Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?

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Welcome back to "Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?" The show where agency founders unpack what's real and what's just noise. In the world of funnels, founders, and full-blown marketing chaos. I'm your host, Adam W. Barney and today I'm reconnecting with someone I've known for years who's building something truly fresh in the space.

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Anthony Tsigourakos is the co-founder of SmartSpend. Part CRO whisperer, part ad systems architect, and all in on designing businesses around real ROI and family-first values. Anthony, thanks for joining us today. Happy to be here and great to see your face, Adam.

[00:41.7]
Awesome. Let's kick it off. In a world obsessed with scale and hustle, is balance actually real? It is if you want it to be. We have more tools today than were ever available to ensure you have it and think because of the way we discover new information, we're more open to new ideas and ways of doing things than ever before.

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So it is, but requires a lot of discipline and a lot of planning in advance let's call it. Planning is everything. And it always has been. But it's different when you're working and building your own business. You've talked about how calendar control became your currency.

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How did that shift your work style and client model to this point in building SmartSpend? I think with anything else, you have to fail before you find ways to do things better. For me, working in advertising since 2005, you're always kind of at the mercy of someone else's calendar.

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Whether you're a coordinator or a planner or an account executive or a head of sales, or a CRO, it doesn't matter. Someone else is always kind of dictating where you spend your time, where you need it to be. For me, as horrible as COVID was, the one bright silver lining, because you could say of it, was that it forced everyone to take a timeout on that chaos.

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Right? You know, before that it was a world where I was on a plane every week traveling to different city. You're out two, three, four nights a week with clients, and of course you're burning both ends of the candle. You're up in the morning and having to answer the bell. All of a sudden, that all stopped.

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And we also were blessed with the amazing technology of video conferencing that really caught up. Right. Like Zoom kind of led the way. So I looked at it as former me and then present and future me, where I've been essentially beat up over that type of a schedule.

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Physically, mentally, even emotionally, you're not taking care of yourself. Couple that with having my first child a month before COVID and we had aspirations to have more than one child, which we did. It forced me to rethink things.

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The way we did business changed automatically, which was cool because we got to see a different way of doing it. We realized probably it would be more efficient in certain ways. We also realized that some of the things we were spending time on were unnecessary. So I was trying to jam in all these different things again.

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But the things changed. Those factors changed. Instead of having to fit in the 6:30 p.m. happy hour, it was making sure I had dinner with my newborn and my wife right after the C-section. My wife needed help. So you're trying to balance those things and you start to realize how liberating it can be if you actually take the hour a week to plan ahead.

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Planning is everything. I've talked about that with a lot of people in this paid ad space. Planning is everything. But it comes into the balance as well. It's prioritizing that is such a key difference of how the world has evolved. Totally. Like sitting down on Sunday morning and looking at your week ahead and figuring out what days am I going in to an office or a city vs. which days you're not, which is a new feature post-Covid doesn't really exist.

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Maybe you had some leniency on Fridays, but that was key, right? Being able to sit down and look at the week as a whole and filling in all the things, you know, you need to do for your job and then all the things you need to do for yourself and your family. And the self part is.

[04:56.5]
I know we're going to talk about that later. That's a key factor to all this, carving out that time in advance. Because as they say, if you don't plan for it with a spot on your calendar, something else will inevitably fill it. It happens every single time. So, a lot of what I'm talking about, again, wasn't really possible in our industry before COVID because everyone was going into an office five days a week.

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You were being, you know, pushed in some degree, to attend the networking, whether it was once a month or four times a week, was kind of dependent on the person. But a lot of that has changed. And yeah, because of the advances in technology, we're now able to do more with less time, which is fantastic.

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Yeah, awesome. And I mean, I know SmartSpend isn't a traditional agency per se, but from your perspective of what you build these days, what's the biggest lie you see in the paid media world? You're gonna get me in trouble.

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That's okay, a little bit of trouble. You don't have to share anything that's NDA'd, of course, or anything particular. We definitely are positioned as an agency's best friend, not the holding company's best friend. We work with all the independent shops out there. We are ultimately trying to help them do more with less to.

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Whether it's being able to help them find efficiencies in their media spend, find the best deal, or just help them with staffing solutions in the short term.

[06:31.1]
The old model is definitely not just broken, it's dying. And anybody out there pretending that it's not is only kidding themselves. We have thousands of people in our industry, great people that are over in France right now, spending lots of money to do the networking and do some window dressing.

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And I get it, most of it is based on relationships, of course, but the biggest lie that I'm hearing is that we're all expecting to grow in the next year and AI is going to help us all do these amazing things.

[07:08.9]
The challenge is most of what we're out there working on, whether it's buying or selling, most of it's commoditized. There's very little differentiation in the space. And when you're asking for that differentiation from someone on the sales side, it's a lot of rehearsed lines, taking one or two tech features and trying to make it feel like it's the end all, be all, but really it's not.

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Most of us have known this for quite some time. It's an issue of having choices of who to work with. And I say who because it's who do I want to actually work with day to day? Not necessarily what am I buying? Because what you're buying is mostly the same.

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Yep. So I think the industry looks a lot different 12 months from now. Will Cannes be as big as it is this year? I don't know. If I had to guess, it'd say probably less people go because it's more. I was reading so much, so much today about how it's so overdriven by influencers actually compared to what it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago.

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That makes sense. Because the influencer basically commands the current currency, which is attention. Like people are curating their experience online and only watching the things and people that they actually care about. And who drives that.

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It's always the influencer. We've called it something different, but it used to be the spokesperson or the podcast hosts. Right. You're an influencer in and of yourself. Yeah. When you have all the eyeballs on you. It's building the echo chamber.

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Right? Totally is. More around your work though, with SmartSpend. What's actually working when it comes to conversion rate optimization and funnel optimization for founders who are maybe right now under that $5 million dollar mark, but they have aspirations to get above that $5 million mark.

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There are several factors that go into that. The number one thing, and it's going to sound very cookie cutter, is that you have to have an offer that gets people's attention, that actually matters to them. And it goes back to what I was saying before about the biggest lie we're being told, that things are going to be the same or get better.

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And I don't really believe that. I think we're in for a major evolution in our industry. For us though, we know that number one thing that's top of mind right now is the P&L of the business.

[09:50.2]
How do you ensure that you continue to make money? Right. How do you ensure that you're leveraging the greatest, latest technology to make money? So what we did was understanding how the gap between the large holding company like Publicis and IPG and Omnicom and everybody else, that gap was widening.

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How do we level the playing field for the independent agency or the brand that does the buying in house, that doesn't get the attention of the Toyotas, and the Procter & Gambles. We wanted to make sure we built something of value that people actually cared about, that they'd see near instant impact on their bottom line and it would give them the option to save more jobs.

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Because what we're going to see over the next 24 to 36 months, is more people on the streets. Unfortunately, the impact that AI is going to have in, I'd say, like the mid and lower levels of white collar work is going to be dramatic as companies, big companies realize that they only need 20 to 30% of the people that do the same or a better job.

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Of course they're going to cut jobs. And when you look at the independent space, and you look at the smaller brands, they're probably at the most risk of shutting their doors completely because they cannot keep up.

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So for us at SmartSpend, if we're giving them another tool in their toolkit to not just keep the doors open, but to actually have a chance to compete and have that big agency feel. That's why we built the business. Because there really is a true need. So in doing that, to answer your question, definitely about the value proposition and the actual impact, but then also leveling up the conversations, the people who can actually make the decision.

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And when we say leveling up the conversations, it's not just about the prospect, but also who are the folks bringing the prospect, this idea, this concept, this service. So we went out and recruited some really savvy senior folks, who could make those introductions for us and walk us into the right people.

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We didn't waste any time. I know there's a lot of automated systems out there. I know you could hire and build sales teams. Those all have value in certain circumstances. But for our specific service, it was finding the person who could have the trusted conversation with the CEO, the COO, the CRO, the Head of Procurement, to show them this immediate impact on their business.

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That's fantastic. You've mentioned to me before "The 5 a.m. Club" and "Extreme Ownership". How did those books shape the perspective of not just your personal daily systems, but the work daily systems that you've moved to in recent years?

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These were eye opening books for me. And you couldn't take, two more polar opposite people in Robin Sharma and Jocko Willink. They actually share a lot philosophically, but, one is an author, very philosophical, and the other is an ex-Navy SEAL, but they both wrote fantastic books that changed the way I looked at how I was spending my time.

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I got caught in a cycle where the travel being part of it, but just being in New York City, you're going out constantly. What that means is you're not eating the best food, you're probably drinking alcohol, which I don't really do anymore, you're probably up pretty late.

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And when you get home, by the time you unwind and get your average sleep, and maybe you've gotten six hours of sleep, seven hours of sleep, it's not great sleep. You're not putting good things in your body. And I thought this was the way things had to be. Right.

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This is the industry I'm in and this is the lifestyle I have to live. And Extreme Ownership speaks to that ownership over everything you can control in your world. Not making excuses like I just said, like, oh, this is, this is it. Right? This is my life.

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This is what I chose. It doesn't have to be that way. It changed the mindset I was going into each day, week, month, year with. So that I should stop, pause and reevaluate A, what I wanted, and B, what I was doing to get there.

[14:33.4]
"The 5 a.m. Club" Then Robin Sharma, brilliant guy and a great. He's written other books that are fantastic. "The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari" being one of them. He taught you a very clear-cut system on how he works with some of the world's most successful people.

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Athletes, entrepreneurs, business people, you name it, entertainers. And how he's taught them how to not just maximize their time, but also optimize the energy that you have on a day-to-day basis. Now not everyone is the same, I'd say.

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I think the quote in the book was like four out of five people, their biorhythm would sync to this system. Where you train yourself over 60 to 90 days to force yourself get up early every day. 5 a.m. get up every single day.

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And the first hour of your day is broken into three parts. You have to sweat some exercise, you've got to do some learning of some sort, whether it's reading or watching YouTube videos. And then you've got to do some journaling or meditation. Self-reflection.

[15:43.2]
It balances your body, mind, and soul on a daily basis. It also forces you to go to sleep earlier, which is a cycle. Again I fell into where, whether you're going out to a ball game, or a hockey game, or a dinner, or a happy hour, or concert doesn't matter.

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All of a sudden you're just not getting to bed before midnight, which is really unhealthy. So being forced into this system, it was a challenge just doing that. Getting up at five, even if you had four hours of sleep, you're getting up, and you're doing that hour.

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I started to notice that, you know, my energy levels went up because I was going to bed earlier, but also because I was exercising, getting blood flowing in the morning. Right. I was thinking more clearly. I was a lot less emotional, a lot less impulsive.

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Then I started paying attention to the fuel aspect of it. What am I putting in my body? Right. Making sure that after a workout you're getting enough protein and hydration, you're eating enough fruits and vegetables. So it forced me to take a step back and reexamine everything about myself.

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And that also included work. It definitely coincided with my decision to go off on my own. In 2022 to lead my CRO consulting practice. Because of the freedom and the flexibility.

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With that, I was providing better work to my customers and my clients and my partners. So it's a cycle that I kind of reverse engineer using the Extreme Ownership mindset and then The 5 a.m. Club system. And knowing that it's not going to take like one week to do it right.

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There's a part of that that I think comes into play, but it's those early changes that you lay. It's the framework that you put down that allow you to shift from whether it's traditional burnout or some different flavor of burnout to intentional growth and intentional rhythms.

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You know Anthony I talk a lot about energy rhythms. Where do you find your flow when it comes to the professional side during the day knowing just like with two kids, two dogs in the house. I get that everyone has a unique place where that flow goes.

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I know you mentioned obviously The 5 a.m. Club that's built on those three pillars of that first hour of the day. But where does that flow come into play? Because you hear so many founders and entrepreneurs who get up at 4 or 5 am, hop in a cold bath and go to the gym.

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Then they do those different things. That's not when their flow state hits necessarily. You've only got about three to five hours of really incredible work in you each day. You have to understand that there are ebbs and flows to the day.

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I read this book, it was called "168 Hours." Laura Vanderkam wrote it. It was all about scheduling your weeks. There's experimentation that happens in the beginning and as you said, it takes time. One of my concerns about society is that we're in a very on-demand driven society.

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Everyone wants what they want, when they want it, they don't want to wait. And you can get everything from your phone now delivered right to your doorstep. So it really goes against the teachings of "Extreme Ownership" above discipline, of putting in the time to see a plan through.

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If you really want to improve your life and improve your health, you have to commit weeks, months, or years to doing it. Even getting 1% better each day is key. That's how you do find the flow. It doesn't just happen and all of a sudden this is what you're doing every day.

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You're prioritizing the things that matter. You're scheduling the things that absolutely need to be scheduled on your calendar. You're blocking it off proactively. You're blocking off time before and after. Yep. To ensure that you could actually digest what you just did or plan for what you're going to do. Right.

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The flow state, it's a biorhythm function. Yeah. Certain things feed it. Right. Certain behaviors, certain foods, drinks, you name it. Like, I won't even drink coffee. Is it water?

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Is it hydration? Is it five minutes running outside? Is it taking the dogs for a walk? For me, it's turning on music and getting into that music that recharges my battery pack that keeps me going and allows me to stay resilient. And it's also that autonomy that we all have.

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You got to figure out a system that works for you. Playing to the theme of autonomy. Like it's your day, and being a dad with three young children, I came to realize over trial and error that there are certain hours of the day that don't belong to me anymore, just by default.

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So you look at what you've got between the hours of 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. for me are key. And then 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. are key. But the problem is at the 8 to 10 p.m. you don't have the energy. Your brain's a little slower at that time, you're more tired.

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So 5 to 7 is key. But then experimenting with said things. For me, if I don't work out in the morning, I'm just not as productive and the flow state doesn't happen as easily or at all. On days I do work out, I wait till 9 to have my coffee.

[21:22.7]
I start to feel it. There's definitely a good working block between 9:30 and lunch. That's great. I've experimented with the fasting. Whether it be intermittent or 24 hours, there's something to that as well. You know, on days I do the intermittent fasting for 18 hours.

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I'm a lot sharper. Today's one of those days. But you've got to know your own body is the key. And it takes three to six months to experiment with it, to get it right. And then you have to also accept that there are going to be days or even weeks where you don't really own it completely and you can't adhere to that structured schedule, and that's okay.

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Give yourself a break every once in a while. You know, we don't have to be always on because the toll that it takes on you mentally could be worse than anything. So you got to be flexible is the key. But ultimately trial, and error for yourself.

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It's protect, protect, but then also give yourself grace. Right. A little bit of grace can go a long way. Self grace with kids, family, around us, other things that circle around. No matter how complicated your life might be, that grace is so important to bring to the table.

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Absolutely awesome. Anthony. This was the real deal. Part therapy, part tactics for listeners who want to learn more about your consulting work or Smart Spend's ad engine. Where, where should they head? Come to my LinkedIn.

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Feel free to DM me. Always. Smartspendadvertising.com is our site and then goodnameconsulting.com is for the consulting practice. We're starting to develop more of a voice on LinkedIn for SmartSpend. So you'll see more and more of our posts.

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Some of them designed to catch your attention. Like talking about the. We're able to find efficiencies. I think the key is though, for everybody, the old model is very close to dead. So how are you going to be better in these next 10 years? And it starts with today.

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I love it. And for the agency leader out there who's doing it all, chasing scale but losing sleep. What's one real talk mindset shift you'd leave them with?

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You have to differentiate. It can't, can't be the same talk track as the other guy. Whatever. Even if it's your own personal brand, whatever it is, you've got to differentiate and you've got to get faster. That means leaning into tools that you're not too comfortable with.

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That's okay. Play around with it, try it out. Bring in people that understand. But the combination of that positioning and, you know, whether it's automation or AI, whatever you want to call it, they're both very different things about getting faster, using technology, even if it's uncomfortable, lean into that because that's where you're gonna find ways to scale.

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You keep doing things the old way, you might be extinct. That's when you start to atrophy, right? That's when you start to just fall down and not get back up. It's about flexing that muscle. Exactly right. Awesome. And then surround yourself with good people. That always it.

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Work with good people on your team and choose good people as clients. You can pull energy from those positive relationships that uplift versus those relationships that pull you down. Oh, There's lots of them out there. You gotta be careful. Even if they're promising lots of money, sometimes it's not worth it.

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That'll be our next episode We record together so we can dig more into that. But, Anthony, thanks again for joining us on "Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?", the show, where we separate what's real from what's just noise. I'm Adam W. Barney. Subscribe, leave a quick review, and check the show notes for links to everything that Anthony and I covered today.

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Thanks for having me. All right, thank you.