shifts and changes in how the platform is working. And one of those things we need to do is to analyze content and work out what content works, what content doesn’t work, how to improve it, and how to promote it and amplify it and boost it. And that’s been our kind of like the strategy and our secret method, so to speak, has been working so well. It’s not unusual to get like 10x rowers from our ad spend these days. But I caveat that heavily because I don’t want people to be like, that’s the expectation from YouTube, it doesn’t always work that well. But what you can do with like quite small spending campaigns, you can get ridiculously good results and a huge amount of data through the door to extend just inform you about how to build and scale from there. So I know a lot of people are struggling with YouTube currently, because it’s changed so much over the last six months, especially. But um, yeah, there’s been so much change. And we’re lucky to have I say lucky, we kind of constantly pioneering and trying to find new avenues and new ways of doing things. And one of the ways in which we tested and worked out has been working really well. So we kind of rolling that out that out for clients.

Jeremy Weisz  7:42 

Tom, if you’re performance-based, you know, you really to be picky on who you choose, right. And if your watch, by the way, of course is going on YouTube, that’d be like a sin, if this was only on Spotify, or Apple or whatever. So if you’re listening the audio, there is a video that you’ll be able to see. And we’re looking at Tom’s website, viewability.co. But I love this here and scrolling down, there’s a perfect fit, right? Who is a perfect fit, because you can’t if your performance base, you can only have so many clients, who is a perfect fit for you. How do you choose?

Tom Breeze  8:20 

Yeah, so we have like some markers that we tend to look for, in order to know that YouTube’s gonna be a good fit for the platform. But we’re a good fit as an agency-client relationship, as well as a few things that go on there. So there’s things like the ads, we want to make sure they can create video, just, they’re already pretty decent at it. Like, if someone’s like, I’ve never created a video on my life, and I want to be really good at YouTube. I’m like, okay, that’s a tough ask right out the gate, that’s going to be a challenge, you need to get comfortable on camera, or you need to be good at it. I’ve never really seen actors, like style videos work really well, long term. So you need unless you’re going to hire that talent to have them on record constantly, you’re going to want to try and have someone in your team or be the person that’s always on camera and build that personal brand admission makes things 10 times easier if you can do that, and have a good personality for it as well. Like some people just don’t have the kind of the person but say this doesn’t just require like there’s a certain nature about presenting on camera where some people have it and some people don’t, or some people fall into that category of like, you’ve got a really good personality for direct response. And you’ve got a really good personality for value and continent and deliver I fall into that camp. I can provide value and content quite easily. If you asked me to do a sales pitch from stage or something, I’m like, oh, I’m gonna be terrible at that just to let you know. So there’s some things I’m good at and some things I’m not I’m just gonna lean into what you’re good at. So YouTube, you can win on both. You can win at being that direct response advertiser like a bit more hyped up and energy focused and that can work really well for you. Or you can be the value-driven content person that is just like the insights you have are so valuable that people want to do business with you. So that’s kind of that’s one aspect the ads themselves, then you got to make sure you have an audience on YouTube. That’s like a real key aspects of this. Now, up until six months ago, you could target people were in really like specific ways. So you can say, if you’re watching that video, I want to get my ad in front of you, if you’re typing in that keyword on my ad in front of you, if you’re searching, or looking at videos about that sort of topic on my ad in front of you that it used to be available for all of us. And now it’s gone away. Least for like conversion-focused campaigns. And so now you’re based more on audiences, and which makes the life a little bit more challenging. So there’s pros and cons with that you can scale when it works really well, but it’s harder to get it going to begin with. And as a result of that, you just got to make sure you can target your audience efficiently. That’s another thing. So the audience’s one key aspect of that is the acquisition process of your ad campaigns. So what funnel will offer do you have in place that’s going to get people to convert? Do you have a good enough conversion rates? Do you have good enough margin to afford this? E-commerce is harder on YouTube, typically, because you just the margins aren’t typically there, like it would be a high-end digital training course, for example, would be a lot easier if you have like some sort of highly leveraged program, like educational program, for example, just makes life a lot easier. And there’s third upsells, and masterminds and all that sort of stuff that you can keep on selling. So that’s going to make things a lot easier for people as well. The attitude is a big one, in fact, of the client. That’s kind of not though, I always want to work with people that I can only have fun with. But you do want to have like a level of respect for each other. There’s been clients that we’ve worked with who we’ve absolutely smashed out the gate for like month one, month two, month three, we’re doing really well. And then they’ll change something on their website or something. And the results will dip for a couple of weeks. And we’ll figure out like a couple of weeks later. Wait, what if someone changed something it was working so well. And then there’ll be like, yeah, I just wanted to test something out. I’m like, fine, you should have told us because that would have been really helpful. And then a week later, they’re like, Oh, well, we’re looking for a new agency, because we weren’t getting the results for last two weeks. I’m like, wow, okay. This is like the attitude that people have to media buying. And they think it’s so easy. And it’s kind of sometimes, like, there’s been letters written by Ogilvy of years gone by talking to clients, and this is how you’re meant to behave as a client, just to let because this is a partnership, this is not a one-way street. And it’s kind of yeah, some clients need to be educated a little bit on that sometimes. So that can happen. So we always vet for attitude to like their approach to this as well. And then we just want to make sure that there’s something different about the client, if it’s like, oh, I want to be the next Click Funnels or something, I’m like, okay, cool, you’ve got a big monster, you’ve got to play with it, it’s probably far more developed, the new got a lot more clout behind them a lot more like brand. And so it has to have something a bit different to them that we can pull on like an angle, we can find it we’re like, ah, that’s different. And that’s going to work well. And that’s really important as well. So there’s a whole mix to it. And sometimes there’s just like a gut feel that you’re like, oh, I got a feeling this going to work really well. It’s difficult to put your finger on, but we’ll get a lot of prospects coming through. And we have to turn them a lot. But when we find those ones that do work really well, well, that causes a winner. Let’s now put our heart and soul into these campaigns and see what we can do. And yeah, that’s kind of normally our vetting process for all of us.

Jeremy Weisz  13:48 

What kind of budget do you recommend to start with? I mean, I know budget is relative, like, if it’s getting ROI, you want to increase the budget infinitely. Right? Of course, right? But you’re starting from a testing perspective, what do you recommend, as a minimum, like, listen, we need to get some data, right? Where do you recommend starting before kind of trying to scale it up?

Tom Breeze  14:18 

Yeah, so my tune has changed on this a little bit over the last few months, just because we have a new method that we approach things with. If you were to create, like the traditional YouTube ad, which is like the, like a 92nd spot that will be like, or you can go longer than that, or you can do whatever length of video you want. But like typically people kind of like aware of the fact that like, okay, cool, I’m gonna create a 92nd spot or three-minute video, perhaps. I’m gonna run that as like what’s called an industry mad or a pre-roll ad was just like you’re interrupting people when they’re on YouTube, and then the user has to press skip ad or continue watching and then click through to your website, if you’re gonna do those ads. They’re just a lot more costly to figure it out. By the time you’ve spent a little bit of money, you’re going to, hopefully have some level of data. But it’s difficult to do that process compared to how it used to be. So you have to either really deep pockets or find a different approach. So when I say deep pockets, you’ll probably need 10,000 $15,000 worth of spend, give it a proper good test, and test out lots of audiences. Because there’s two things with testing there’s one is like, does it work or not. And then sometimes it’s like, you’ve got to run it and give it enough time to be tested, as well. And both from an algorithmic standpoint, let the algorithm dial in. But also, like, the lag time of lead to customer can be a nightmare for clients as well. Like, if someone says, like, oh, I’m looking for lead gen. And then we really know the value of those leads after 90 days, then I’m like, okay, cool, well, we’re gonna only really know the true row as of our activity in about 120 days, really, and then we can start dialing in and optimizing because we do it too early. And we can probably optimize for like lead cost. But lead cost is a poor indicator of customer value, so you’ve got to give it a bit of time and have to spend about to do it, which is challenging for a lot of businesses, they can’t bankroll that easily, and feel comfortable to do. So. The strategy that we go with nowadays to get people started is we actually start with like, $10 a day, like not big spend at all, we might choose like four or five videos that go live with $10, a day behind this, like $50 a day type of activity. But with that, you can gain so much data and really good return, but you use a different style of ad format. So you’d use like a infeed video ad, which is where you kind of create your really good content. And you want to provide value to Monique a 10-minute video, eight minutes of pure content and value, and two minutes at the end of it for a call to action. And then I go straight through to a sale at that point. But the beauty of that is you can very quickly see what targeting is getting you really high retention, and what targeting is getting you leads and sales. But also you can because envy video ads don’t work in the same way as conversion focus campaigns. All of a sudden placement targeting keyword targeting topic targeting it’s gone away for most advertisers becomes available to you. And so you can play around with the kind of like, smaller campaigns but very, very, very focused in on what works. You can drive campaigns and really good results with $10 a day. And then you can choose like, right, these are my best targeting options, here’s my best creative, here’s my best offer, you can work out what works. And then with that data off, like 30 60 days, you can be like, okay, cool, we’ve acquired loads of customers at normally very, very profitable. And now you’ve got enough data to be able to say, cool, let’s go in and tackle those big campaigns. Now, because we’ve got a bit more momentum, we’ve got a lot more data coming through, and we can make better decisions and feel more confident and are buying. And at that point, you can start to scale up a lot faster. But with a lot more confidence is slightly slower, for sure to get started. But you build the foundations correctly. And it’s always pros and cons you know, but I would say that’s a strategy that if you’re a bit more like me where I’m like, I’m not the best at advertising. As a presenter, I’m not the best at kind of being a direct response, advertiser presenter type person, I’m much better at like, let me just give you some good values and good advice and teach you something and you want to do more business with me great. I’ve got more of what you like. That is my personality down to a tee. And I’m like, great, I can do that all day. And if you’re more inclined to be that sort of presented, I would say that strategy works really well for you. But I do believe that also content creators will completely take over on YouTube for all advertising anyway, just a matter of time, really more than anything else.