Masterclass.com YouTube Ads - Scaling to $160M+/year with Thomas Hopkins - VidTao Podcast

Masterclass.com's former head of performance marketing Thomas Hopkins reveals how he helped scale Masterclass.com to $160M per year, via YouTube ads, TV, and literally every other paid media channel available.

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1) Find your competitor's top unlisted YouTube ads in our VidTao.com YouTube ad library   

2) Want help scaling YouTube & other video traffic platforms to $10k/day+? Set up a brainstorming chat here:  https://inceptly.com/call

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Get in touch with the host, VidTao Co-Founder Ian Nagy here:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/cronag805
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-nagy/

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Some highlights from this episode:

✅ How Thomas went from running an eCommerce dog poop bag business to growing gaming companies, scaling ridership at Lyft to $5M/week, and scaling Masterclass from $40M to over $160M in a year.

✅ How Thomas’ custom-built LTV (Life Time Value) models allowed gaming companies to see the ROI on their ads so they could scale 

✅ The 4-part "DIY" Dashboard Thomas uses to measure each channel's impact on your marketing mix reliably, and know how they impact your overall profitability (even at $1 million per day in adspend)

✅ What most direct response marketers get wrong when it comes to breaking through their scaling “ceiling” and what opportunities can happen when you combine brand + performance  to what Thomas calls “brandformance” 

✅ The secret to making platform-specific content that scales

✅ Why Thomas predicts 2021/2022 will be seen as “the lost years” of digital advertising - and why Facebook and Google 

✅ The “old school” tracking metric used by Masterclass to scale to $160M

✅ Why most incrementality tests fail - and the 1 metric Thomas uses “you have to make something like a 50% difference on that channel to actually see a jump”

✅ The “ceiling” on direct response advertising - & why DR alone can’t scale your business to the maximum potential

✅ How to use “Creative Diversity” to overcome ad fatigue, decrease your cost of traffic, and breakthrough scaling plateaus

✅ The ad account structure changes Thomas made at Masterclass to help push yearly revenue way past $100M

✅ The 2 keys to scaling post-iOS 14.5 

✅ Why Thomas predicts Facebook & Google’s “Walled Gardens” will soon no longer exist - and what this means for the future of advertising

✅ Thomas' new Web 3 gaming company perfectstorm.gg - and why Web 3 gaming will soon be a $50 Billion space

✅ Blockchain, and what it means for marketing in 2022 and beyond

✅ And last but not least... The exact YouTube video ad formula Masterclass used to scale to $160 million per year (and the best example ad to use as a template even if you DO NOT have an a-level celebrity with name brand recognition)