The Real Reason Your Paid Ads Aren’t Working

I want to tell you a story. It all started when I was about 10 years old. My dad was a computer programmer and I remember walking into the living room and seeing computer parts spread all across the floor, my dad with a soldering iron and a fiercely determined look on his face. This was around the year 2000. I also remember Y2K and the first time I logged onto Google – the good old days.

Due to his high capacity to retain knowledge on all things web development and IT related, my dad was a born (though incredibly hard-working) search engine and website master. He was one of the first people to tap into a real estate database of listings – giving access to his client of all the local real estate listings for their website’s use. He created the software that eventually became Indeed, and MonsterJobs (remember that oldie?) even has him to thank for his contributions.

Now, he’s too humble to come outright and tell you these things. But listen to the story of his journey into digital marketing and you’ll begin to add the pieces together.

Humble Beginnings

When I was around 10 years old, he had me help him for my first job. He taught me how to buy links that pass page rank to websites to increase their domain authority and rank higher in Google when people search for terms that it would benefit them to show up for. This was during the earliest days of SEO (search engine optimization), back when buying links was yet to be a black-hat strategy and SEO was the wild west of marketing. But the crazy thing was, it worked! So well, in fact, that this kicked off his career in marketing and ultimately led him down the path that brought him to where he is today, the founder of a prestigious and well-known technical SEO agency.

Along this path of Google-presence-obtaining strategies and digital marketing pioneering, ourselves and our colleagues have become very in-tune with SEO and PPC. We’ve experienced trial after trial and more errors and successes than I can count. It has allowed us to become known names in the industry and recently, my father was honored with a plaque for his contributions to Web 3.0. Also along this path we have seen the many reasons why paid ads can fail, or simply not bring in half as much revenue as they have the potential to with their campaign budget, keyword search volume or competition (or lack thereof).

The Future is Here

One glaring and recurring reason (and why I chose to co-found FireBrand Media) is because the display ads, YouTube ads and social ads are being boosted and boosted some more – and shown to large audiences with thousands of impressions and impressive reach – but with low quality (or non-existent) images and video.

This is the year 2023! It’s well-beyond time to start utilizing the tools available in video marketing services to make those ads stop a user from continuing to scroll or show such a captivating, informative or stunning photo that it can’t possibly be forgotten.

And the great part is, you don’t have to be a large company to look like one. With the finesse and tactical creativity that a great video production company/videographer can provide, you can make a small event production look large and full, a speaker look to be presenting to a large audience or a podcast service executed with great staging so as to impress the viewer with it’s professionalism and interesting media content.

Not to mention the ability to present a home in it’s full glory with breathtaking b-roll taken by a real estate videographer that stuns prospective homebuyers with a living room windows’ amber light casted across a foyer’s cherry wood flooring, enhanced with slow-motion during sunset. The vintage crystals formed by an artisan and stylized to sit just-so in the chandelier hanging in the foyer, that’s accentuated and shown for it’s true glory with a tech-forward camera lense or the savvy-and-smart kitchen appliances that overwhelm the visual senses with speed-ramped, focalized and then slowed to a tantalizingly seductive pace that turns a home listing into a sure sale.

Or, a law firm video production that feeds education to a hungered audience with a found-need to cosume vitally-informing content about legal matters during a high-stress and high-stakes court case. Or at least, expose them enough to facts and mistakes they could make that ensures they learn that they don’t know what they don’t know – and that letting an expert in the field represent them is most certainly something in their best interest. This is how you sell your product or service.

Ads are a phenomenal marketing tool and even vital to some companies, so if you are going to budget large amounts for them, as a tech and video SEO and Digital Marketing Director, I urge you to consider using a talented videographer , video service and/or photographer to make video advertisements or custom-curated photo ad assets that force those ads to stand out. If you have a digital marketing expert or agency, they’ll thank you for it! Trust me.