Facebook Marketing Regret

Sean Frank reflects on his experience with Facebook advertising during its early days and shares his perspective on marketing channel optimization. He believes that focusing entirely on Facebook would have been the optimal strategy until around 2020, rather than diversifying too quickly.

• Facebook was a revolutionary marketing channel in its early days (around 2012-2015):

  • "Facebook ads came out in 2012... it was probably like an open beta anybody could join"
  • "We're probably two and a half years into Facebook ads, people still thought Instagram followers were the most important metric"
  • "Nobody's an expert" when a new platform emerges - similar to TikTok Shop today

• His agency focused heavily on Facebook as their primary service:

  • "It was like a cookie cutter DTC agency... in the heyday this is probably like 2015"
  • "Facebook and email was the services we were providing"
  • "There was no other services, maybe there was one guy doing Google ads"

• His biggest marketing regret was diversifying too early:

  • "If I could go back in time I would've been even deeper into Facebook"
  • "The biggest challenge with Ridge... we try to diversify too fast"
  • "I was doing newsletter sponsorships and like they worked"
  • "I should have put all of my dollars into Facebook back then up until like 2020"
  • "I would have just been better off putting as much money into that as possible"

• He views marketing fundamentally as attention arbitrage:

  • "It's ad arbitrage right... everything's tension"
  • "If I'm giving Facebook... $15 per thousand views and if I can get a better price off of newsletters or influencer or YouTube"
  • "It's all just an attention economy"