Here’s a scary thought: you could be running a campaign that looks like a home-run on the surface, high up and to the right, a “positive ROAS,” your marketer high-fiving across the room, and still be driving your business straight into the ground.

That’s not me being dramatic. It’s a mistake I see all the time, and it’s exactly what I got to dig into on a recent Marketing Minds conversation with Cameron Herold.

If you don’t know Cameron, he’s the former COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK (where he helped scale the marketing from a $0 budget to $5 Million/year across 330 cities), the founder of COO Alliance, and the author of The Second in Command and Vivid Vision. In other words, this is a guy who has spent his entire career sitting at the intersection of marketing and the actual money – and that’s a rare combination.

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Here’s a Sneak Peek at What’s Inside This Email:

• The ROAS “miscalculation” that makes losing campaigns look like winners (and the number you should be measuring instead)

• The “Rule of 27” – why your prospects need to see your marketing WAY more times than you think

• Cameron’s “Casino Bet” framework for understanding your Cash Conversion Cycle & when to pour fuel on a campaign

• Why your marketing team gets bored of your ads long before your customers ever do

Alright, let’s Dive In…

Watch the Full Video on YouTube:

The ROAS Mistake That Looks Like a Win

Let’s start with the big one, because this single reframe could save (or make) you a fortune.

Most marketers measure Return on Ad Spend by looking at the revenue a campaign generated. Spend $500K, bring in $1 Million, and they’ll proudly tell you that’s a 200% ROAS.

Sounds great, right?

Here’s the problem. Revenue isn’t the number that keeps your business alive. Margin is.

As Cameron put it, if you sell $1 Million worth of product but your cost of goods sold is 70%, you only actually keep $300K in gross margin. So if you spent $500K to generate $300K in real margin, you didn’t win, you just went bankrupt with a smile on your face.

That “200% ROAS” was a return on ad spend that’s going to sink the ship.

The reason this happens so often is simple: the creative, marketing-minded people in a business usually aren’t the finance-minded people, and the finance people usually aren’t marketers. So the person celebrating the revenue number often doesn’t have the operational or finance lens to see the cash drain coming.

The fix? Measure your ROAS on Gross Margin, not top-line revenue.

Here’s a quick cheat sheet on the difference, because getting this right is everything:

• Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) = what it costs you to actually deliver the thing you sold. For a chair, that’s the wood, the stain, the nails, the labor, the shipping, the warehousing & the credit card fees. If you’re a coach, it’s the time you spend delivering & your payment processing fees. The key test: COGS only happens IF you make the sale.

• Overhead = the costs that exist whether you sell anything or not. Your rent, your salaried accounting team, your office. (Fun distinction from Cameron: your credit card fees are COGS because you only pay them when you sell, but the interest on your line of credit is overhead because you pay it no matter what.)

• Gross Margin = Revenue minus COGS. This is the real money you have to pay for everything else AND to spend on acquiring your next customer.

Once you’re measuring ROAS against gross margin, you suddenly see your campaigns for what they really are.

Then Go One Level Deeper: Lifetime Value

Here’s where it gets really powerful, and where Cameron shared a live example from his own business.

Over two years, he sent out 3,000 free copies of his book The Second in Command to targeted CEOs and COOs. The cost was about $10 per book shipped, so roughly $30K in total ad spend.

Those books brought in 26 new members to COO Alliance at a $5,900 initiation fee.

If you ONLY look at that initiation revenue minus his cost of acquisition, that’s about a 400% return on the gross margin. Fantastic on its own.

But that’s not the real number.

Because the actual lifetime value of one of those members is $12,200. Suddenly that same $30K in “ad spend” is generating closer to $280K in revenue, which is more like a 900% return.

This is the lesson most people miss. When you only measure the first transaction, you dramatically under-value your marketing, and you under-spend on the campaigns that are actually your biggest winners. When you understand your true gross margin AND your lifetime value, you give yourself permission to go win.

(This is the exact kind of thinking I preach around YouTube Ads – the businesses that win big are the ones who know their numbers deeply enough to confidently outspend their competition.)

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The “Casino Bet” & Your Cash Conversion Cycle

Okay, so you’ve found a winning campaign measured on real margin. The natural next question is: “How hard do I push it?”

Cameron shared a brilliant thought experiment for this. Imagine a friend owns the Bellagio and tells you that today, and today only, for every $1 you bet he guarantees you’ll get $2 back. The casino is rigged in your favor.

How much money do you bring?

All of it. You borrow from friends, family, everyone. It’s a no-brainer.

But now he changes one tiny detail: “I’ll still pay you the $2… but I won’t pay you for six years.”

Suddenly the answer changes completely. Now you have to think about the cost of borrowing that money, and what else you could have done with it over those six years.

That’s the Cash Conversion Cycle. It’s not just whether a dollar comes back as two, it’s how LONG it takes to come back. A profitable campaign with slow cash conversion can still choke a business, because you run out of cash before the returns show up.

So how did Cameron apply this to his own winning book campaign? He didn’t just dump his whole budget in at once (even though the math was tempting). He ramped intelligently:

• 500 books this month, 500 the next, 500 the month after

• Then 1,000, 1,000, 1,000 over the following three months

• Watching the data the entire time, ready to scale to 9,000+ if the numbers held

This is the yin and yang every business needs: the creative energy to go aggressive, balanced by the operational discipline to protect your cash. Measure, watch the data, then pour on the gas.

The “Rule of 27” – You’re Not Marketing Enough

Let’s shift from the money to the message, because Cameron dropped a stat here that I think every single business owner needs to hear.

You’ve probably heard the old “Rule of 7” – the idea that a prospect needs to see about 7 (or 9) pieces of your marketing before they make a buying decision.

Cameron argues that in today’s world, that’s badly outdated. We are bombarded with marketing everywhere (he joked that he was recently at a ski resort in Italy where brands were advertising on the bottom, top AND back of the chairlifts – you can’t even ski in peace anymore!).

Because of all that noise, his take is that we only actually notice about 1 out of every 3 pieces of marketing put in front of us. So if someone needs to truly see your message 9 times to buy…

3 x 9 = you need to put your marketing out there 27 times.

Read that again, because it reframes everything. The number of touchpoints you need is almost certainly higher than you think.

And here’s the trap that makes it worse: your marketing team gets tired of your marketing long before your customers do.

Your team sees that same flyer, that same ad, that same landing page over and over and over. So they beg to create new stuff. But your customers? They’ve barely seen it. As Cameron put it: “Our clients are not bored of our marketing. They haven’t seen our marketing.”

When he was at 1-800-GOT-JUNK, they went from 4 pieces of marketing collateral to 127 over his time there – and the honest truth is they only ever needed about 4 to 10. They burned time, energy & money creating new assets when the real win was pushing what already worked in front of more people, more often.

The lesson: before you spend another dollar creating something new, ask if you’ve actually put what you ALREADY have in front of your audience 27 times. This is one of the biggest reasons I’m such a believer in evergreen content & YouTube – a great video can work for you for years, racking up those touch points on autopilot, instead of disappearing from a feed in half a day.

There’s So Much More in the Full Conversation

Honestly, this is just scratching the surface. Cameron & I went deep, and there were a handful of golden nuggets I couldn’t fit here, including:

• His surprising approach to PRICING (and the 4-question survey he used to find the exact price point that gets the most people to say “yes, let’s do it”)

• The “dashboard” analogy for which metrics should actually be front-and-center for your leadership team (and which ones are just noise causing you to get “speeding tickets”)

• How he thinks about AI without taking his eye off the business he has to run today

• The 3 biggest lessons from scaling 1-800-GOT-JUNK, including the PR strategy that generated 5,200 unique stories in 6 years

If you want the full breakdown with all the examples and the back-and-forth, I’d highly recommend carving out the time to watch the entire conversation.

Watch the Full Conversation on YouTube:

Watch the Full Episode on YouTube! (Click Here)

Watch The Full Video on YouTube:

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I’ll see you in the next one!

To Your Success,

– Aleric Heck | Founder & CEO of AdOutreach

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