Podcast Summary

The podcast features Skip Wilson discussing the concept of a “DRAFT mentality,” which focuses on continuous improvement rather than perfectionism. He explains how marketers should analyse campaigns by breaking them into measurable stages such as visibility, engagement, and conversion, using data instead of instinct or emotion to identify what is and is not working. The conversation also explores how AI has made marketing benchmarks more accessible, why remarketing is essential for longer buying cycles, and why traditional lead magnets like white papers are losing effectiveness. Wilson argues that businesses should instead focus on solving practical customer problems and providing real value, while also sharing how DRAFT Media Partners adapted its own business model during the pandemic by responding to client needs.

Key Points

  • The “DRAFT mentality” was described as a mindset of continuous improvement, where nothing is ever truly finished or beyond refinement.
  • Marketing campaigns should not be treated as simple successes or failures; businesses should identify which specific elements worked and which did not.
  • Effective campaign analysis requires relying on objective data rather than emotional attachment to creative ideas or headlines.
  • Benchmark metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates are essential for understanding campaign performance.
  • AI and online tools have made it far easier for marketers to access industry benchmarks and performance data.
  • Campaign troubleshooting should be broken into stages, including visibility, engagement, and landing-page conversion performance.
  • Time spent on a landing page can help determine whether problems are caused by poor audience targeting or weak copy and creative content.
  • Because most purchases involve long decision-making cycles, remarketing campaigns are important for maintaining customer engagement over time.
  • Traditional lead magnets like white papers are becoming less effective, with businesses now needing to provide practical services or immediate solutions that customers cannot easily do themselves.
     
     

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:01):
I'm delighted to welcome this week Skip Wilson, who is the CEO of DRAFT Media Partners.

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (00:07):
Definitely, when you're looking back at a campaign, you can't have any heart in it at all. In other words, you can't be like, "Oh, I really liked this headline," or, "Oh, I really liked that thing." You have to look at it purely as this piece works, this piece doesn't. Get the emotion out of it and look at the facts. Absolutely.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:22):
Skip, you are somewhere exotic. Where are you?

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (00:26):
Yes, the exotic lands of Greenville, South Carolina, just the Southeast United States.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:31):
It sounds very exotic from Cambridge. And as this is a British podcast, how is the weather?

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (00:37):
It's nice. It's a nice 75-degree day, sunshiny day.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:41):
One day, I'm going to stop asking my guests that question because I always end up feeling terribly envious. It's blowing a holy over here as we would say. You wanted to talk about a DRAFT mentality, and obviously your organisation is DRAFT media partners. So tell me a little bit about what a DRAFT mentality is.

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (00:58):
It's the idea that nothing is finished, that everything can be improved on or made better. Walt Disney, when he was asked by a reporter when Disneyland opened, they said, "Now that you're finished with Disneyland, blah, blah, blah." And he cut the reporter off and said, "We're not finished. We're still building it,, and we're still growing it. " And I think that's kind of how we should take everything, whether it's apply it in every area of life. So, your physical fitness, personal relationships to the business world, you should have an idea of what you're trying to achieve, but perfectionism causes stalling and all sorts of things. Just figure out where you're at now and improve upon it.

Kiran Kapur, Host (01:44):
Do you find that people don't have a DRAFT mentality? Do you find people are trying to be too perfectionist?

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (01:49):
Yeah, especially in the marketing world. The idea that an ad has to be perfect and I mean, you want it to meet brand standards and those things, but the idea that an ad has to be perfect or finalised or that you need to know all the answers before you do something and then looking at campaigns or marketing from a pass/fail standpoint, the number of times I've heard, "Oh, we've done this or that thing or we've done that and it failed." That's in my opinion, a very limited way of looking at it. Instead, you look at it in terms of, okay, well, which pieces of it worked, which pieces of it didn't? And then you just sort of keep swapping out the pieces that work. And like I said, that kind of applies to every area of life. We look at things of like, "Oh, I've tried X thing, and it failed instead of figuring out specifically why it failed.

(02:37):
And oh, if I had just changed this, maybe it would've done 90% of the job." Yeah, I think we look at pass/fail too often.

Kiran Kapur, Host (02:46):
That's interesting. So again, from a marketing perspective, it's very easy to go, "Well, we did that say in an email campaign or it failed because. " Well, why did it fail? But also, in what sense did it fail? Did it fail because you didn't reach some stretch goal that you've set or did it ... Yeah. So what was your goal realistic in the first place?

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (03:07):
Exactly. I think taking the time to do the research to figure out what should be happening along the stage. So if it's an email campaign, you can find out what a good open rate is, you can find out what a good click-through rate is, you should know what a good conversion rate on a landing page for your industry is. Those are all things you could know and then do the cocktail napkin math before you launch the thing so that you even know what those benchmarks are. Then if it fails, it's like fixing an engine or anything else. You just look at it and you go, "Okay, well, did we not get the open rate? Okay, well then either our audience was wrong or our subject line was wrong or did we not get the click-through rate? Okay, well then our email copy is wrong or maybe wrong audience." When you look at each piece of it, there's really only two or three factors and it makes it much easier to actually figure out what's going on because a lot of times it's like, "Hey, we got a great click-through rate, but they didn't actually convert to leads." Okay, well then, your landing page is the problem, so you work on your landing page.

(04:08):
The idea of anything as complex as even a basic campaign failing as a whole, I mean, that can't really happen.

Kiran Kapur, Host (04:17):
I think there's two ways that you can tackle it. You can either settle back and go instinctively that feels like this is where the problem is, or you can start really going into the data. Which way are you? Are you a data person or are you an instinct person?

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (04:29):
I'm a data person because I really do think that instincts are ... When it comes to creative and when it comes to the more art of the business of the marketing side, I'm all about instinct and yeah, let's try different things and I get a feeling for this. When you look at the parts that are objective, those numbers mean everything. So if you're about to launch something, don't launch it until you know what the numbers should be before you launch it at each little stage. And then definitely when you're looking back at a campaign, you can't have any heart in it at all. In other words, you can't be like, "Oh, I really liked this headline," or, "Oh, I really liked that thing." You have to look at it purely as this piece works, this piece doesn't. Get the emotion out of it and look at the facts absolutely.

Kiran Kapur, Host (05:14):
And that could be really hard for marketers. You've said a couple of times, you should know what the numbers should be. And I have a feeling I may have one or two listeners thinking they're going, "How do I know that? " So let's go back even a further stage than that. How do I know what numbers should be?

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (05:31):
It's never been easier to know. Even 10 years ago, we were getting to where we had good global information on, okay, in a heating and air conditioning business or a roofing company, what is the cost per click of search or those types of things. So you're really only a Google search away from finding out the answer to those things. In my opinion, one of the best uses of AI and marketing is using that to get the information. Jim and I itself, being a Google product is really good at giving you pretty accurate marketing data for your industry. And then so you can know those numbers, and it's free. You can find that out in a very, very quick way.

Kiran Kapur, Host (06:18):
I think yes, it's a good point because it can seem very overwhelming, but actually, I mean, AI is a great tool for that sort of thing. I'm intrigued. You said that DRAFT stood for an acronym. So what was the acronym?

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (06:32):
So we launched in 2020, and we launched our original business idea was we were a SaaS software as a service for ad agencies, and it was a planning tool. It was dynamic, response, advertising, forecast technology. That's actually what it did,-,- is if you said that you're a roofing company in this particular market or in this particular region, it would do the research in that particular area to figure out what your media mix needed to be and give you all those analytics along the way. But then what we didn't realise is that, oh, wait a minute, marketing and advertising agencies don't have the money for it. The last thing they need is another subscription. And so we kept getting the feedback of, "Hey, this is great. Can you just do it for us?" That we quickly changed to being an ad execution company. And now I'm glad because now, like I said, you can ask Gemini and get a pretty accurate forecast, but we built it before AI.

Kiran Kapur, Host (07:34):
But that's actually quite great because that means you can double check what, presumably you can double check what the AI is telling you, which is quite a handy thing to be able to do.

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (07:41):
Exactly. Yeah, no, exactly. We have first party data is always better than global data and things. So yeah, we still got a little bit of an edge in that space, but yeah, DRAFT not only was our mentality, but it just happened to serve as a great little acronym for the tool that we built.

Kiran Kapur, Host (07:59):
It's really handy. So I know one of the things that you talk about a lot, because I've been listening to some of your podcasts, is how to turn around a campaign that's failing. And obviously, one of the things you do is by knowing the numbers and knowing what the numbers should be and therefore knowing that it is failing because that's part of the problem. What do you advise people to do when they're sitting there going, "Oh, the campaign's not working." Where do you advise them to start?

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (08:23):
When you think of it like an engine or troubleshooting like a printer that doesn't work or something else, you want to first break it off into its stages. So rather than going, "Oh, that ad's not working,, or that platform's not working." Rather than going, Meta is not working or whatever, instead break it apart and figure out, okay, first of all, are people seeing the ad? That's the first metric. And then because it needs to be getting impressions, it needs to be getting views. If you're doing an email campaign, you need to check the deliverability of your list, those types of things. So first, are people seeing the ad? Two, you want to see, all right, once people see the ad, are they taking the action that I'm wanting them to do? Which usually is a click. I mean, in the digital world, it's a click.

(09:06):
Even with direct mail and those types of things now, you're looking at QR scans and those things. So essentially a click, just a real -world click, but you're looking at what the response rate of that ad. Then you look at, okay, now is my landing page or the thing that I'm sending to, is it doing its job of converting? And you figure out specifically which piece of it is falling below average. So rather than going, "Oh, this thing's not working. I'm at a 1X row as on this campaign." Instead of throwing the whole thing out, break it off into the pieces, figure out is it getting seen? Is it getting engaged with? Are they coming to your page and is that page converting? Then you can figure out where it's falling down

Kiran Kapur, Host (09:52):
And when I've done that and I've thrown up my hands in the air and gone, "Oh heck, it's this bit that's wrong. What do I do next?"

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (10:00):
That's when you start testing, and that's when you start doing different things. I think one of the hardest ones to solve is like a landing page that's not converting. One of the first things I look at is time on site, which is actually really hard to get now in Google Analytics. I use Google Analytics, of course, but then I also use Microsoft Clarity, which is another free analytics tool. I use both, but time on site I think is one of the most telling things because if they're spending 30 seconds or less on a site, then I think you probably have the wrong audience. What they're doing is they're opening up the page and going, "Oh, that's not what I wanted," and closing it. And so you either have a lot of click fraud in your campaign, which is a problem in today's world, or they're just instantly going, "No, this isn't for me.

(10:44):
" Either one of those things can be solved by tweaking the audience. If they're spending 30 seconds or more on the page but then not taking the conversion action, that's a copywriting issue. And so now you just need to tweak, maybe add a video if there's no video on there or change the video if there is a video on there or change the headlines, change the ... Now you've got a page that people are actually interested in enough to read and engage with. They're just not feeling the sense of urgency to take action in that moment. So then now it's a copywriting and creative issue.

Kiran Kapur, Host (11:15):
Interesting. So the other thing I sometimes hear quite often here in fact is, "Oh, well, ours is not an instant purchase." So you'll get companies saying, I mean, if it's a shoe, in my case, it's an instant purchase, but it could be something that's a longer purchase. How do you cope with that? What do you look for then?

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (11:33):
A lot of things are not instant purchases. I mean, I would say most of the things we buy are not instant purchases. We have a lot of car dealer clients, of course, because we're in the US, but even buying a car is what you would think of as normally a needs-based purchase, is still 20 to 30-day cycle. Roofing is another one where you would think it's more instant, but even that is usually a 14, 15-day cycle. So almost nothing is an instant purchase. However, in the ad world, there are two ways to solve that. One is make sure that you always have a remarketing campaign. If you have even the world's smallest budget, you should still, in my opinion, be doing two things and that's a search-based campaign and a remarketing campaign. Because remarketing on something like Meta is pennies a click. If all you have is a micro budget, I'd be using search to get them to your page and then remarketing on a platform like Meta to get them back.

(12:33):
You should always have those two pieces going, but remarketing is the easy way to keep in contact with people that have come to your site. The other thing you could do is really hone in on what that thing that you're trying to get the ad to do. So for example, let's say you're an accountant and if you have an ad that says get a free consultation, well, that only is appealing to a business owner that is currently in need of an accountant. If I need an accountant, then okay, free consultation, that's interesting to me. The odds of hitting me while I'm in that mode of needing an accountant, I really only need an accountant a couple times a year. And so now an accountant would disagree with that, but whatever.

(13:18):
But I really only need it. So the odds of hitting me in that window, pretty unlikely. So instead, don't offer a free consultation because I don't really want that, but a couple of times a year. Instead, your ad should probably be something like, get your QuickBooks cleaned up. Well, that's something that's an immediate need that every business owner that uses QuickBooks has constantly. And so get your QuickBooks cleaned up today or something like that. Change the offer to not necessarily be the sale. I mean, I do think that things like white papers, where you'd be like, sign up to get the top 10, whatever. I do think that era is sort of, I don't want to say it's gone because we do still have some clients that are using it that work okay, but it's definitely going away, and I think it's less effective. So you'd have to get a little bit more creative than that, but the basic idea is still the same though.

(14:11):
Then, if you have a longer buying cycle, then just don't ask for the buy in your ad, ask for something else so that you can get their contact information, so that you can then, because you want to move them into your sales funnel, from your marketing funnel to your sales funnel as early as possible.

Kiran Kapur, Host (14:28):
That's a really interesting point. And I agree with you about the white papers. I mean, the time was when it was a really exciting one, so you could enter and get a really interesting white paper, but now to be honest, I can probably find it somewhere else. Why would I bother to give you my data for that? And also another thing to read, thank you very much. I'll just pass.

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (14:47):
Right, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I'm dyslexic. Even in the ... Actually, I know people say that. I'm actually dyslexic. So even when the white paper arrow was in its boom, I was still like, am I actually going to read this thing? Probably not. It'd take me five times longer than most people. So no.

Kiran Kapur, Host (15:05):
Yeah. You've got to really explain to me why it is worth my while putting that level of effort in. Yeah.

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (15:09):
Exactly.

Kiran Kapur, Host (15:11):
So what are you seeing that is replacing white papers? Is there things that people are jumping on the bandwagon of? You all jumped on the white paper bandwagon, to be fair.

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (15:20):
We did because it worked, and it worked so well for so long, but now it's more ... I think service is coming back in a major way, which is good and bad. From a business owner standpoint, it stinks because service is such a time, like it takes time to actually do customer service and stuff. But something like an accountant doing a, I'll clean up your QuickBooks for either a low or no charge, that type of thing is very impactful because there's not a lot of ... What we need a lot of times is someone who has hands-on with whatever the thing is. And so anytime you can do that. So if you're a roofing company, rather than doing free roof inspection or something like that, do something like, "We'll help you navigate insurance." Oh, okay. Well, that's interesting to me. Or if you're a car dealer, it's check to see if this vehicle's even still available, so an inventory check.

(16:21):
So I would look for what could this person not do themselves, and information is not one of those things. Used to, that's why whitepapers work so well is because you were either an expert on something or you weren't. Now you can be an expert on almost anything pretty quickly. So that's why that went away. What I can't do is even if I became an expert in QuickBooks, I'm just going to keep picking on QuickBooks. Even if I was an expert in QuickBooks, I don't want to do it. I don't want to invest the time to become an expert. And then I also, even if I was one, I don't want to spend the time going through my books. So what is a problem that my target audience likely has that they don't want to do or can't do themselves?

Kiran Kapur, Host (17:02):
And likelihood in this and age is that they are overloaded with the information, overloaded with tasks, and time-starved.

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (17:08):
Exactly.

Kiran Kapur, Host (17:09):
I can see that. So tell me a little bit more about DRAFT Media Partners. You started roundabout lockdown, which must have been an interesting time. Yes.

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (17:21):
It was fortuitous because we were about to sign a lease, and we were about to do the normal business thing of like, "Oh, well, we've got to bring everybody in. We've got to have an office space and all of those things." That timing for us worked out well because we realised, oh wait, we don't need the overhead office. Now we're at a point where we do actually have an office, but I mean almost nobody's ever there, and we've been able to recruit from a larger talent pool and without the overhead of having an office and things. But I mean, as far as us, vast majority of our business is behind the scenes of other marketing and advertising agencies. So we are the hands-to-keyboard paid media execution arm behind folks. So essentially, taking the same software that we had, our forecast tool and forecast technology, using that to build the plans and then just doing the execution on the backend.

(18:16):
Because things like access to TradeDesk and Amazon's DSP and all these different things, we realised a lot of people didn't have that. So we just sort of bring all of that access together and then combine it with ad execution.

Kiran Kapur, Host (18:27):
So you're finding that you'd found a gap in an area where people don't have the time or don't have the expertise, or in that case don't necessarily have the access. Yeah.

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (18:36):
Yeah, exactly. That was why, for the eight months or so that we were a SaaS business, that was why it really wasn't working with the market, because we would spit out a plan and it'd be like, "Hey, your client should be spending this much here and this much here and this much here." And we just kept getting the feedback of, "Well, we don't have access to half what you've recommended." Or sometimes they would have the access, but they wouldn't have the staff to hand. They've got one person that is the ad person, and so they're like, "Well, no, we're not doing that. " And so we realised, 'Oh, I think that's the bigger opportunity. Let's do that. "

Kiran Kapur, Host (19:14):
Which is a beautiful example of a DRAFT mentality in and of itself.

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (19:17):
Right. Yeah, exactly. The whole company itself had to take a like, "Wait a minute, I think we're doing this wrong."

Kiran Kapur, Host (19:24):
Skip Wilson, that was an absolutely brilliant overview of thinking about a DRAFT mentality, working out how and why something is going wrong and how to put it right. Thank you so much for your time. I will let you go back and enjoy your glorious sunshine. She says, "Not at all envious of you. Thank you so much."

Skip Wilson, founder of DRAFT Media Partners (19:41):
Awesome. Thank you very much.