Simple $1 Per Day Ad Strategy for Business Growth | Curt Maly | Scale with AI Summit 2024

Full video transcript

Hey everyone, my name is Curt Maly and welcome to this hackathon session where I’m going to be talking about the dollar-a-day strategy and ethical propaganda. I’m super excited to be here with the Scale with AI Summit with Darby and Kelly, and I’m just really excited about this. I’ve been playing with AI a lot. I tell people that I have a PhD in AI marketing — that is what we call a public high school diploma — so I’m going to show you some stuff that I am doing with duct tape and bubble gum, and you may automate these processes even more, but I’m going to go ahead and jump right on in so we can get right into the meat and potatoes of the overall presentation.

So again, my name is Curt Maly, I’m a leading consultant on digital advertising, I speak all over the world, I love AI. I’ve been doing Facebook ads pretty much since Facebook — well now Meta — has really been around, and it’s just something I’m super passionate about. Over the last 17 years inside of our marketing agency we’ve worked with a lot of who’s who in the online space: professional athletes, New York Times bestsellers, celebrities, people on Shark Tank, magicians, musicians, National Speakers, a lot of people you may know or see online. It’s just I have a passion for this type of marketing, and I love being able to either do this for other people or, like in this case, show you how to do it on your own.

You’re going to see a lot of wrestling images in here. Here’s a cheesy image of me holding up a bunch of belts. Back in 2019 I was awarded the Masters of Marketing Championship belt by Todd Brown. I was invited to a room with about 30 other media buyers, really some of the best media buyers in the world at the time, and they ended up giving out a wrestling belt to the person who had the most documented, proven, resourceful strategy that was duplicatable, that anybody could use. I was voted in by my peers by winning this championship belt. That spurred some aha moments and how we created a brand new process called the belt method, where we run ads for the following four segments — B-E-L-T: build belief, then engagement, then people you engage with either become a lead and/or transact. That’s very much like what we’re doing right here: I want to build rapport with you through this presentation, receive some information, build a relationship, and maybe down the road you’ll become a lead and we’ll transact later. But right now it’s all about building that relationship, and I’m going to show you how to build very strategic relationships for just a dollar a day over on Meta. Besides the belt we’ve won lots of other awards too — 16 and counting with Molly Marketing, over 16 different American Marketing Association awards, leveraging this strategy across radio, TV, billboard, Google, Facebook, direct mail, and more.

Here’s your roadmap to the dollar-a-day Meta ads. I’m going to call this ethical propaganda, and you’ll see why. First we’ll cover propaganda — how we turn hyper-targeted emotional stories into what I like to call ethical propaganda, and priming the algorithm using the golden ad process to optimize for results, basically giving the ad network exactly what it wants. I’m going to talk about our hot 28 retargeting strategy, how we’re using AI with retargeting tactics to drive engagement and conversions, and the dollar-a-day blueprint — proven steps for effective, low-cost ad campaigns at a dollar a day.

Let’s talk about propaganda first. There’s a lot of bad connotations, which there should be — like “more doctors smoked Camels than any other cigarette.” It didn’t say smoking was healthy, it just implied it through more doctors smoking Camels. At the dark side it’s manipulation, misinformation, deceptive practices, hidden agendas — like the food pyramid, which was set up by lobbyists, not nutritionists. That’s not what I’m going to show you how to do. Ethical propaganda is redefining the concept: informative, sharing truth and valuable content, super targeted, reaching the right audience with the relevant message, transparent about intentions and sources, and beneficial — aiming to help, not harm or mislead. Our mission is to transform propaganda from a dirty word into a powerful ethical marketing strategy.

Think about social media as the modern newspaper — it’s called the news feed for a reason. If a hundred people log into Facebook at the same time, they’ll all see different posts at different times depending on what they individually want to see. A physical newspaper is written for everyone and has to guess what goes on which page. Our digital news feed is customized for each of us individually, and I’m going to show you how to leverage the current social media AI on Meta to make sure people are seeing your content — whether organic or paid. Once you understand how the algorithm works, it’s about creating a tailored newspaper for a perfect avatar at the perfect moment, aligned with their behaviors and engagement patterns, and blending organic and paid strategies with micro budgets — the dollar-a-day strategy.

Here’s how the organic algorithm works. When you post, Facebook estimates action rates — is this relevant, is it positive — and shows the post to a small initial audience. Depending on how that audience reads, engages, comments, and likes it, the post either gets shown to more people or stalls out. The more relevant a post is to the right person at the right time, the more it gets shown — I like to call this “amplify” rather than “virality.” People who feel shadow-banned often just aren’t creating content that’s relevant enough to the right audience.

The paid algorithm works similarly, but adds the advertiser’s bid: you choose an objective (leads, sales, video views, engagement) and Meta charges a CPM to place the ad. Meta then evaluates how your ad creative actually performs — are people reading, clicking, engaging — because Meta wants leads and sales, but only from relevant content. If people aren’t engaging or converting, Meta knows it’s not relevant and your costs go up. So we want to win with ad creative: post a lot of organic content to see what rises to the top, based on which resonates, not who has the “best” headline.

To generate that content, we build out a full customer avatar — the buyer brief — then create a custom GPT around it. I upload the buyer brief, screenshots of the website or funnel, and my conversion goals (for example, wanting 20-30% of visitors to opt in), and ask the GPT for 20 radically different content ideas I can record videos on, or interview questions I can read to camera, which AI tools like Opus Clips then help edit into clips. I also tag a separate public GPT built by Michael Sanchez for viral intro hooks — feeding it the buyer brief so it analyzes my avatar, offer, and goals, then writes viral hooks and scripts based on frameworks that have made other videos perform well.

Now, turning content into golden ads — ethical propaganda with Meta AI enabled. Post on your business Facebook and Instagram pages at least once a day, because posting infrequently means you never really learn what works. Once a week, check your analytics for which posts got the most reach (not likes or shares) — for example out of seven weekly posts, reach might range from 50 to 500 people, and you want to know why the strongest ones performed. Take that top post and activate the hot 28 audience: a 28-day retargeting audience covering anyone who visited your website, anyone who engaged on Instagram or Facebook, or who follows you — all built inside Meta Ads Audiences. Just like a physical newspaper is written for everyone but a news feed is custom-designed for each person, the hot 28 gets you inside someone’s custom news feed. Each time someone watches a video, visits your site, or follows you, their 28-day clock resets, so consistent engagement keeps them seeing your content — like a digital spider web catching as many people as possible.

An example: one-minute videos with a financial-planning client, Peter, built from AI-generated content ideas using the buyer brief and a custom GPT. As people watch, engage, or visit Peter’s site, they enter the hot 28 audience, so instead of ads that just say “buy my stuff” repeatedly, people log back into Facebook and Instagram and start seeing a range of Peter’s content — building familiarity and trust for just a dollar a day. Content like “find out how to fund college education while protecting your retirement” (noting Yale currently charges $94,000 a year) gets posted regularly; some videos get three or four views, others get 2,000, and the most popular ones get promoted to the hot 28 audience for a dollar a day.

Once a week, identify your two best-performing posts and run each for a dollar a day against the hot 28 audience — that’s only $5-$7 over five to seven days per ad creative. In that window you can read custom Meta metrics: hook rate (3-second views divided by impressions, targeting 35%+ stopping their scroll), then 15-second video views divided by 3-second views (again targeting 35%+), and then how many of those 15-second viewers watch 25%, 50%, 75%, or 95% of the video. This tells you specifically whether a video needs a better hook (low hook rate), a better opening promise (good hook, low 15-second retention), or better mid-video content (good retention, but viewers drop off before the end).

I call this the “conversion kryptonite” phase: once you’ve identified winning creative for a dollar a day, you turn it into a $20-a-day conversion ad. Most advertisers test many ad creatives at high budgets right away and burn through money before finding the roughly 20% of ads that actually work. Testing at a dollar a day for five to seven days costs only $5-$7 per creative to know if it’s working, and moving a winner to $20 a day with a conversion objective (like leads) typically confirms within about two and a half days whether it converts.

The dollar-a-day strategy overall: low-cost testing, high-impact results, visible within about 48 hours, hyper-targeted to the right audience. My friend Dennis, who originated the strategy, uses it for himself as a professional speaker — retargeting people who book speakers on stage with a dollar-a-day image any time he’s speaking, so event bookers keep seeing “Dennis speaking here, speaking there” across multiple events. The approach works across many content categories: testimonials, user-generated content like box openings, awards, product reviews, demos — vary the content and format (video, long-form post, image) to find what resonates for the right person at the right time.

I can’t cover everything in 30 minutes, so there’s a checklist available (via QR code in the original presentation) covering how to run these dollar-a-day ads and set up the hot 28 audience. Beyond that, the business offers three ways to work together: teaching people to run their own ads, one-on-one or group consulting, or having the agency run ads directly across Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, billboards, radio, and TV. Thank you to Darby and Kelly for hosting this hackathon session as part of the Scale with AI Summit.