From one-trick pony to contrarian advertising

That October morning didn’t start well. 

I woke up to a barrage of notifications in my inbox saying that Google had disapproved dozens of our ads.

All these ads belonged to the same client, a stem-cell therapy clinic on the West Coast. The account remained active, so we immediately appealed. But it was to no avail. 

Overnight, Google updated their policies related to “speculative and regenerative therapies,” dropping the hammer on the whole industry. A lawyer in Mountain View decided that from now on, this industry was not welcome on the Google Ads platform anymore. 

For a short while after that, we could still come across some ads for PRP or stem cell therapy services in Google search results. It wasn’t clear why some clinics’ ads were getting through and some weren’t, so we kept trying to reason with Google Ads support. But three days later, the slate was wiped clean.  

Back then we were just a Google Ads agency, a one-trick pony. Unfortunately for our client, that pony couldn’t do that trick of hers anymore.  

We scrambled and started looking at other ways to get traffic for the clinic. Too late, too little. The client lost patience and fired us before we had a chance to launch new experiments. 

What about Bing and Facebook? Bing could still work but didn’t have the traffic volume we needed. As for Facebook Ads, there was another agency in the picture doing it on this project. 

This story doesn’t have a happy ending. However, it set us on the path of exploring other ways to buy traffic. So many businesses learn the hard way the danger of relying on just one or two traffic sources. Turns out, we were no different.

Since then, we’ve invested our clients’ and our own money into ad campaigns on Facebook/IG, TikTok, Reddit, Quora, Twitter/X, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Taboola, Yelp, Paved, Jeeng, Rumble, GroundTruth, MNTN, DV360, StackAdapt, and direct buys from various publishers. 

We’ve become a “skunkworks lab” for media buying that works with inhouse marketing departments and helps them test and activate new traffic channels. 

I believe that no advertiser should be beholden to just one or two networks. Why dance to the tune of the duopoly, when there is so much traffic out there that you can buy? 

There is no reason to keep all your eggs in one basket! If you are a CMO, CRO, Director of Growth, Marketer or Media Buyer, we encourage you to be a rebel and become a round peg in a square hole.

Become a contrarian advertiser.

That’s all for today.

Be well, stay contrarian!

-Alex